Information & Ethics committee  No. In fact I think it's the inverse. It's taking a lot of the information in Treasury Board guidelines and simply bringing it up to the status of a law. Treasury Board could then issue new directives of interpretation of the law. Again, it's because we're trying to put forward p

Information & Ethics committee  No. I think this is essential. One dimension that I haven't mentioned today is the international dimension of Canada as we look around the networked world and see that Canada is becoming one of the few modern countries that really hasn't touched up its national privacy legislati

Information & Ethics committee  It's being done all over the world now.

Information & Ethics committee  Not ideally: I think it takes a little drafting.

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you very much.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes. The seeming contradiction between recommendations two and six is another attempt to balance the use of public funds in investigations, which are very labour-intensive operations, and justice for the Canadians who come to us with their privacy complaints. Actually the commi

Information & Ethics committee  The five-year review comes from precedent. Because we have the temerity to label these quick fixes--we know there are no quick fixes in a parliamentary process that involves so many actors and so on--we tried to hone in on things that were perhaps easy, understandable, and for wh

Information & Ethics committee  I'm not directly privy very often to the details of national security concerns. Some of our investigators have a high level of security clearance, and when there are complaints for classified information they may look at it to the extent they understand that, but that's fairly ex

Information & Ethics committee  Well, obviously, if it's sharing information and a government department doesn't want to share the information and doesn't, we're kind of stuck there, I would say. But I'd say we do have the confidence of the government under our act to see quite a bit of national security legisl

Information & Ethics committee  Perhaps my colleague, who has worked in this area for a long time, could add something.

Information & Ethics committee  Can I ask Madame Bernier to answer? She is the former Assistant Deputy Minister of Public Safety, so it's an area she knows well.

Information & Ethics committee  I understand the honourable member's concern about public money, about possible overlapping. I assure you that we would not overlap and repeat what the provinces are doing or what we do in PIPEDA. But may I remind you that we're in a bit of an unusual situation here. Usually, whe

Information & Ethics committee  I would suggest, honourable member, that this is a function of the Treasury Board Secretariat. I'm not here before you to ask for more money. I don't have any requests for more money. I'm here because I'm concerned about the principles in the Privacy Act that need to be updated.

Information & Ethics committee  I do. At the moment, those provisions are in the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act that you passed in 1999. My colleague showed me the relevant paragraphs. I repeat: we have already tried these things in Canada. They are in the other act dealing with th

Information & Ethics committee  Exactly.