Information & Ethics Committee on April 29th, 2008

[Jennifer Stoddart]

We get a lot of congratulations on the act concerning the private sector, the sector that gets the international attention because it regulates trade. This is one of the most modern and most flexible acts. It adjusts, but its standards are those of the European Union. So they're quite high.

Few people outside Canada are interested in the Personal Information Protection Act because it governs only Canadians and landed immigrants. We're already seeing that there's a problem because fundamental rights apply to persons who are already in Canada, even if they're Canadian, but it was drafted a long time ago. So few people are interested in it, but Canadians who are interested in it agree that this act is outdated.

[Richard Nadeau, Bloc, Gatineau, QC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Paul Szabo]

Mr. Harvey, s'il vous plaît.

[Luc Harvey, Conservative, Louis-Hébert, QC]

Good afternoon.

I'm very pleased to be able to talk to you today. I'm not a permanent member of this committee, but I'm very much interested in this issue.

You've no doubt recently heard about the visit of a tracking dog, a drug-sniffing dog in a school. The Supreme Court has ruled that that dog should not have been in the school.

What is your opinion on that?

[Jennifer Stoddart]

In fact, that judgment should be considered together with another judgment involving a man who had transported drugs in a suitcase and was arrested at a bus station. I think that these are very important judgments and that they generally contain a lot of positive points. The judgments acknowledge that students and individuals who travel have reasonable expectations regarding their privacy. This is a fairly flexible approach based on the manner in which the court interprets the interests involved and the facts in each case.

Lastly, I could say a lot of this subject, but I'm going to conclude by saying that the Supreme Court has adopted the average standard rather than the most demanding. As Privacy Commissioner, I would have liked the most demanding standard to be applied. The judges debated the question, but there was no clear consensus. There was a majority, but it was a very slim one.

Whatever the case may be, I think that underscores the fact that Canadians should be informed about their right to privacy and know what expectations they can have in that regard and in what circumstances. So I come back to my request for a specific public education mandate.

[Luc Harvey, Conservative, Louis-Hébert, QC]

An individual may find an error has been made in his case, not know to whom to turn or how to go about correcting that error. That individual then runs into an immense wall. These are things that happen. I feel that we too often forget that the public service and MPs are not on the job to serve their own interests, but rather those of their clients. And our clients are all those who pay taxes. When those taxpayers can't find a solution, they feel lost. As a last resort, they can even call on you, who are the highest authority in the field.

How is it that no quick recourse is available in such cases. I come from a computer and electronic background, and I know that certain computers perform billions of operations per second. The NAG 2 software, the compression process that Bell and all broadcasters adopted, was supposed to be unstoppable. However, six months later, software was available on the Internet to unlock it. There's increasing talk about identity theft. Last week in Quebec City, police arrested a group who had managed to hack into 10,000 computers and access whole sets of personal information such as birth dates, social insurance numbers, credit card numbers and so on. What is being done to protect people in those circumstances?

[Jennifer Stoddart]

Mr. Chairman, a number of recommendations that I am submitting to you today concern precisely those problems. In the case you mentioned, the taxpayer or citizen can simply say that, in his view, there has been a mistake in his case. Unless the department agrees with him, that individual is not entitled to have the error corrected or to go to Federal Court to report a computer or other problem in his file, a human error that causes a problem. I think that's a serious omission.

As I've already said, I can't make things public quickly. If a mistake were made in a department and it was going to affect a lot of other individuals other than the one who filed the complaint, the department would be well advised, I believe, to issue a news release to draw the attention of those other individuals. That would encourage them to examine their files, to have the mistake corrected and to take measures to subsequently protect themselves. Currently, I have to talk about these things 10 months later. That's why I'm seeking changes to the act.

[The Chair, Liberal, Paul Szabo]

Now I think Mr. Martin has a brief question or two, and Mr. Wallace may have at least one question, I think. Let's just see.

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

I can be very brief, but bells are going to ring at any moment.

Madam Stoddart, I'm still interested in section 10, the cross-border sharing of data and information. It strikes me that if the privacy of your personal information is compromised domestically, it might be inconvenient or you might even be ripped off in a credit card scam, but if your personal information is compromised internationally you might wind up in a Syrian jail being tortured and might be killed. It's really serious.

What struck me is that your office did a study, an overview, of 21 information-sharing agreements between Canada and the U.S. and found that two-thirds of them didn't have any kind of adequate protection in terms of the type of information to be shared or any third party controls. In other words, we could share that information with one agency, but there's no stated limitation on their sharing it with further agencies. So we lose control of it.

If we get your recommendations into the Privacy Act, will that move have, in your opinion, a ripple effect to add elements to those international agreements? Will we have primacy? Will the Privacy Act automatically permeate into those international agreements, or would they have to be renegotiated, in your view?

[Jennifer Stoddart]

That's a good question.

I would think it would be that any new agreements that are drawn up would be drawn up more carefully.

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

But there are some 45 agreements now, aren't there?

[Jennifer Stoddart]

If you change the law, those departments that have these kinds of agreements will then revise them according to the new standards, because unless they were grandfathered, strictly speaking they'd be illegal.

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Wouldn't Canadians' right to privacy be afforded by the Privacy Act? Would they not carry those rights...? I'm just wondering whether those rights flow with them in their treatment by these international treaties, or whether the treaties themselves would have to stipulate a new set of rules. You'd have to renegotiate them all.

[Jennifer Stoddart]

We're proposing that there be a kind of registry, so at least the public could see, as is done in what we propose. That is that you could see the list of treaties, unless there's some issue of national security. But if you're sharing information on, say, traffic across the borders—arguably this is not vehicle traffic and so on—there may be reasons under the Access to Information Act why a person could not have access to his or her own file.

But maybe there aren't; maybe I could ask to see my file on how many times I have crossed the border. I think more transparency is what we need. A good way to promote privacy is through transparency, so that it's not misuseable.

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

I agree.

[The Chair, Liberal, Paul Szabo]

I think we're going to have to cut it off there.

Madam Stoddart, to you and to your colleagues, thank you kindly for your assistance. It's evident that we are going to have you back. We will be building our case with regard to the changes.

For the committee, we have Treasury Board on Thursday and we will be giving you some information with regard to witness propositions.

[Mike Wallace, Conservative, Burlington, ON]

For what reason? Is the minister coming?

[The Chair, Liberal, Paul Szabo]

That's the Department of Justice; we're negotiating to get them here.

In any event, I think the commentary of the committee with regard to HR issues speaks for itself. I don't want to make any further conclusions, but there is a linkage, obviously, in terms of your ability to deliver the service levels you've committed to. We'll continue to work with you to make sure we give ourselves the best chance to do the job properly.

Thank you very kindly.

[Mike Wallace, Conservative, Burlington, ON]

I may not agree with the Privacy Commissioner on these ten things. If we implemented them all, there would be a reaction, and there might be other sides to the story.

Have we picked all our witnesses now?

[The Chair, Liberal, Paul Szabo]

No, we have not started, other than for the boilerplate witnesses.

[Mike Wallace, Conservative, Burlington, ON]

Thank you very much; that's all I wanted to know.

[The Chair, Liberal, Paul Szabo]

The ten are not boilerplate themselves, but they are a starting point. There may be a lot more.

Thank you.

We're adjourned.