Mr. Chair, I will start and then Mr. Bowman will continue.
The Canadian Bar Association is very pleased to appear before this committee as it conducts its statutory review of PIPEDA. The Canadian Bar Association is a national association representing over 37,000 jurists across Canada, and amongst our primary objectives are improvement of the law and improvement of the administration of justice, and it's with those optics that we have reviewed PIPEDA, and indeed that we were actively involved when PIPEDA was developed.
The development of this area of law also led the Canadian Bar Association to establish the privacy and access law section, the group that has prepared the paper before you. I'll just say something about the section. It brings together lawyers who act for businesses and not-for-profit organizations and privacy groups, as well as academics, and government officials who act in this area of law. So it brings that balance of interests to the table in assessing the operations of the law.
Finally, a word about the paper in front of you. This is not the privacy and access law section's first foray into a review of PIPEDA; we've provided preliminary assessments to Industry Canada and the Privacy Commissioner on issues that we thought should be addressed in this review. So the paper before you poses some key points from those more comprehensive submissions and gives an executive summary of them. We have provided the full paper to the clerk for use in greater detail.
I will now ask Mr. Bowman, who is chair of the privacy and access law section, to address the key elements that we think are subjects to review.