Public Safety committee  Yes, thank you very much. The point you raise is very important. What is the purpose of the act? As Ms. Bethell said, a significant number of sex offences often involve people who know each other, and those offences are committed in domestic situations. They are often committed

Public Safety committee  Good morning, sir. Thank you very much for your comments. My name is Lisa Campbell. Our point of view is that privacy's a constitutional right, which we have to remember. Even after a person's been convicted of a very serious offence, they still have some rights. It's in our bes

Public Safety committee  Yes. You referred to the situation in the U.S. DNA is collected and the information is shared for research and statistical purposes. As Mr. Rondinelli has just said, it is a very rich source of information. It is important to apply a very strict control considering the extent of

Public Safety committee  Thank you for your question. The false positives I was talking about related to familial searches. This is a practice that happens in the U.K., where searches will be run against a convicted offender index from a crime scene and they look for close matches. That's a less precise

Public Safety committee  May I just add one additional point? The most reliable samples come directly from blood and other bodily fluids, but if DNA is collected from discarded facial tissues or postal stamps.... So it depends on where you've collected the DNA. It also depends on the method of testing.

Public Safety committee  If I may also add to that, you've heard the adage “junk in, junk out”, and that's what I was talking about earlier, the critics of the U.S. system, where the 50 states all have different standards for which DNA is collected. They use different techniques and even different techno

Public Safety committee  It is a very good question. We strongly believe in accountability, that is that an organization should be held to account for its activities. As has already been stated, the RCMP should be more closely supervised by Parliament especially to increase control on the use of persona

Public Safety committee  It forms part of our recommendations on oversight of the RCMP as a whole. We have recommended stronger oversight of the RCMP's activities in general. So while we're satisfied that there has been good, sound management—my colleague is part of an oversight committee that's comprise

Public Safety committee  Good morning. The Supreme Court of Canada has recognized on numerous occasions that privacy interests are worthy of protection under the charter and that the Privacy Act has quasi-constitutional status. The privacy of citizens goes to the essence of a democratic state, and it's

Information & Ethics committee  That's a very good question. This is how it works: Data brokers have become an industry unto themselves. Personal information is now worth money, and it usually passes through many hands. There's not one identity thief, but several: there's the person who collects it, the person

Information & Ethics committee  It's an interesting case. The name of the case is Hani Al Telbani against the Attorney General of Canada and Transport Canada. It's the first challenge in court, that we know of, to Canada's no-fly list. At the moment they're exchanging documents. An interesting side issue is tha

Information & Ethics committee  For complaints against our office, I believe it's been under 12 or so for the moment.

Information & Ethics committee  I should explain as well that in addition to creating the office, when there are privacy complaints against our organization, we don't handle them ourselves, because of conflict of interest reasons. They're handled by an external body.

Information & Ethics committee  That's an excellent point, and I'm glad you raised it. I mentioned our ombudsman role earlier, and we take the view that the best way to get compliance with the legislation is through people knowing about it, agreeing with it, and conducting themselves in accordance with it. To

Information & Ethics committee  I mentioned earlier the total of, at the moment, 75 per month, divided between the two acts. If you multiply that by 12, that sort of gives you our total. I would need a calculator here.