In this special on-the-ground episode, Commissioner Kosseim takes you to the launch of the IPC’s Transparency Showcase 3.0 event, Clearly Now, Trust through Transparency, held at the Royal Ontario Museum as part of Right to Know Week. The event celebrates best-in-class initiatives by Ontario’s public institutions showing how openness, access to information and transparency can positively impact the day-to-day lives of Ontarians. In a keynote address, Jonathon Penney from Osgoode Hall Law School explains how transparency can build public trust as the foundation of a healthy democracy, by reducing uncertainty, enhancing accountability, and bringing citizens back inside the institutions that are meant to serve them. -- Dans cet épisode spécial enregistré sur place, la commissaire Kosseim vous emmène au lancement de la Vitrine de la transparence 3.0 du CIPVP, Pour y voir clair : la confiance par la transparence, tenu au Musée royal de l’Ontario dans le cadre de la Semaine du droit à l’information. Cet événement célèbre des initiatives exemplaires d’institutions publiques de l’Ontario qui montrent comment l’ouverture, l’accès à l’information et la transparence peuvent avoir une incidence positive sur le quotidien des Ontariennes et des Ontariens. Dans son allocution principale, Jonathon Penney, de l’École de droit Osgoode Hall, explique comment la transparence peut renforcer la confiance du public, fondement d’une démocratie saine, en réduisant l’incertitude, en améliorant la reddition de comptes et en rapprochant les citoyens des institutions qui sont à leur service.
Guests
Jonathon Penney
Associate Professor and York Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence, Data Governance, and Law
Author of Chilling Effects: Repression, Conformity and Power in the Digital Age
Dr. Amol Verma
Co-Lead, GEMINI network
Unity Health Toronto: Artificial Intelligence Models to Prevent Delirium
Marco Cheng-Perri
Manager, Digital Transformation, Data & Corporate Innovation
Township of King: Responsible AI Roadmap
Alejandro Mayoral Baños
Co-Executive Director
Salvator Cusimano
Executive Director
Transparency International Canada
Resources:
Info Matters is a podcast about people, privacy, and access to information hosted by Patricia Kosseim, Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario. We dive into conversations with people from all walks of life and hear stories about the access and privacy issues that matter most to them.
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Patricia Kosseim:
Hello, I'm Patricia Kosseim, Ontario's Information and Privacy Commissioner, and you're listening to Info Matters, a podcast about people, privacy, and access to information. We dive into conversations with people from all walks of life about privacy and access to information issues that matter to them.
Welcome to a special episode of Info Matters. Every September, Canadians celebrate the fundamental right of access to information and its role in strengthening our democracy. Openness and transparency build trust in our public institutions, and without them, the spread of misinformation and disinformation undermines that trust. Right to Know Week reminds us that people have a right to access information that helps them make sense of government decisions and actions taken on their behalf.
For the past several years, my office invited public institutions to share with us innovative projects that advance open data, access to information, and transparency. Our Transparency Challenge is open to all, provincial ministries, municipalities, universities, libraries, health institutions, police services, and other public sector organizations subject to Ontario's access and privacy laws. This year, 15 new projects were selected for our Transparency Showcase 3.0, bringing the total to 46 projects featured in our virtual 3D gallery. Each project is presented through engaging descriptions, videos, infographics, charts, and photos alongside original artwork that bring the exhibit to life in visually creative ways. This collection has been specially curated to showcase best-in-class efforts in transparency and open government. Each project demonstrates the public value of information, its relevance, and its positive impacts on the lives of Ontarians.
On September 28th, my office unveiled Clearly Now: Trust Through Transparency at the Royal Ontario Museum, a virtual museum within a real museum, so to speak, where we brought together participants, partners, and members of Ontario's broader public sector community for an evening to celebrate what openness, access, and transparency look like in practice.
MUSIC:
I can see clearly now the rain is gone.
I can see all obstacles in my way.
Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind
It's going to be a bright, bright, bright, bright, sun shiny day.
PK:
Have a listen to my opening remarks at the event.
The right to know lies at the very core of a healthy democracy. Information is the key that allows people to know what actions and decisions governments are taking on their behalf, who is influencing them, and how public funds are being spent. Ontarians are the shareholders to whom public institutions report and are held accountable. Information allows people to have and express their views, whether privately in the ballot box, locally in communities, or broadly in public fora. It allows them to participate actively in public life as engaged citizens, and most importantly, it secures their confidence in public institutions.
Freedom of information laws and processes, yes, are vital tools to help enable access to information, but these are only the means. They are not the ends. The right to know depends much more critically on a dedicated commitment to transparency, a predisposition to share data, and an embedded culture of openness. Le droit à l’information repose davantage sur un engagement résolu en faveur de la transparence, une disposition à partager les données et une culture d’ouverture bien ancrée au sein d’un organisme.
Public institutions must have the moral courage to be forthright, not only about their successes, but also their challenges, mistakes, and lessons learned. Public institutions must have the honesty to tell people what they're doing with their personal information, how it's being collected, used, and shared with whom and for what purposes. And public institutions must be open and generous with their data holdings, willing to invest in the digital infrastructures needed to curate and share meaningful data with others for the public good. We need a shift in culture among public institutions, recognizing that the data they hold is not their data. They are merely the stewards of data that fundamentally belongs to the public whom they serve and whom we all serve.
Ultimately, transparency is the key to public trust. And unfortunately, as we all know, public trust barometers are quite low these days. By all measures, we are in the midst of a crisis in public trust. Democratic institutions are under attack globally, as are the independent and impartial oversight bodies charged with overseeing them through necessary checks and balances. People are legitimately afraid of where artificial intelligence is taking us. Even the forefathers of AI are sounding the alarm bell, yet again, warning of the potential dangers to our privacy, our security, and our humanity.
In this algorithmic age, we are surrounded by more information than at any other time in history, yet more information does not necessarily mean better information. Misinformation and disinformation in the form of deep fakes and extremely polarized rhetoric online is seeding distrust and shaking the very ground beneath us as we struggle to discern what is true from what is not. These are radical incursions on public trust, and the only antidote that will allow us to dig out of it is radical transparency.
Timely access to accurate government information is crucial to make sense of the world we're living in. As citizens, we need to be able to trust our public institutions as a credible source of information. Information is the lifeblood we have to rely on to understand our context, make well-informed decisions, and actionably use it to improve our day-to-day lives. Of course, people have the right to request information through FOI laws and processes, and they even have the right to appeal institution's responses to my office, but that's only a very small part of it. To breathe true life into the right to know, it's incumbent on all public institutions to proactively put information out there without being asked. And that is why we are dialing up transparency today through the Transparency Showcase.
Being a modern and effective regulator with real-world impact means not only enforcing the laws we administer through sanctions and orders when institutions get things wrong. It's also about encouraging compliance through positive behaviors and celebrating institutions' efforts to get things right. Well, tonight is that celebration. We want to celebrate institutions finding new and meaningful ways to make information more open, accessible, and useful to the people they serve. That was the very idea behind this transparency challenge in the first place.
The event also featured a keynote address by Jonathon Penney, associate professor and York Research Chair in artificial intelligence, data governance, and law. He's also the author of Chilling Effects: Repression, Conformity, and Power in the Digital Age. In his remarks, Jonathon highlighted a few of the new projects in this year's Transparency Showcase, including one by the Barrie Police Service. Its community conversation series leverages transparency in an effort to build public trust by opening the police services doors and engaging citizens in two-way discussions about its use of technologies that are meant to serve them. Here's Jonathon.
Jonathan Penny:
These days, the public is naturally very sensitive about police use of technology. There's not a day that passes that we see some media story about negative uses of police surveillance technologies, both in the United States and in Canada. There's been significant pushback, for example, against new forms of surveillance, facial recognition technology, or the backlash against, for example, automated forms of surveillance like the Flock camera systems. And here in Canada, many people learned only after the fact that police services were employing Clearview AI's facial recognition tool. That kind of discovery and lack of transparency is exactly what undermines trust.
Barrie Police Services have done exactly the opposite. Before developing procedures for new technologies, the service invited residents to question experts, including experts prepared to ask whether police should use the tools at all. Its second session took on facial matching technology directly. The sessions were held at the public library rather than police headquarters, and they were livestreamed and people could ask questions anonymously.
This is what the commissioner meant by moral courage. It's easy for organizations, especially those involved in public safety, like law enforcement, to tighten up secrecy, security and choose obscurity over transparency. But Barrie Police Services has done the hard thing, done the opposite, and I'm optimistic that other services will follow their leadership.
We live in an era of public and private sector use of powerful new technologies and data with capabilities and uses that are poorly underserved even by experts. Outside, citizens feel more uncertain and more mistrustful of what's being done with these technologies than at any time prior. And transparency is a central cure for this public policy challenge. It reduces uncertainty, makes power visible and accountable, and it brings citizens back inside the institutions that are meant to serve them. That is how trust is built, and trust is the foundation of a healthy democracy. The projects in the showcase prove that is not just an abstract ideal, but it's something that's happening in Ontario right now. When institutions let public see clearly, the public can trust again. Please explore every one of the projects in this excellent exhibit.
PK:
Transparency really is built from the ground up, and a shining example of that is Bracebridge Library's Open Book Project that builds on the idea that transparency begins with authenticity. The library uses digital storytelling, staff voices, humor, behind the scenes content, and genuine interaction to show residents what the library does, why its services matter, and how it reflects the community and the values underlying it.
I thought another great example of transparency in action is Public Health Ontario's Vector-Borne Disease Tool that takes complex public health surveillance data and turns it into something really useful. Through digital maps and dashboards across Ontario, people can see where risks are highest for vector-borne diseases like Lyme disease spread by infected ticks. This is open data with a very practical purpose, giving people reliable information they can use to make decisions about their health.
Another example is Northumberland County. Its submission shows us how an institution can turn a strategic plan into something the public can actually use to hold them accountable. The county's public performance dashboard lets residents track 45 commitments tied to its strategic plan. People can see what's on track, what the results mean, and what the county plans to do if it falls short of its commitments. They told the public what they were going to do and now they're giving them a way to see how they're doing. And then there's Unity Health Toronto's project called AI Models to Prevent Delirium that builds patient trust through transparency. Dr. Amol Verma, co-principal investigator of this initiative, explained to us how the project works.
Dr. Amol Verma:
Delirium is a state of severe confusion that can affect especially older adults when they have a medical or surgical problem. As many as one in four people have this problem when they come to a hospital. It's really devastating because if people become very confused, they can become disoriented, they don't eat and drink as well, they don't recover as well from their illness, and that can cause really devastating complications and be really hard for that person and their family.
About 40% of delirium cases can be prevented, but the problem is, those prevention efforts are really time-intensive. It might take two to four hours a day of nursing care to help people prevent delirium, and we simply don't have the ability to prevent delirium for every patient in the system. So this is an exciting opportunity for artificial intelligence where we can predict when someone comes to the hospital who is at risk of delirium, and then we can focus those prevention efforts on the people who need it the most.
So we're rolling out this initiative across 13 hospitals in Southwestern Ontario. A really exciting part of this initiative is that it's being designed with patients and their families, and we're thinking really about how do we talk about AI? How do we help people as they're receiving care understand that AI is involved in their care? How do we involve the frontline clinical staff as well? So it's really about designing it with transparency right at the heart of the initiative.
I think when you're doing a project like this, we know we're approaching this project with the best of intentions, and it's a project governed by research ethics boards and really developed with core principles. At the same time though, we know there's a lot of mistrust in the world about artificial intelligence, also about data, the way people's data are being mined and used for different kinds of projects. So it was really important for us to have transparency be at the heart of this initiative and for us to purposefully think about how do we incorporate patients' voices, family members' voices, as well as the perspectives of frontline clinical staff into the project so that when we're rolling this out, we can communicate with patients and their caregivers that we're using artificial intelligence, but we're using it to help us inform better care, we're using it to make the hospital safer. So that was really intentional for it to be at the heart of this initiative.
There's a bit of a cliche saying in health care these days, which is that we can only move at the speed of trust. Essentially, what it means is that as we're making changes in the healthcare system, we can only go as far as people that are participating in the system trust, they move with you. And in order to move the public, in order to move patients forward using new technologies, using new tools, using data to improve care, we have to ensure that the systems we use are trustworthy. So at the heart of that trust comes transparency. People need to understand what you're doing, why you're doing it, how you're protecting their data, how you're protecting the system, and who gets to benefit from all of this work. And I think that really at the core of it is a transparency mission.
PK:
Another example of a public institution being open and transparent about its use of AI is the Township of King, which has adopted a responsible AI roadmap. This roadmap outlines the township's AI principles, the results of its AI maturity assessments, future plans, and how it will use AI responsibly to support staff, residents, and council. Marco Cheng-Perri, manager of digital transformation, data and corporate innovation for the Township of King, was also at our event to explain firsthand their responsible AI roadmap.
Marco Cheng-Perri:
I think we're one of the first municipalities in Ontario actually to publicly put one of these out. It was important to us because we knew there were concerns within the community about AI. You see the news every day. So we wanted to establish trust and do something that we weren't asked to do. So within that document, it's on our website at king.ca, we have our principles there. We have results of maturity assessments, and we're very transparent. Even things we weren't doing so good then, we put it out. We put out our plan to get better. I think it's gone a long way. I've gotten a lot more compliments and a lot less questions about where we stand.
It was interesting because part of our AI initiatives included a civic feedback portion, and we did publish those results through the roadmap as well. We created the website where we asked people: "What matters to you? How do you want to see AI deployed?" And we took those insights and shared them. Typically, people were talking about service improvements, and we knew that was always a sticking point. It just helped us solidify, "Okay, where do we actually want to go based on this feedback with our AI aspirations?"
So I think it's inspiring them and giving them confidence. We have tools, various tools actually. One of the more notable ones is on our website. We have Kingsley, it's an AI-powered virtual assistant. Before we put out this document, people did ask questions like, "What's happening to our data? Are you monitoring everything that's going in there? How should we use it? Can we trust it?" I feel like the roadmap actually explained to them a couple things that were important. For example, where we stand, what matters to us, making sure data is secure.
After seeing that, I've seen usage go up. Some of our committees that we speak with, they came back to me and say, "You know what? We're a lot more happy knowing all these things, and we can use it freely." It really matters with AI in particular, because as I mentioned, it's become a hot topic. There's a lot of things out in the media environment. Some of them make people afraid, some of them make them question the value. So we want to let them know that we're looking for the positive while making sure we safeguard all the bad things that could happen.
PK:
Also among our guests attending the launch of this year's Transparency Showcase was Alejandro Mayoral Baños, co-executive director of Access Now, an international nonprofit organization that defends and extends the digital rights of people and communities at risk. He spoke to us about the transformative power of transparency to drive civic engagement in the democratic process and gave us his thoughts on the Transparency Showcase.
Alejandro Mayoral Baños:
Well, transparency is one of the main aspects of an open government alongside participation and accountability. Transparency these days is fundamental for the exercise of democracy. Right now, with digital technologies, that is offering a lot of possibilities and opportunity to bring this together. I think democracy is about giving power to people, and I think we have been relying on representative democracy. Now, with access to this type of technology and access to information, we can change our democracy to a direct form of participation, direct democracy.
I think one part that struck me is the creativity and how we can bring these policy-oriented topics to the public, and I think a way to celebrate our rights. In this moment of geopolitical changes, really a moment of celebration is very important and how the public can get all this information more accessible for them.
PK:
We also spoke with guest Salvatore Cusimano, executive director of Transparency International Canada, and asked him what he thought about the projects featured in the Transparency Showcase.
Salvator Cusimano:
What stood out to me is that I think that when you're working in civil society, when you're working in what some might consider an activist organization like we are, you often think of people within government as trying to hide information or doing anything they can to withhold it. And what always inspires me about initiatives like this is that there are so many people within government, whether elected officials or civil servants or just people on the front line, there are a lot of people who understand the value of transparency. There are a lot of people who live by that ethos, but I think, unfortunately, some of that drive to share and that understanding to share information gets wrapped up in politics sometimes or fear of what will happen if I share this information. So it's just really refreshing to know that there are so many people with that motivation, with the skills to make transparency something people can grasp, and that gives me hope every day that we can have more of it.
PK:
Transparency Showcase 3.0 brought home to me just how many different and positive forms transparency can take. It can mean making a complex government decision easier to understand, making valuable public data available to inform people's decisions and choices, giving citizens actionable information early enough so they can have a say, or being much more open about how new technologies are being adopted and used.
I really want to thank the Royal Ontario Museum for their partnership in launching Transparency Showcase 3.0 and allowing me and my staff to attend the museum throughout Right to Know Week, where we had the occasion to speak directly with members of the public about their information rights, engage them in discussion, and walk them through our virtual exhibit through our digital kiosk. I want to congratulate and thank all of the institutions that submitted projects and also thank everyone who attended the showcase launch and visited our exhibition through Right to Know Week.
Although this year's Right to Know Week has come to an end, the Transparency Showcase remains available on our website at ipc.on.ca. So come visit us. You can tour our 3D gallery online and roam around to see positive examples of how transparency and open data can make a real difference in the day-to-day lives of Ontarians.
Well, that's it for this special episode of Info Matters. Hope you enjoyed it. Thank you so much for listening, and until next time.
I'm Patricia Kosseim, Ontario's information and privacy commissioner, and this has been the Info Matters Podcast. If you enjoyed the show, leave us a rating or a review. If there's an access to information or privacy topic you'd like us to explore on a future episode, we'd love to hear from you. You can comment on our posts on Bluesky and LinkedIn or email your ideas to podcast@ipc.on.ca.
Thanks for listening, and please join us again for more conversations about people, privacy, and access to information. If it matters to you, it matters to me.