Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Ladies and gentlemen members of the committee,
good afternoon. It's an honour to be here once again with you, but this time to answer questions about my nomination for reappointment as Privacy Commissioner of Canada.
I would deeply appreciate Parliament's confidence in me to continue on in this role and to have the opportunity to build on what my office has already accomplished. It has been a great privilege to serve Canadians and Parliament for the last seven years.
As you know, I've had the pleasure of appearing before this committee many times over the course of my mandate. and I'm very happy to see so many familiar faces today.
It has been quite a journey over the last seven years. Back in 2003, I took over an office that was only beginning to recover from an extremely difficult period. Our administrative powers had been seriously curtailed. Part of our budget was about to lapse. We were being investigated by the RCMP, the Auditor General, and others.
I must say that it took a lot of hard work, but we got our house back in order and returned our focus to where it should be--protecting the privacy rights of Canadians.
To be frank, this has also been a tremendous challenge in the face of a dramatic reshaping of the privacy landscape in recent years. Technological advances in human creativity have combined to bring us a multitude of new online services and electronic devices with important implications for our privacy: social networking sites, YouTube, foursquare, and smartphones, to name but a few.
At the same time, our personal data has become a hot commodity in both the private and the public sectors. Businesses use increasingly detailed profiles to better target us with advertising, while governments around the world see personal data as the key to combatting terrorism and other crimes.
We live in a world where the flow of data is global, instantaneous, and constant. I am extremely proud of our achievements in the face of this rapid change. However, the ongoing threats to privacy remain enormous, and there is still so much to do.
If reappointed, then, I would focus on a few areas: leadership on priority privacy issues--we have four, and I can talk more about them later; supporting Canadians, organizations, and institutions to make informed privacy decisions; and of course and always, service delivery to Canadians and, by extension, to Parliament as well.
I'd like to move on now to leadership on priority issues.
As Canadians live out more and more of their daily lives in this digital environment, it is clear that is where we need to be focusing much of our attention.
As you know, we have had ongoing discussions with on-line giants such as Facebook and Google. At the moment, we are investigating further complaints about Facebook, as well as—