You're right that many people have different perspectives on some of these issues. I think there's some low-hanging fruit here. We could start by ensuring that there's respect for people's choices about consent and that there's adequate disclosure from the organizations collecting the information. It is important to have informed consent.
We need to move further along that chain. I think it's fair to say that at the moment Canadian law doesn't do a good enough job. We don't get the disclosure where there are security breaches with any sort of penalties. We don't have order-making power to ensure appropriate compliance. And we don't have penalties where there is insufficient compliance. At present if a company doesn't like what the Privacy Commissioner of Canada has said, they just tell them to go to court, that they're not going to abide by the decision. At the provincial level, we have commissioners with order-making power and the ability to enforce.
It's pretty tough to have faith in the Privacy Commissioner's ability to represent the public interest, to enforce the values that are broadly reflected within society. The commissioner has told you that she can't do her job—the legislation, which dates back more than a decade, doesn't give her adequate means of enforcement and organizations are increasingly willing to push back.
There is concern about the blurriness between federal and provincial jurisdiction. But in light of the securities regulation decision from the Supreme Court of Canada last December, I think we'll see that, absent some real changes in the law, if the federal commissioner tries to get aggressive about enforcing the rules, any company that doesn't like what the commissioner has done will say, “Go sue me.” They're going to tie it up in the courts for years. And there is a clear risk that the courts may say no, or find the law itself to be unconstitutional. I think if we did nothing more than try to ensure appropriate disclosure and adequate enforcement of consent, we'd be miles from where we are right now, given some of the shortcomings we see in the law.