It has been an exciting few past week with the federal government sharing two important announcements. The first is the sharing of intent to make it mandatory that companies in the extractive industries disclose all of their material payments to governments.The details are to be ironed out. In Canada, we have provincial securities regulators, and the federal government was the group announced the intention to make these changes. I am sure we have lots of provincial-federal negotiations around this to still wade through, but exciting nonetheless.
There are two possibilities here: the first is that we set up a federal securities regulator, like they have in the US. The second is that the federal government works with provincial governments to make this happen. I haven't delved into how this will actually occur, but on first pass, my guess is that the benefits for citizens around the world, and in Canada, would come faster if we were to do this through provincial regulators. It seems it would be a few years to set up and transition to a federal regulator, possibly delaying the benefits to citizens by a few years.
(Check out the Publish What You Pay coalition for more info on these developments.)
Finally, the second announcement, with a few sub-layer announcements. Canada, with the rest of the G8 nations, has signed onto the Open Data Charter, the best news of which is that it now makes publishing of data a default practice. This means that there would need to be a strong and real argument against not publishing data (for example, as per Canada's Privacy Act), for it not to be published. This flips it from having to argue to have data published.
Along with this came the launch of the federal governments new Open Data Licence, and Open Data Platform. Both of these are exciting, and make for great progress. Other people have said valuable things about these so just visit their blogs:
a. David Eaves shares his thoughts on both the charter here and the platform here.
b. Teresa Scassa has shared thoughts on the licence here.
An announcement was also made that the federal government will be running a National Open Data Challenge and an Appathon in this coming fall. This is exciting because it not only provides incentive for participation, but will also help raise the profile of both open data and the potential of 'contests' or 'challenges.' There is a massive amount of potential in tapping into the knowledge and abilities of Canadians who have skill sets in technology and subject-area knowledge through contest formats. The US has been doing some really neat things on this. Check out http://challenge.gov/ I'm excited to see where this goes.
