Toronto at the Centre of the Race To Save Climate Change Data from Trump

"At its core, this is a story of how lack of transparency breaks down trust between citizens and government. Are there any lessons on transparency that our local government can take away from this story?

The U.S. has been way ahead of Canada in terms of opening up data. Cities like Boston and Chicago do a good job of opening up data sets to the public. We need to catch up. There is a lot less to lose here in Canada! People really do value open data sources. Sometimes people think that open data is just an ideological position and there are no users out there. But the users are out there, if the data is provided. As an administrator or data provider, it’s the little things—like providing a hash of a dataset for better searchability or making it accessible via peer distributed networks—that government can do to be more transparent."