Thank you, Chair.
Thank you, Commissioner, for appearing before us again today.
Earlier this year, we learned in our study of the scandal with Cambridge Analytica, Facebook and AggregateIQ—as you did in your investigation, and as did the Privacy Commissioner of B.C. and the Privacy Commissioner of the United Kingdom—that millions of pieces of personal data, including that of hundreds of thousands, perhaps more, Canadians, was improperly harvested from Facebook, handled by a number of bodies, and moved back and forth in the digital world across national borders, and we have no assurance that this original improperly harvested data, this mass of data, has been destroyed.
We learned just in the last few weeks that your former Ontario counterpart, Ann Cavoukian, resigned from a Google sibling in Toronto, Sidewalk Labs, because Google could not assure her that highly personal data within Toronto could be effectively de-identified, which Google said was their objective.
Just in the last few days, a Conservative Order Paper question was responded to by the Liberal government regarding recent hacks of the Canadian government: 800 pages, representing perhaps 10,000 hacks or improper access to various government departments and agencies' websites.
This week we learned that you have launched an investigation into Stats Canada's demand or request to Canadian financial institutions for deeply personal information on at least 500,000 Canadians without their knowledge or consent—again, I know that consent is a major concern of yours—to develop a new institutional personal information bank. The claim here by Statistics Canada is that it would be anonymized.
Certainly, after seeing Cambridge Analytica, Facebook and AggregateIQ, and after hearing the very legitimate concerns of a well-recognized authority like Ann Cavoukian over the impossibility or the unlikelihood of de-identification being achieved, I'm also deeply skeptical about Statistics Canada's ability to guarantee that all of the information they're harvesting will be anonymized.
I know you've just begun your investigation, but is consent a paramount consideration in situations like this? Could we have your comments, please?