From Open Data to Open Governance in Canada: Dissecting a Work in Progress

Many governments are striving to develop open data strategies, taking previously internal and often proprietary sources of information and rendering them public through online spaces. However, open data does not fit easily within the rubric of democratic governance and traditional public administration. The purpose of this chapter is to probe such tensions within the context of Canada, a Parliamentary democratic regime of the Westminster tradition where the inertia of the machinery of government often translates into a penchant for informational control rather than openness and sharing. More specifically, we examine the federal government’s ongoing Open Government Action Plan and its three main dimensions: data, information and dialogue. Within each dimension, there are tensions between opportunities and pressures for openness and sharing on the one hand, and the inertia of traditional government and proprietary notion of information ownership and control on the other hand. Within a broader democratic context as well, notions of individual privacy coexist uneasily with the emerging culture of openness and sharing, a culture greatly facilitated by the advent of mobile computing and devices. This chapter concludes with a call for greater political innovation and dialogue in order to facilitate a more meaningful path of institutional adaption predicated upon enlightened openness and data sharing aligned with a culture of responsible and genuine public involvement in the creation of public value.