Information & Ethics committee  Thank you very much, Chair. Good morning. My name is Michael Geist. I'm a law professor at the University of Ottawa, where I hold the Canada research chair in internet and e-commerce law, and I'm a member of the Centre for Law, Technology and Society. I appear in a personal capa

Information & Ethics committee  That's a great question. I think the starting point is the question of whether data can ever be reidentified. Can you put humpty dumpty back together again? I think that's one of the really exceptional challenges in this area. We see it play out on a lot of different issues. Fr

Information & Ethics committee  I think—

Information & Ethics committee  I think it's hard to say that it has been fully transparent given the limited disclosure and the fact that the Privacy Commissioner wasn't more actively engaged. It's quite clear that this could have been done far better.

Information & Ethics committee  I'd start by saying that keeping that door open is something that we see both companies and perhaps governments trying to do in terms of potential multi-use of data down the road. That's partially where these problems really start to arise. I think that you can make a credible ca

Information & Ethics committee  No, that was really the point that I wanted to drive home with my opening statement. I think that at the moment both the Privacy Act and PIPEDA simply are not fit for purpose.

Information & Ethics committee  I must admit I'm not sure that I can answer that beyond having read the same transcripts that you will have seen, and therein lies part of the problem. Can I confirm for you that it was fully—

Information & Ethics committee  I can only go by what the committee has been told by Telus and responses from the minister. Based on what I've seen put forward, the indications are that that's the case. I think it would have been better to have the Privacy Commissioner there operating as an independent agent

Information & Ethics committee  I'm in line with the evidence that's been put forward to date. I'm not an auditor. I'm not in the position, let's say, that the Privacy Commissioner would be in, to be able to go in and fully verify those statements. I'm able to go on the same publicly available evidence that t

Information & Ethics committee  I think this represents one of the really exceptional challenges. We started to see that considered in the former Bill C-11, which included references to potential consent or potential rules even around de-identified data, and so—

Information & Ethics committee  No, I don't think the current rules are sufficient. I appreciate that the committee's mandate may be to focus on this specific incident and whether it was legal or not, but I fear that would miss the forest for the trees. There is an opportunity here to use this particular inci

Information & Ethics committee  In the particular circumstance, I think there were a number of things that could have been done better in terms of the transparency of what took place. I think Christopher Parsons, who appeared before you, did a good job in his brief before the committee of identifying the lack o

Information & Ethics committee  —and the fog of information.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, absolutely. Let me pick up on and extend some of the comments I made at the beginning with respect to PIPEDA on the private sector side, which would of course implicate the obligations that Telus and BlueDot would have faced. That's legislation that's more than two decades o

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, on the issue of the tribunal, there was some opposition to that. A tribunal was proposed in Bill C-11. I actually had less of a problem with it. I thought that as long as it was an expert tribunal—which unfortunately Bill C-11 did not have; it had a mandate that one of the t