Unlocking potential: how the Government of Canada is working to optimise its data assets
Governments around the world are struggling to make the most of their data. During a Global Government Forum webinar, Canadian public service leaders discussed the importance of data mapping, stewardship, and why bringing data strategies to life requires added ingredients
Data is one of governments’ greatest assets for improving citizens’ experience of public services, but it is all too often disorganised, siloed within departments, and under-used.
The push to optimise data in government is happening right across the globe, and Canada is no exception, with work underway to better utilise data to provide more actionable insights for public servants, and more joined-up, personalised services for citizens.
During a Global Government Forum webinar, Canadian public service leaders shared insights on the barriers to to data- and AI-driven decision-making, creating the organisational culture needed to make data strategies come to life, and how to improve public servants’ data literacy.
Canada’s next data strategy and the path to enterprise delivery
First to speak was Kara Beckles, executive director of privacy and responsible data at the office of the Chief Information Officer, Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat.
She said her team’s overarching priority is to “better deliver services digitally to Canadians, as well as getting better at enterprise delivery”.
She explained that silos are a barrier to enterprise delivery, since each ministry “has its own mandate… its own data and its own ways of delivering”.
But as she highlighted: “Oftentimes we all have the same things we’re trying to do, the same problems, particularly back-of-house.”
The aim, therefore, is to deliver enterprise solutions right across the system, “avoiding duplication and overlap, and a lot of that comes down to the data at the base of it and being able to share that”.
Beckles’ team is responsible for the government’s data strategy, and is currently working on the third iteration of it. The first iteration, she said, set a “guiding star” for data use in a bid to get all ministries to move in the same direction; the second iteration focused on “being a bit more prescriptive” about what to do and how to do it; and the third will build on that, linking the approach more directly to important government priorities.
“The expectations are that we move quickly, and we move at an enterprise level, so that requires a lot of coordination around data,” she said.
Once completed, the government’s new data and AI strategies are expected to work in sync, since, as Beckles stressed, “AI really just doesn’t work without the data”.
Consultation on updates to the country’s Privacy Act are underway, which Beckles said is needed to “clear the path” and “unlock the potential of data” while at the same time “making sure that [related] protections are adequate”.
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The data lifecycle, focus on repeatable quality, and data literacy
Nancy Porteous, vice president of oversight and investigations at the Public Service Commission of Canada (PSC), spoke about the Commission’s data governance committee, which was established two years ago.
The Committee, she said, is “really explicit about who does what across the data lifecycle – the owners, stewards, custodians, processors, users – so that decisions about data don’t depend on who you ask within the organisation”.
It is also “super focused” on repeatable quality, as she explained: “We’re standardising definitions, working on metadata and data lineage with all kinds of practical checklists and templates, so [that] teams can apply the same quality bar… across data pipelines and products.”
Another focus is on driving up data literacy for everyone across the organisation, with a view to treating every employee as a “data actor”. A base level of digital and data training and role-based training is provided by the Canada School of Public Service, and a data literacy guide has been developed that Porteous described as “foundational in helping to lead to responsible AI”.
She echoed Beckles’ earlier point about AI being “only as good as the data beneath it”, and said the Commission is mapping its data landscape and looking to “implement tools to simplify the discovery and cataloguing of our data that will support our automation and AI plan”.
The Commission is piloting high-value AI use cases and trying to scale them safely, she added.
“We’re really focused on trust and we’re building the foundation to give us more consistent reporting, faster insights and safer reuse, and all of that leads to our mandate to strengthen the staffing system that we’re here to protect, and also to keep an eye on the political activities and non-partisanship of public servants.”
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Making data strategies come to life
Nadia Ahmad is director general and head of evaluation, knowledge and the evaluation bureau at Global Affairs Canada (GAC). She leads GAC’s use of evidence to strengthen policy and programme effectiveness, efficiency, and relevance, and also oversees the Open Insights Hub, the role of which is to connect GAC with external expertise and deliver strategic analysis to drive a deeper understanding of global affairs.
In her view, while data and other related strategies are important, “a strategy alone is not going to lead to behavioural change… There are other ingredients that need to go into the mix to make [it] something that takes hold”.
“As we approach renewed strategies at the Government of Canada level, or at our departmental levels, we have to take into consideration what’s going to make those strategies come to life, and learn from past experience,” she said.
She added that factors that drive a successful strategy include “explicit senior leadership expectations being set” for the deputy head down, as well as “clear accountability mechanisms” so that people are held accountable to meet those expectations, whether through incentives or disincentives.
Frequent or periodic check-ins are also important to determine whether an organisation is on course to arrive at its destination, she said.
Picking up on what Porteous had said about the PSC’s data governance committee and work on stewardship and skills, Ahmad offered the example of an initiative she is working on which maps data assets across the organisation and clarifies what data assets exist, where they are, and who has stewardship over them.
All of these steps are key before any question of how those assets might be leveraged can be raised, she said.
“We’re taking a very methodical approach to that… sector by sector, branch by branch… and part of that exercise is also a data literacy exercise, which is to say the team is really taking it upon themselves to teach stewardship skills to the organisation”.
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Possibility of cross-jurisdictional data sharing?
Looking ahead, Beckles was asked whether it was possible to promote a culture of data sharing in Canada’s multi-jurisdictional environment.
“We have trouble sharing data even within the same department, across different programmes, never mind trying to share data across departments or across jurisdictions,” she said.
She described the problem of data sharing as “multifaceted”, adding that the way data is shared currently is through Memoranda of Understanding (MOUs).
“Every time we go to share data, there’s an MOU between two organisations, so there are thousands of MOUs right across the system, instead of having a set of rules about who can share what data with whom, for what purposes, and when.”
She also highlighted that the term ‘data sharing’ can be misleading, since it implies “making a copy of [data], and [then] sending it to someone”.
“As soon as someone makes a change in either of those datasets, well, now we have two different datasets that aren’t the same,” she warned, adding that she prefers the phrase “data reuse” to encapsulate the idea that someone is given access to the data they need to improve what they’re working on.
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Pinpointing data for a purpose
The conversation returned to responsible use of data and confidentiality.
As Ahmad noted, GAC has “a number of business lines”, from international trade and development to diplomacy and consular service, all of which require data protection.
“This comes back to the issue of culture,” she said. “There is this tendency, or a gut reflex to be very proprietary over data within a particular group, and the instinct is that that data is so sensitive that [that group] couldn’t possibly allow someone else to have access to it”.
“What we need to continue to educate [ourselves] on are the benefits of sharing data… and what protocols need to be put in place to ensure that that data is treated appropriately.”
Gabrielle FitzGerald, senior director of the analytics and systems division at Justice Canada – another of the webinar’s panellists – had spoken earlier in the session about the need for professionals within the justice and legal services teams to be able to “amass large amounts of data” and “synthesise and summarise it”, and the part AI played in this.
Concluding the webinar, she said the fact that the government is so “data rich” is a major sticking point because it tended to collect more data than it needed, and so holds on to more than it has a clear use for.
Her gripe is that government teams often don’t know the question they want data to answer, so they widen the circle of inquiry to gather as much data as possible. The result is an even greater surfeit of data, which itself becomes an end, rather than a means.
“I think we need to get back to a true understanding of data for a purpose,” she said.
The ‘Getting insights from data to improve services’ webinar was hosted by Global Government Forum and took place on 12 May 2026. You can watch the webinar on-demand here.
About Jack Aldane
Jack is a British journalist, cartoonist and podcaster. He graduated from Heythrop College London in 2009 with a BA in philosophy, before living and working in China for three years as a freelance reporter. After training in financial journalism at City University from 2013 to 2014, Jack worked at Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters before moving into editing magazines on global trade and development finance. Shortly after editing opinion writing for UnHerd, he joined the independent think tank ResPublica, where he led a media campaign to change the health and safety requirements around asbestos in UK public buildings. As host and producer of The Booking Club podcast – a conversation series featuring prominent authors and commentators at their favourite restaurants – Jack continues to engage today’s most distinguished thinkers on the biggest problems pertaining to ideology and power in the 21st century. He joined Global Government Forum as its Senior Staff Writer and Community Co-ordinator in 2021.
