I don't think it's too soon either, although I do agree, in part, with respect to health information, we're just in the working stage of building these large systems. An enormous amount of money is going into them. Requirements are being put on physicians' offices. There are still a lot of doctors who have paper files, and that's not going to work in this age. They have to go electronic, which means they have to transfer all that paper into computer files. Then there are a lot of questions associated with that kind of information about access.
I've been attending meetings of the Department of Health in B.C. and that group that's doing a lot of this work on the electronic medical record, and there are a lot of questions now. They're guided, of course, in B.C., by B.C. law, and so far it looks like it will be okay from a privacy point of view, except that there are just a lot of questions about access that are not well worked out yet, about routine access and special access.
As I mentioned previously, medical researchers believe it's their right to get access to whatever they want, as long as you strip off identifying information. A lot of medical research goes to looking at medical records and seeing people under treatment A, compared with people under treatment B, over long periods of time. The question is, if you strip off identifying information, there should be no privacy issue, because you can't identify the individuals, except that this is another technology appearing where work and statistics show it's possible for certain sizes of groups to recover information. You can do it, in part, if you know where people live and they have a certain disease, because there are only a few people who can satisfy those criteria; and even if you strip off the names in advance, it's possible to recover information about them. So we're forced to think more carefully about that, about the conditions under which the information is available.