The Ontario government is looking to change the way citizens view government.
On Monday, the Open Government Engagement Team will host a public session at the Valhalla Inn in Thunder Bay to talk to people about how to make government more accessible.
The travelling engagement team is part of Ontario's Open Government initiative Premier Kathleen Wynne announced last month and Minister of Government Services John Milloy said it's in line with what other governments are doing around the world.
"Ontario is joining that movement," he said in a telephone interview with tbnewswatch.
Milloy said they have to change the way people view government; far too many people view government as an us-versus-them situation or as a distant body or institution.
"We've got to break down all that because that's not the way government works. Government is all of us," he said.
"There's a level of cynicism out there about government and we've got to try to re-engage and re-energize people and have them take an ownership of it," Milloy said.
The engagement team consists of experts in the open government field, including chairman Donald Lenihan, who is a senior associate at the public policy forum in Ottawa.
Milloy said Monday's session won't be a typical question-and-answer session, but a more interactive discussion.
The Open Government initiative focuses on three areas. The first is open dialogue, which Milloy said is about looking into how they can include citizens more in policy-making.
The second area is open information, which is about making government information more readily available to the public.
The last part is about making the thousands of different data sets the government collects accessible to the public.
Those data sets range from school enrollment numbers to the most common baby names in Ontario.
"A lot of that data is not in the public domain or if it is in the public domain, it's not in a way that's usable," he said.
By making that data available, people could use it for several types of projects or business ideas. Milloy cited an example of a New York City entrepreneur who made an app where people could search a restaurant and bring up their public health records.
The Open Government session at the Valhalla Inn on Monday runs from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.
