First of all, privacy is recognized in Canada as a fundamental human right in a number of ways. Canada is signatory to international documents that underscore its commitment to the protection of privacy as a human right. The Canadian charter has been interpreted to include protection against unreasonable search and seizure where you have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
The fact that privacy is a human right doesn't mean that as a society we don't need to balance that right against competing rights. Freedom of speech isn't absolute in Canada; there are criminal limitations on what you can say. Privacy isn't absolute in Canada as well. There are a number of occasions where the courts, in particular in the criminal context, seek to find the right balance, when you have these situations where you have competing interests at play.
My argument is, if you recognize privacy as a fundamental right in PIPEDA, that what you're going to avoid is balancing that fundamental right against commercial profit or convenience. We don't balance off the right to freedom of speech because somebody could make some money if it were repressed. We come to situations where we have to decide where the limits are, when we're balancing right against right.
In the example you pointed to, there is a body of case law that has been developed to deal with that delicate balance. And it is a delicate balance; it is a difficult balance.
The suggestion I'm making is really drawing on the Finestone report, when the standing committee did an extensive public consultation on the impact of new technologies on privacy rights across the country. The recommendations of the standing committee at the time were that data protection legislation was necessary for the private sector, but they argued that data protection legislation will only fully protect privacy because of all the things we've discussed. It is a complicated environment, where information is flowing in all sorts of different ways, and our relationships are changing because of the platforms we're building.
Data protection will only be implemented in a way that gets us to where we want to be as a society if there is some umbrella commitment, some umbrella piece of legislation that recognizes that privacy is a fundamental value; it is a democratic value, a social value, a human right.
The suggestion of the Finestone committee was to enact a privacy rights charter that simply made that a statement of principle.