Information & Ethics committee  As somebody who practises privacy law on a daily basis and advises businesses, I think one thing that's notable—certainly it's been my experience and I've heard it anecdotally from others—is that the large banks, the large telcos, and the large Internet companies have squads of l

Information & Ethics committee  Sure. I think that to a certain extent some of what we think of as being a right to be forgotten or a right to erasure, as it's more recently being called in Europe, actually exists. You have the ability to revoke consent that you've given previously. The Privacy Commissioner did

Information & Ethics committee  Good afternoon. Thank you to the committee and to the chair for this opportunity to speak with you today about this very important subject. If I could just briefly introduce myself, I am a privacy lawyer and partner with McInnes Cooper in Halifax. I’ve been practising law in th

Information & Ethics committee  I would be broadly in favour of oversight over the entire national security and intelligence functions within the Government of Canada, which would include the law enforcement components as well. What we're seeing is that they all work as a group. When we have 17 organizations, s

Information & Ethics committee  It's an interesting one. It is, I think, worth further discussion. For the recipient organization, I think they should collect only the information that's necessary for their operations, the information that relates to their statutory obligations related to threats to the securi

Information & Ethics committee  I'll try to be brief, which is uncharacteristic. Consistent with the other efforts that are going on related to oversight of national security generally and across the board, there is no common oversight of any of these 17 organizations, and all of them, apparently, are instrume

Information & Ethics committee  When you look through each of the individual clauses, it makes a whole lot of sense and hangs together, and certainly—

Information & Ethics committee  I think that's something to be mindful of, and there are other kinds of limitations that talk about and are related to protected expression and things like that, so certainly it fits and is consistent within the whole scheme of the statute. I would identify the defects as being w

Information & Ethics committee  Certainly certainty is a whole lot better than confusion, both in the way you referred to and in the example you gave of hesitation in handing it over when they probably were lawfully able to do that in the first place, and also in the possible broad interpretation of relevance.

Information & Ethics committee  One of the challenges we are going to face, particularly when you look at the Five Eyes, is that Canada is one of five countries that are part of this. I think it will be politically difficult for Canada to act alone, because it ultimately depends on reciprocal information flows.

Information & Ethics committee  Well, certainly, and we would lose the advantage. For example, if Canada were to adopt a position that we were not going to play the bulk collection game and would instead play the targeted collection game so that we're not hoovering up massive amounts of information that's irrel

Information & Ethics committee  I'm happy to answer that. Part of it relates to the question of relevance: what is relevant to investigations related to activities that undermine the security of Canada? Relevance is a very low threshold. If you're going to tinker with it, I would adopt “necessary”, because tha

Information & Ethics committee  I think it's a very interesting question. It raises the spectre that I didn't even think of as well, which is essentially information laundering. I'm actually a little ashamed, because I'm usually pretty good at worst-case scenarios. In an example like this you could—I don't kno

Information & Ethics committee  I would suggest it's exactly as Mr. Elder referred to. It's a matter of trusting. You're going to have to trust. If you're going to enter into these bilateral or multilateral information-sharing arrangements, you're going to have to trust. We can also put in place general limita

Information & Ethics committee  How exactly you would do that is a very complicated question. A lot of effort went into looking at what happened to Maher Arar, for example, which was triggered by the sharing of information with the United States by Canadian law enforcement and national security agencies, and th