The federal Open Data portal is an important step on the road to a more open government and is often used by the Harper Conservatives as a direct response to criticisms over serious lapses in this administration’s transparency and accountability. They certainly need it to succeed in light of the ongoing failure of many of the key initiatives of their 2006 Federal Accountability Act.

The portal just might do that — by flipping the onus of responsibility around to our side of the table. By providing government data to scientists and the public, the portal allows another sector of society to use evidence-based arguments to suggest, guide, monitor or challenge policy decisions. However, its success in this regard rests squarely on active participation by Canadians.

Launched in 2012, the portal provides datasets gleaned from government-funded studies, free of charge and in formats easily downloadable by the public. It’s billed as a one-stop-shop for government data because it is much easier to canvas the portal than search each department’s website for a particular project. Nearly 200,000 datasets are available on the portal from 25 federal departments, with information from economic, environmental and social studies. More datasets are being added every year; the hope is that all government data will be made available over the next few decades.

However, more than 95 per cent of the current datasets are geospatial maps that were always available to Canadians through Natural Resources Canada. The other 5 per cent are also mostly standard datasets that governments around the world provide their citizens, such as the Market Information Services provided to farmers through Agriculture Canada. The portal is still young, but the repackaging of standard information has garnered little interest from experts — and the general consensus is that it doesn’t provide any meaningful data that improves government transparency.

“What we haven’t seen from the federal government yet are really solid datasets related to government transparency or government accountability,” said Dr. Tracy Lauriault, then a post-doctoral fellow at the Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre at Carleton University.

However, Dr. David Eaves, professor at the Center for Digital Media, points out that the portal’s power lies not in “providing accountability on a silver platter” but in offering a “window of opportunity” for those interested in correlating different datasets to create broader pictures of how Canada is functioning. For instance, the portal can be used to compare data on school locations with maps of income distribution, which can tell us if there is any bias in where the government decides to build schools.

This approach can be highly effective. In two independent studies, Brett Favaro and Dak de Kerckhove (one of the authors here) analyzed data from press releases and annual reports to Parliament to show that Canada’s environmental laws were not grossly impeding economic development. Amber Hildebrandt and Michael Pereira at CBC converted 405 pages of documents from the National Energy Board into an interactive map demonstrating that pipeline incident rates have doubled in the past decade.

These types of studies contradict government talking points, and so have the potential to keep government policy in line with the available evidence and outside of political agendas. It is telling, however, that these datasets were created using information gleaned from a diverse set of public documents that the researchers were required to recombine into something meaningful, as the type of information that contributes to studies like these is still not easily found on the portal.

In our own review of the portal we found that very few meaningful datasets are available from federal departments like Environment Canada and Fisheries and Oceans, which have come under broad attack recently for questionable policy decisions. In fact, Fisheries and Oceans has posted only 16 datasets — of which 14 are simply lists of books found in their libraries.

While it’s important to remember that the portal is young and the government is on-track to publish much larger datasets in the coming years, there is certainly a danger that meaningful datasets might not be forthcoming. There is no clear process for how departments choose which datasets are posted to the portal, and no clear process for reporting which datasets will not be made available, and for what reason. This leaves a great deal of power in the hands of the government. In tandem with the aggressive muzzling of the public service sector, it could be virtually impossible for Canadians to learn which relevant datasets exist if they’re buried deep within department walls.

While the Open Data portal provides an improved opportunity for increased transparency and accountability, the onus falls on the public to take the government to task on its promise.

A key limitation of the portal is that repeatedly mining large datasets for patterns invariably will lead to some statistically supported — but fundamentally false — conclusions. The best safeguard against this is an open line of communication with the experts who are most familiar with the datasets (scientists, economists, sociologists, etc.), so that the appropriate context can be provided in which to evaluate the data.

Dr. David Schindler and his research team at the University of Alberta demonstrated that data being collected and released under the Regional Aquatics Monitoring Program (RAMP) in the Alberta oilsands were not telling the whole story. His report prompted a multi-stakeholder review, which revealed weaknesses in the RAMP program and limitations in the accuracy of the program’s conclusions on the state of the aquatic environment in the oilsands region. This same danger lies in all datasets on the portal — and can only be mitigated by ensuring that there is adequate supporting information for each dataset and that the lines of communication with the experts who collected the data remain open.

Opening lines of communication between the government and the public through data exchange is the really exciting potential of the portal, as noted by Michael Mulley, creator of Open Parliament. In referring to Open Parliament, Mulley said that “making it easier to see what politicians said in the past has encouraged people to hold MPs to their past statements, or at least remind them of them.”

During the passage of the Conservatives’ first omnibus bill in 2012, his site experienced high traffic on a 1994 statement by then-Reform MP Stephen Harper on the undemocratic nature of omnibus bills. If facilitating access actually does improve public participation, then the portal provides a compelling opportunity for community engagement in politics. “The nice thing about the portal,” Eaves notes, “is that it notches up the diversity of people that can access the data.”

However, increased accessibility is simply a tool that provides the opportunity for increased accountability. If it’s to be effective it’s critical that we, the public, shoulder the weight of its potential by becoming engaged and holding the government to the promises of open government. The legacy of the Federal Accountability Act serves as a warning to Canadians that the promise of a new initiative can tarnish over time.

While progress on the portal will be monitored by the Open Government Partnership, there are no sanctions beyond a poor report card if Canada fails to meet its objectives. Poor report cards were issued by the Information Commissioner on Freedom of Information (FOI) requests in 2009 — but that seemed to have little long-term effect, as the backlog in fulfilling FOI requests appears to be getting worse.

Eaves suggests that Canadians should ensure that the release of data be legislated within new laws, so that a broader array of datasets are disseminated to the public in a timely manner. Further, he recommends linking FOI requests to the portal so that any time a request for a particular dataset is made — by anyone, for any reason — that request appears publicly on the portal. Having a clear picture of what datasets are being requested and how long they take to process — or the reasons why they were refused — would be an important component in ensuring the government and its various departments are responding appropriately to data requests.

Finally, Canadians should continue to demand that the muzzle be removed from public service employees to ensure an open flow of communication between the public, the government and the experts who collect and understand the data.

The Harper Conservatives promised Canada a transparent and accountable government. They believe that an Open Data Portal satisfies this promise, despite other serious problems in the federal bureaucracy. While the portal provides an improved opportunity for increased transparency and accountability, the onus falls on the public to take the government to task on its promise.

Treasury Board President Tony Clement, who oversees the portal, has himself invited greater participation by Canadians in ensuring the portal’s success. “I would like nothing more than to hear from Canadians about Open Government and how we can continue to increase transparency and accountability in how taxpayer dollars are spent,” he said. “I have dedicated much time to raising awareness about the opportunity Open Government offers to encourage greater citizen engagement, spur innovation and create economic benefit.” We hope Canadians answer this invitation.

Dak T. de Kerckhove is a PhD student at the University of Toronto and a fisheries biologist. He recently co-authored a paper estimating environmental review times under the Fisheries Act in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences.

J. Adam Phipps is an imaging/database specialist and artist. With Dak de Kerckhove he works on projects that involve the interaction between science and art.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.