On the question about Westminster, I'd say that one of the clearest potential tensions is around our vertical accountability structures and this horizontal model that we're increasingly pushing towards, when we think about platform government or the Estonian model.
Right now, the way we allocate praise and blame in our system is through the notion of ministerial responsibility. When a service fails or when funds are spent irresponsibly, the minister is the one who's called to account. In a really practical sense, they field those questions in the House. Who will be responsible—very practically speaking, in a concrete way, before Parliament—when there is a failure in one of these horizontal systems?
I want to be clear that there are ways to overcome this, and the beauty of the Westminster system is that it's inherently evolutionary. It is built to adapt to the times. I think we really could explore what are often called models of horizontal accountability or shared accountability. Essentially, it's the point we've been discussing. This is not so much a technical question as it really is a governance question—laying out, ahead of time, which parts of the bureaucracy and then, ultimately, which ministers will be responsible for how these systems are rolled out. I fear that right now a lot of the enthusiasm around platform governance has actually ignored that question, in part because we're often just dealing with pilots to show how this might work. If we're going to scale this, we need to be thinking about those questions.
I think the second piece of work that might be done around here is not just on the question of ministerial responsibility, but also getting into some of the data governance questions. Earlier on, the point was raised about whether the Privacy Act is fit for this purpose. The Privacy Act is one of the tools we need to look at to address these data governance issues, but it's actually not the only one, and it doesn't address a lot of the questions we're talking about.
Mr. Erskine-Smith mentioned the point about how this data could be used and combined to, say, tailor services to me in particular to say, “By the way, we know you had a baby. Now you're eligible for this tax credit.” Those kinds of questions have privacy implications, but they also have other questions around how data can be combined, when we feel comfortable with the state contacting us directly, and how we want different ministries to be able to access data. Privacy is one lens, but there's a whole other lens around ensuring we don't disadvantage certain groups over others, and those sorts of questions.
Again, it's the bleeding edge nature of the issues you're looking at. It's about privacy, but we also need to maybe develop entirely new regimes, not necessarily in legislation, but in principles of data use. Again, that's why I pointed you to the work that's being done on artificial intelligence. There, I think, we have a great example of the federal government being really progressive and open in talking about some of the very real ethical questions that are going to arise when we apply artificial intelligence to policy-making. The same thing can be done for a lot of the questions you're talking about.