McGill Tribune

Following the lead of Toronto, Vancouver, and Ottawa, the City of Montreal has created a website—donnees.ville.montreal.qc.ca—opening up its municipal data to the public. The website, known as an open data portal, is intended to be a universally accessible resource for municipal information, ranging from government contract details to parking ticket revenue statistics. This new openness is extremely timely, given that the public inquiry into the possibility of corruption in the construction industry was commissioned just two weeks ago by the Quebec government.

The website is still in a foetal stage: most of the links have not been activated yet, and a wealth of data remains to be uploaded. But the Tribune believes the initiative to bring this information within a few clicks of the public is a noble one, worthy of applause. There may not be as much content as is ultimately desirable, but its very existence heralds a positive step in the direction of greater government transparency, and consequently, increased accountability.

That being said, we should not deceive ourselves into believing that the promised land has been reached. The municipal administration was not a voluntary benefactor of its information; rather, it did so because of the pressure imposed on it by the tireless work of Montreal Ouvert, a voluntary organisation of “hacktivists.” There is still a great deal of work to be done before Montreal’s governance can be called transparent; newspapers and the public alike must be proactive to make sure that the municipal government is not only forthcoming about supplying information, but also that such potentially revealing data is not left unexamined. Good investigative journalism is therefore needed to keep the information flowing, and to ensure it is used for the good of Montreal.

Initiatives from Montreal Ouvert such as zonecone.ca  (an open data portal showing where road construction is taking place) and resto-net.ca (a database of restaurants who have been fined for poor hygiene) have already had positive impacts on the accountability of restaurants  and construction projects; it is now harder to disguise excessive road  repair projects, and less likely that restaurants will not adhere to decent hygeine standards. If the municpal government’s website is encouraged to be expanded, and all information is made available by the municipal government, a similar effect could be the result: malpractice and corruption will prove harder to keep in the dark.