Health committee  Mr. Chair, as my colleague mentioned earlier, the representatives who are responsible for the vaccination program are not here, so unfortunately we will not be able to respond to that question.

Health committee  The work that we're doing in the corporate surveillance and data branches really supports the data and analytics and the risk assessments that are happening in other parts of the organization. I'm not aware of any data that we have related to the question.

Health committee  Mr. Chair, I'm going to pass that question over to my colleague, Cindy Evans.

Health committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Absolutely. The pan-Canadian health data strategy, which I did mention before, is the long-term road map that we're looking at. It's been developed in consultation with provinces and territories. Currently, two reports have been published by the expert advisory group.

Health committee  Thank you, Cindy, and thank you, Mr. Chair. Data gaps are a broad complex issue given the way that health is a shared responsibility across provinces, territories, indigenous communities and the federal government. As for solutions, there are no silver bullets. Work has been ongoing to find a way to make sure that public health data is reliable, timely and relevant, that data is getting to where it needs to be.

Information & Ethics committee  That's an accurate representation. Cellphone and telco companies collect this data as part of the business and part of the services they provide to users. That is not any part of the data or information that is coming to PHAC.

Information & Ethics committee  Mr. Chair, that is correct. As several members of this committee have pointed to, this is a new space for many folks. There are rapid changes happening. Apple made changes in April 2021 to be a more privacy-respecting platform. My expectation is that these changes will continue.

Information & Ethics committee  No, I have not.

Information & Ethics committee  Mr. Chair, I think that's an accurate description. Each of the applications now—because of the changes to operating systems, both Apple and android—requires opt-ins for a large number of the uses, including, usually, mobility data. BlueDot also has an internal process in place whereby it will only provide data to us if a device has appeared over five consecutive days.

Information & Ethics committee  It's pretty fair to say that the focus of the Public Health Agency of Canada is to protect the health of Canadians, but that can never be done while sacrificing privacy or sacrificing the rights of our citizens. In everything I've seen with my teams and the teams of people putting together the RFP, making sure the privacy of Canadians is an utmost priority is key.

Information & Ethics committee  Mr. Chair, may I ask a question? Criteria in regard to what?

Information & Ethics committee  I think I understand. Mr. Chair, the law in the Privacy Act for the Government of Canada is very clear. Part of what we did, as we were engaging with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner and as our own privacy experts were looking at what we were doing with mobility data and what we wanted to do with the new RFP, was first to look to see if there were any privacy impacts or if any personal information was being held or used.

Information & Ethics committee  I believe we can provide samples of that data to the committee that would help you understand and make your decisions.

Information & Ethics committee  Mr. Chair, the comparison between the de-identified aggregated data that PHAC receives and the amount of data that is being transmitted by mobile devices and used by both applications and telcos is like a bucket or even a drop compared to the ocean, effectively. When we're looking at Google Maps....

Information & Ethics committee  The data, as said, is de-identified and aggregated. I understand that it doesn't mean a lot in and of itself. The level to which it is de-identified and aggregated, though, is quite significant. Effectively, for one data line, we have a table called “percentage time at primary location”.