I was just browsing through the results section of the ibelieveinopen.ca campaign website. Candidates can respond yes or no to each of the five commitments and post comments, some of which give nice insights into the sort of people you may be voting for.
I noticed two things:
Andrew Graham, the NDP candidate from New Brunswick Southwest, does not support reforms allowing free access to scientific and survey data gathered by government institutions. First, kudos to Mr Graham for signing the pledge — that’s the kind of leader we want. Now onto his comment, which explains his reasoning: “My main worry is those who would take tax-funded research and use it for private corporate profit.” Although it does not entirely address Mr Graham’s concern, my understanding is that if you licensed the data under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license then anything that was built on the dataset would have to be shared in the same way, thereby allowing anyone — government, civil society groups, or nonprofits — to benefit from the value added by the private company. But I’m no copyright lawyer, so let me know if I have this wrong. Then, of course, the argument can be made that companies pay taxes too. So why shouldn’t they have access to the data? But that’s a whole other discussion.
The other thing I noticed is that none of the MP candidates from Outremont have signed the pledge. They are: Marcela Valdivia (Bloc), François Pilon (Green), Thomas Mulcair (NDP), Lulzim Laloshi (Conservative), and Sébastien Dhavernas (Liberal). C’mon folks! Let us know where you stand. Sign the pledge, or at least tell us why you disagree.
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