When I started building SolveTO, I kept running into the same wall.
Why don’t other Canadian cities have open data? Why are some municipalities still operating without any public data at all? Why is Toronto doing things that most of the country hasn’t even started? And if reporting a pothole is this hard here — one of the most connected cities in Canada — what does it look like everywhere else?
I didn’t start with those questions. They found me while I was building. The more I dug into civic data, the more I realized the gap wasn’t just Toronto versus the rest. It was Canada versus the world.
So I went looking for the real picture.
The number that stopped me
The UN publishes an E-Government Development Index every two years. 193 countries. Ranked by how well they use digital infrastructure to serve their citizens. (Full 2024 report)
Canada is #47. Score: 0.8452.
Denmark is #1. Score: 0.9847.
Singapore is #3. Score: 0.9691.
Finland is #9. Score: 0.9575.
Let that sit for a moment. We are behind Spain, Lithuania, Oman, Poland, Uruguay, Chile, andKazakhstan. We have more land, more natural resources, more post-secondary graduates, and more public sector spending per capita than most countries ranked above us.
This is not a resource problem.
What #1 actually looks like
Denmark’s strength is not one great app. It is a coordinated stack, what I’d call a national operating system for civic life.
Every resident has a single digital identity (MitID) that works across every public and private digital service in the country. One login. Everywhere. There is a common gateway (NemLog-in) across all public self-services, so you don’t create a new account at every agency. There is a shared rights and delegation model — digital power of attorney — so you can act on behalf of a family member safely and legally online.
Municipal, regional, and central governments share components. They don’t each build their own login, their own identity layer, their own notification system. They share. They coordinate. They build once and reuse.
The result: address changes, taxes, healthcare, child services, and official government communication all flow through shared digital rails. Citizens interact with their government the way they use a phone — one device, many services, seamless.
Finland and Singapore tell the same story differently
Finland has what it calls the “once-only” principle. The government never asks you for information it already has. You register a change of address once. Every agency that needs it — tax, healthcare, education — already knows. No duplicate forms. No scanning the same document at three different offices. (Suomi.fi data exchange)
Singapore built consent-based data reuse. When you apply for a service, the government pre-fills your information from authoritative sources, with your consent. You verify, not re-enter. The burden shifts from the citizen to the system. (Singapore digital identity — World Bank)
These are not the same model. Denmark, Finland, and Singapore each built differently. But the outcome is the same: residents spend less time navigating government. Government spends less time processing redundant data. Both sides trust the system enough to use it.
What software makes possible — when trust exists
Software alone does not build civic intelligence. But when the trust is there, software unlocks things that are otherwise impossible:
Trust at transaction time — you verify who you are once, not every time. No repeated data entry — if the government has it, it doesn’t ask again. Faster service delivery through shared reusable components. Lower administrative burden because authoritative data sources are shared, not siloed. Better citizen experience: fewer steps, fewer offices, fewer wasted hours. And something less visible but more important — resilient crisis response, because the digital rails already exist before the emergency hits.
That last one matters more than it sounds.
The real gap
During COVID, coordinating a national public health response required stitching together dozens of separate systems across provinces, municipalities, and agencies in real time. No shared digital rail existed. Each province managed its own channels. Municipalities communicated separately. Information fragmented. Coordination was rebuilt from scratch in the middle of a crisis.
Countries at the top of the index had a different experience. The rails already existed. One message reached every citizen through a shared channel. Coordination happened faster. Not because those governments were smarter — because they had already built the infrastructure.
Canada hadn’t made that choice yet.
The problem is not the software
I want to be direct about something, because it’s easy to miss.
Denmark, Finland, and Singapore did not get to the top of this index by buying better software. They got there because citizens, governments, and institutions chose to trust each other enough to build shared infrastructure. Citizens accepted a national digital identity. Agencies agreed to share data. Governments funded common components instead of each building their own.
That trust is not a technical problem. It cannot be purchased or deployed. It has to be built, demonstrated, and maintained over time — through transparency, accountability, and systems that actually work for people.
Canada has a trust deficit. Not because our people are less capable or our governments less well-intentioned. But because we haven’t made the investments, the decisions, and the cultural shifts that trust requires.
It is, as someone once put it, a choice.
What I’m trying to build
SolveTO started with a pothole. One broken street. One frustrated resident.
But the question behind it has always been bigger: what does a city look like when residents and government are actually aligned? When information flows in both directions? When a report from a citizen becomes actionable data, not a lost email?
That’s civic intelligence — the connection between what residents see, what government knows, and what actually gets done. At the city level, at the ward level, at the street level.
I’m building one piece of that layer. Bottom-up. From Toronto. With the data that’s already public, already free, already waiting to be connected. The council transparency page — every Toronto council vote in plain language — is one example of what civic intelligence looks like at the local level. (Read more about why I built it.)
Canada can be #1. Not in ten years — we are not Denmark yet and we won’t be overnight. But the distance between #47 and #1 is not talent or money.
It is a choice.
