The same minister who helped use the “border infrastructure fund” to build gazebos and public toilets in his riding and left no official paper trail in doing so is also the government’s most prominent champion of open government policies.

Mr. Clement said by sharing the information that government uses to make decisions, citizens can become more informed and engaged on public policy issues. “You can get into this whole world of crowd-sourcing where rather than it just [being] cabinet committees or caucuses deciding policy, you could get the public that are engaged in a particular issue to help come up with options or even help make decisions,” he said. “That to me is the ultimate future of open government.”

Part of the Harper government’s open data agenda will be a central database of access-to-information requests and releases, which, as the Globe notes, sounds something like the database the Harper government eliminated three years ago.