Open Government Blog

I went back to school this week, albeit as a guest speaker to a group of about 90 girls from grades 6 through 8 at D. Roy Kennedy Public School in Ottawa.

I was very pleased that the Government recently launched Canada.ca/results. Last week, the Results and Delivery Unit (RDU) posted the data set we’re using to track mandate letter commitments at open.canada.ca, allowing anyone to poke around in the data and analyze it as they’d like.

As you may know, Canada recently accepted a new leadership role with the Open Government Partnership (OGP) as co-chair for a two-year term. Last week, I represented our country in this role by participating in the OGP’s Americas Regional Meeting in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Open and transparent government leads to better government for all Canadians.

As a government, we’ve been acting on this principle from the get-go. Back in November 2015, the Prime Minister made public the mandate letter commitments of each minister. This was a first. Now we’re reporting on our progress against these commitments with the launch of the new Mandate Tracker at Canada.ca/results.

A discussion on open source software and open standards in public administration took place last week at the Canada School of Public Service. Approximately 55 people attended in person while more than 450 participated online, with about 100 of these coming from the general public. The Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of the Government of Canada (GC) clearly stated that the Treasury Board Secretariat (TBS) is not against using open source software and open standards.