Good afternoon, Mr. Therrien. It's always a pleasure to have you here. I think you're the witness who visits this committee the most so that's great.
You made a submission to ISED dated November 23. I read it through. It was very interesting. One thing you did write was, “It is not an exaggeration to say that the digitization of so much of our lives is reshaping humanity.” I would go even further that once that march towards technology has started, it's very difficult for anybody to stop it. Eventually it will succeed.
I know the model we have been using is Estonia, but if you look at Estonia right now, you see there are 1.3 million people, four million hectares of land, and half of it is forest, so broadband connectivity is not really a big issue there. When we look at Canada right now and the latest UN survey on leading countries in e-government development, we see that we rank 23rd, so eventually the world is moving in this direction.
You indicated in the notes I have read that privacy is a big concern for you. There has to be a point as to where we start from and what the objective is. The majority of countries, especially advanced countries, are moving towards more digitization of government. Let's leave Estonia aside for a second. Where do we start from?
I'm going to frame this in two ways. The one frame I had is because in Estonia you have two levels of government. In some cases, we have four levels of government. How do we protect privacy? As Mr. Angus said, people want to have security of their data, but different governments do different roles. It's not one government that's a repository. The provincial government deals with health. The federal government has the CRA. How do we protect the privacy of Canadians going through different levels of government? How do we make the system interoperable among different departments within one level of government?