Information & Ethics Committee on Dec. 11th, 2018

[Ryan O'Connor]

We have aggregate data from the results of the phone calls.

[Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

There were 2.5 million phone calls. Presumably there are some results, and you hold—or you may hold—personal information as a result. Presumably it's not zero.

[Ryan O'Connor]

We may. It's aggregated data.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Zimmer]

We're out of time.

We're going to suspend. We'll come back after the votes, Mr. O'Connor.

See you in about a half an hour.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Zimmer]

I will call the meeting back to order, everyone. Thanks for making it back.

We ended with Mr. Erskine-Smith when we suspended. Now we're going to Mr. Kent for seven minutes.

[Peter Kent, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Mr. O'Connor, for attending today.

I must say I was a bit surprised at the opening round of questions by Mr. Erskine-Smith, with the emotion and the passion. There seems to be a little bit of an issue with a constituent in the constituency, and I understand the background for that.

Mr. O'Connor, as you're aware, there have been a host of third parties active in Canadian elections, increasingly in recent years. In 2015, we had any number of Canadian third party players tied to Canada—the Dogwood initiative, Sisu Institute, the DI Foundation, the Salal Foundation, and, of course, Leadnow.

It's interesting that all of these Canadian third party players, either directly in elections or in election-related anti-resource development campaigns, were parented and subsidized in a variety of ways by American organizations, such as the Tides Foundation U.S.A., the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, or the Online Progressive Engagement Network, know by its acronym OPEN, which was itself created by an American organization called the Citizen Engagement Laboratory, which self-identifies as the people behind the people.

Recognizing the statement you made in your opening remarks, again, for the record, does Ontario Proud have an American or, for that matter, any other foreign benefactor of funds, direction or technological support?

[Ryan O'Connor]

No. As I indicated, neither Ontario Proud nor its sister pages have any sort of association with anyone outside of this country. We're 100% domestically funded, and we will remain that way.

[Peter Kent, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

I don't know how closely you have been following our study, which began earlier this year after the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook-AggregateIQ scandal, but by an unfortunate matter of timing, the final report of this study was tabled this morning before your testimony.

I would draw to your attention, with regard to your recommendations that third party political players not be subject to too much oversight, scrutiny or regulation, that recommendation 2 says:

That the Government of Canada amend the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act [PIPEDA] in order to subject political third parties to it.

Recommendation 3—and, again, this was unanimously agreed by this committee—says:

That the Government of Canada grant the Office of Privacy Commissioner and/or Elections Canada the mandate and authority to conduct proactive audits on political parties and political third parties regarding their privacy practices and to issue...fines.

With regard to the appearance of the three major political parties in Canada before this committee, only the Liberal Party resisted and argued against the application or the extension of PIPEDA to include political activities. The Conservative Party said, “Write the rules, and we will follow them.” In effect, so did the NDP.

Could you live with the recommendations that this committee has made in its report, tabled today, should the government act on them?

[Ryan O'Connor]

That's subject to my reviewing them in great detail, but Mr. Kent has provided a summary, so I'll make some brief remarks about that.

Certainly, we will comply with whatever legislation applies at a given time. If PIPEDA is extended to include third parties operating on a national level—I suppose Parliament can amend the legislation to do that—we'll comply.

However, the problem we would have would be increasing compliance costs. Already with Bill C-76, there are going to be significant compliance costs for third parties between elections. They will have to monitor their online advocacy if they receive a number of funds that total $10,000 or more. That's not a lot of money when they're receiving those donations within the four-year election cycle. Groups that don't even consider themselves third party political advertisers now might fall within the ambit of Bill C-76. That means they'll have to hire an auditor. That costs money. That means they'll have to potentially hire legal counsel for many different things that they wouldn't have had to before. That costs money.

If the intent is to have a robust political discourse in this country, managed by Elections Canada, I don't know that an increase in clients' costs, especially for small third parties, would do it. Certainly, our organization and our sister organizations will comply with the legislation as it's drafted. Provincial privacy legislation already applies to the work that we do. But again, if PIPEDA is extended, it should be extended fairly and to all political actors, including all political parties and candidates. Some of the biggest repositories of personal information in this country rest in all of the political parties' databases, not in third party databases.

[Peter Kent, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

Again, just for the record, a good deal of that information in terms of individual voters in the respective constituencies comes from Elections Canada or from interaction with constituents who, either on social media or in response to printed material, offer their accessibility through a phone number or an email.

You did mention the fact that there are already some reporting responsibilities with regard to the placement of advertising on social media platforms. However, we heard in testimony from a large number of players—including Mr. Wylie himself, who was the whistle-blower in the Cambridge Analytica affair—that a more lay-friendly website, repository or registry would be much more helpful in being able to see what ads were placed, who paid for them, what the content of the ads was and what the timing of those placements might be. Would you have a problem with that?

[Ryan O'Connor]

Certainly, that's something that's going to be undertaken, I think, by the service provider, be it Google or Facebook. They appear to be going down that road anyway.

The concern for me, again, rests with compliance costs. Do the third parties—I'm not necessarily talking about us, with our large reach, but an individual community group that wants to comment on a political issue—now have to hire a privacy expert, a lawyer, to advise them on these matters? There are some concerns about the compliance costs.

Again, we don't have an issue with complying with the law as it's drafted, but this committee and Parliament should really be aware of the impact that any recommendations from this committee, in conjunction with what has been passed in Bill C-76, subject to royal assent, would cause. There's going to be, I think, a very significant and, I would argue, deleterious impact on very small individual community groups and other individuals who wish to speak on political matters of the day, because now they're going to be required to comply with Elections Canada regulations, potentially regulations emanating from this committee, during the entire election cycle. That doesn't necessarily encourage a robust environment for free speech, in my view.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Zimmer]

Thank you, Mr. Kent.

Next up for seven minutes is Mr. Angus.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Thank you, Mr. O'Connor, for coming.

I want to ask you a few questions about the phone campaign that you ran in the final days of the provincial election. It seems to be a little at odds with the statement that you're non-partisan and that you just set up a Facebook site and got a whole bunch of likes. However, you ran 2.5 million calls, plus a million texts. Who ran the phone campaign?

[Ryan O'Connor]

We used a vendor. As I indicated previously in our discussions today, that vendor has access to telephone numbers through which it made those text messages and delivered those phone calls.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

What was the call centre? Who did that work?

[Ryan O'Connor]

That's proprietary. It's a vendor that engages in these—

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

It's proprietary. Does it engage in other political work? There aren't too many people able to do that. Does this unnamed vendor do other political work?

[Ryan O'Connor]

I can't speak on behalf of that vendor. I suspect that they do.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

You suspect that they do.

Did you just look them up in the Yellow Pages? How did they come to you?

[Ryan O'Connor]

Individuals seek out assistance from organizations for any number of reasons.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Were they doing work for the Ontario PCs?

[Ryan O'Connor]

I can't speak to what work any vendor we have utilized has done in the past, or will do in the future.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

If our committee asked you to give us that information, would you be willing to pass that on to our parliamentary committee?

[Ryan O'Connor]

In terms of, if you requested...?

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Yes, if we made an official request as to who ran that call centre—