Information & Ethics Committee on June 5th, 2006

[Jennifer Stoddart]

We are part of the same administrative unit for reporting purposes and formally for administrative purposes. There was a proposal that was examined by the Honourable Mr. Gérard La Forest, who's a retired Supreme Court judge and one of the primary legal theoreticians of privacy rights in his judgments. He made a study of both our offices and concluded that it would not be a good idea. His report came out in November and is on our website.

So the government has gone ahead, and then funded us separately for the future, and has looked at our funding proposals. An all-party parliamentary committee reviewed our funding proposals last November, just at the end of the last Parliament, as separate entities.

[Bruce Stanton, Conservative, Simcoe North, ON]

Okay. The only comment I would offer is I certainly don't disagree with that because I would have to believe, even looking at the culture of the two offices, there are two real polarities here, and that makes a lot of sense.

Going back to the volume of work that you've got, and again in previous reports there was an indication that you did in fact have a backlog, where do we stand now, as we sit here in early 2006? Has that been brought into line now or is it at a level that is reasonable, given what you've got in front of you?

[Jennifer Stoddart]

No, it's not. As I explained to the all-party parliamentary committee, we think it'll take us two years to absorb the backlog, so, unfortunately, I have to report to you today that two months into the new fiscal year the backlogs are still there.

We're not pleased with the time it takes to treat Canadians' privacy complaints. We do have resources to hire new people. Our practical problem is that there is a dearth of qualified personnel in Ottawa in the civil service to fill these jobs, and as soon as we recruit people they receive other offers. I think the Information Commissioner has talked about that. So I have barely two people more than I had at the end of March, although I have all kinds of budgets and all kinds of staffing actions. So it's a real challenge. But we have two years. We're not giving up at this point.

[Bruce Stanton, Conservative, Simcoe North, ON]

And as we heard your report here today, there's still a whole series of other issues in front of you, not even including the fact that you've got this backlog to deal with. So I think these are very definite issues that will need to be addressed, and we'll be interested.

I presume at some point, Mr. Chair, through the course of the coming year, we'll be reviewing estimates and/or numbers, as it relates to their budgetary requirements for the coming year.

[Jennifer Stoddart]

Yes.

[The Chair, Liberal, Tom Wappel]

Yes, that's correct.

[Bruce Stanton, Conservative, Simcoe North, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

[Jennifer Stoddart]

Yes, and we'd be happy to appear and discuss. We have two annual reports under both laws. We'd be very happy to go over those annual reports with you and answer your questions on those.

[The Chair, Liberal, Tom Wappel]

Thank you.

With the committee's permission—and I hope I have it—I'd like to ask two questions in the remaining three minutes.

In your slide projection, or whatever these things are called, under the Privacy Act, you indicated that the Privacy Act came into force in July 1983, and you gave us this document, “Government Accountability for Personal Information: Reforming the Privacy Act”. It's a lengthy executive summary, which I haven't had an opportunity to read, but I note that you say:

To be effective, policy cannot be developed in a legal vacuum. The feebleness of the current legislation has created such a vacuum and the Privacy Act must be reformed to close the gap.

I want to give you a minute to expand on your call for a review of the Privacy Act. My specific question is, in your discussions with the bureaucracy--let's put it that way--where does the bureaucracy see a review of the Privacy Act in terms of its priorities?

[Jennifer Stoddart]

I'll begin. I'll ask the assistant commissioner who's in charge of that in particular to answer that.

I think this paragraph refers to the fact that we think that Privacy Act reform involves public consultation, sector-wide consultation, because this is the basic personal info management framework of all the information Canadians give to the federal government.

We think it's long overdue for reform, to address some of the challenges that I suggested: the management of personal information within the Canadian government; the management of the information that, once we've given it to the government, the government then sends abroad to our neighbour to the south, for example; to give Canadians effective rights of redress; and to do things like address issues that were largely unheard of in 1983, such as covering DNA samples.

The act deals with a definition that was quite avant-garde at the time; it deals with recorded information. Well, if you keep a skin sample, it's not really recorded information; it's just a skin sample. But we have been saying this should be treated as if it's subject to the Privacy Act.

These are some of the examples of issues. Other issues have to do with the fact that we live in such a globalized, interconnected world, and unlike for PIPEDA, we restrict the rights that people have under the Privacy Act to people who basically have immigrant status in Canada. So visitors or people who are flying through Canada on their way somewhere else, then, don't have rights under the Privacy Act. Again, there's been an administrative arrangement to get around this so that Europeans can fly in and through and enjoy the reciprocal or same level of privacy protection.

Maybe I could ask the assistant commissioner...another big thing is the whole theme of data matching.

[The Chair, Liberal, Tom Wappel]

Assistant Commissioner, you'll have the last word. Could you just answer my question at least about where the reform of the Privacy Act is on the radar screen of the bureaucracy, never mind the government?

[Raymond D'Aoust]

To be honest, it's very difficult for us to come up with an assessment of that, because when we talk to our colleagues at Treasury Board, they're quite open to making any policy change that will reinforce the privacy management framework, but when we talk about Privacy Act reform, they'll say, “This is really a question for the legislator.“ So it's very hard.

We certainly have met with the Minister of Justice. We've met with the President of the Treasury Board. Certainly, walking out of those meetings, we felt that they were quite open to discussing Privacy Act reform.

I should say that within the parameters of the existing law, we've had some success. For instance, the Treasury Board released guidelines on outsourcing for federal managers and so on. That's done under the current legislative framework, and those guidelines, we feel, are quite good, and they're a step in the right way in terms of reinforcing or mitigating against privacy risks resulting from outsourcing.

It's the same with the privacy impact assessment policy, which was adopted by the government back in 2002. Again, we see that there's a real commitment to improving privacy management practices, but also there's a recognition that the Privacy Act needs to be overhauled, if you will.

[The Chair, Liberal, Tom Wappel]

Okay, thank you.

I'm very regretful that we don't have more time, but the rules require that I cannot go beyond 5 o'clock so that there's no conflict between the two committees.

There are new members on this committee, myself included. These are very interesting issues. You've certainly given us something to think about in terms of a review of the Privacy Act by this committee. That's where the public consultation would begin, at least from the political point of view. So we want to thank you very much for that. I have no doubt that you'll be back, hopefully, once Bill C-2 is done and we can get down to some regular meetings. So thank you so much for coming.

We're adjourned.