As you know, you have an interesting mix of federal and provincial jurisdiction here. PIPEDA captures health information that is traded through the course of a commercial activity. The argument is made that information needs to flow within the health care community to ensure Canadians get the benefit of appropriate health care and all those types of things. At the same time, I think it's important to recognize that this information has an incredible value in the marketplace--it's worth a lot of money--and it's used for other purposes as well.
For example, I was contacted by a Canadian doctor who was sitting in his office when he got a knock on the door and a drug rep walked into his office and began going through his prescription records. He said he had a list of every woman in the doctor's practice between the ages of 35 and 55, and asked why they weren't on his drug for hormone replacement therapy. There's evidence that pharmaceuticals spend tens of millions of dollars a year to profile doctors solely to sell product.
When we create these infrastructures that allow the flow of information for the public interest, I think we have to be cognizant of the fact that there are secondary purposes and there are unintended consequences for that. When health information in particular flows out of the confidentiality, gets outside of that relationship between the doctor and the patient, all the evidence that I've been able to dig up in the research indicates that people respond by lying and hiding and not going to the doctor.
It goes back actually to a comment of yours, Madam Lavallée, about the importance of privacy as a social value and a human right. Privacy is more than the control of our information. It's how we negotiate the relationship between ourselves and others. It's central to our ability to trust other people, to enter into social relationships. When we allow that information to flow, if we don't respect the social value of privacy and the importance that privacy plays in the democratic process, we're going to end up with these unintended consequences and we will have people hiding and not going to the doctor because they'll only go if they know what they say to the doctor is confidential.
I think it's interesting that PIPEDA captures health information because it underlines that this is a commodity that's traded in the marketplace that's worth a heck of a lot of money. We have to be particularly careful when we examine those kinds of arguments that it should flow for the public interest because those unintended consequences aren't necessarily going to get you where you think you're going to end up.