I'm not sure what the point of this article is. There's nothing wrong with governments providing their data in standardized machine readable formats. This makes

I'm not sure what the point of this article is. There's nothing wrong with governments providing their data in standardized machine readable formats. This makes it easier for groups of informed citizens, hackers looking for a side project, and non profits like CFA to process and visualize this data. They then can create tools to make it easier for citizens to see and understand what is going on 'under the hood'. It's ludicrous that governments should keep the data about what they are doing with our taxes locked inside proprietary enterprise databases. Oftentimes, the only information available is a small subset or overview released once a year as a PDF. Anything more usable and parseable is a big improvement on this. It's true, governments will start by only releasing things that make them look good (or at least not bad). But this is not the end goal. Eventually the stuff that they don't release becomes glaringly obvious and people start asking why. The author has what sound like some valid complaints about the Canadian government. But somehow he thinks it's logical to conflate these issues with the entire open data movement. I don't get it. For example, politicians will sometimes justify bad laws by claiming that they are 'for the children'. This article is the equivalent of complaining about these laws by saying 'children are a joke'. Nice straw man.