Long accused of systemic secrecy and reluctance to disclose information on issues ranging from food safety to drug approval, the Canadian government has unveiled certain transparency initiatives, according to the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ). The initiatives include datasets like ones on the number of dairy cows in Canada and soldiers of World War I.
Health Canada and the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) are not among the 10 departments and agencies posting data at a new web portal. Moreover, licensing restrictions and requirements around what data is to be shared are seen to make the initiative substantially narrower than those now underway in other nations like the US.
The initiative will see the federal government share the data it collects in a 'more useful format,' proactively release information about its activities on an ongoing basis, and give Canadians 'a stronger say' in policies and priorities through expanding 'Web 2.0 technologies,' the government claimed in unveiling its plans (http://open.gc.ca/open-ouvert/aop-apgo-eng.asp).
Officials also launched an Open Government website with links to preexisting disclosure pages on various department sites (http://open.gc.ca). Additionally, they kicked off an open data pilot project to provide the public with 'single-window access' to select federal datasets (http://www.data.gc.ca/default.asp?lang=En&n=F9B7A1E3-1).
The initiative may constitute compliance with the government's stated commitment to the OECD to launch a new portal to provide one-stop access to federal datasets by the fall of 2010 (www.oecd.org/dataoecd/48/56/46342001.pdf).
No rationale was reportedly provided for excluding Health Canada and PHAC from the pilot project. Only select datasets from 10 federal departments will be made available via the new portal, only one of which - Citizenship and Immigration Canada - was among the top five recipients of Access to Information requests between 2009 and 2010 (www.infosource.gc.ca/bulletin/2010/b/bulletin33b/bulletin33b02-eng.asp). Health Canada received the fourth most requests during that period.
According to the CMAJ, Health Canada recently come under fire from health experts and open government policy experts for keeping the data that informs its decision-making processes under wraps in the name of protecting industry interests.
While most of the information currently posted on Canada's new open data portal is machine-readable, some maps and older data are posted as PDF documents or images. Users must also agree to a licence in order to access the portal. That licence contains restrictions on an individual or organisation's ability to 'disassemble, decompile or reverse engineer the data made available.' No such clauses are found in open government licences required by other nations, the CMAJ has pointed out.
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