Information & Ethics committee  Thank you.

Information & Ethics committee  I cracked it open as soon as I could read it. I'll leave aside at the moment all the other issues they raised with Waterfront, since obviously our focus is on Quayside and you have limited time. However, I want to tell you that with respect to the Quayside bid, I've spent some time criticizing the mayor I worked for, publicly, for what I very politely called “a culture of dealmaking” at Winnipeg City Hall.

Information & Ethics committee  It said that Sidewalk received more information than the other parties. On my way here I stopped for coffee, and it took me two minutes to pull up an example from Infrastructure Ontario, which is considered best-in-class in Canada in terms of running complex P3s. It gives individual bidders differential information on complex bids, because you want them to account for different business models.

Information & Ethics committee  To be crystal clear, the phrase I used was with reference to city hall conducting land swaps without proper valuation of the land and RFPs that were clearly designed to put certain tangential pieces of land into the mix. As I said, I read the audit closely, twice. I think there are plenty of legitimate questions out there.

Information & Ethics committee  It's the most valuable real estate that's all in one place that hasn't really been touched by external development.

Information & Ethics committee  Certainly, Waterfront has tried to answer this question from Waterfront's perspective. We're both outsiders on this. The way I have always understood the distinction is that what's unique about the Quayside parcel, as members will know, is that it's the piece Waterfront owns, over which it can actually have some control; it doesn't have to talk to its constituent shareholders before it sells.

Information & Ethics committee  I'm familiar with that. I've read the report twice, and we'll get to that. But nobody yet has specifically said that there's cause to overturn the legal agreement these two parties have, and as I noted in my preliminary remarks, as a civic government expert I see that there are literally dozens of points of gatekeeping between here and what Sidewalk wants to get to do.

Information & Ethics committee  With respect to concern, I'll put it this way. I want to say, at every opportunity that I can get a chance to, that many of Sidewalk's harshest critics are not close friends of mine, but I admire them. I've worked with them. I've had more than one consecutive drink with them on occasion.

Information & Ethics committee  By way of example, Jan De Silva, the board's president, and I had an extensive conversation with Julie Di Lorenzo, who was the other witness scheduled to be here, to hear her concerns. We spoke to at least one other individual close to...a board member who had been concerned about those things.

Information & Ethics committee  The original structure of how the federal legislation was implemented in the early 2000s was actually a very good case of Canadian federalism, in that it set broad standards and all jurisdictions had to comply with those standards, especially with respect to federal interests. Below that, there was the option at the provincial level, and it would be just as easy to provide that option at the municipal level, provided that local and—

Information & Ethics committee  I think it depends on what the significant differences are. A jurisdiction might be more inclined to do more in terms of commercializing its data, provided it was consistent with protecting the rights that the federal legislation would protect. An urban jurisdiction that had more to do with that data might be willing to be more aggressive about how much of it it captures and processes if it's for its own or public uses, relative to a smaller jurisdiction that didn't have that capacity.

Information & Ethics committee  We hope they would. I retreated from partisan politics by being a cities guy for the rest of my career. Around the world, cities are leading a lot of the innovation in a lot of these close-to-ground technology areas. My hope—our hope, the board's hope—is that there will be enough room in whatever federal legislation, new standards or even guidelines might be created to say, here are the broad ground rules but there's some room for local governments, in the spirit of federalism, to make their own decisions about what's within their value set in that purview.

Information & Ethics committee  I'll try to answer several strands of that as bluntly as possible, and we can follow whatever other strands you want. Part of why I may be more comfortable with this personally, and why the board is, is that this is very much a development proposal. It's an innovation proposal. It's a services-to-development proposal.

Information & Ethics committee  I'm going to give you an answer that I want to say at the outset is not exhaustive, for all the obvious reasons, but a couple of things came to mind. The “BiblioTech” report was probably one of the most entertaining things the board's policy team has done. We deliberately collected everybody on our team, which at that point was, I believe, seven people, and locked them in a room for a couple of weeks, day after day, and said, “Let's think some of this through.”

Information & Ethics committee  No, it's quite the contrary. Part of what I'm encouraged by, in terms of how fixable it is, is that it's not new. There are a lot of jurisdictions that are already operating on this, and you have just spoken about some of them in testimony that I read earlier. The challenge, just in Canada, is that we don't have a common standard of rules or even a consistent standard of rules to play by among a number of different federal jurisdictions in the federation.