I think that's an excellent point that I'll echo. One of the conditions that need to be in place for all of this to work is citizen trust in the system, and that's also going to be about generating a certain tolerance for failure amongst the public. I'm not talking about the public kind of smiling and shrugging off large-scale data breaches or anything like that. One of the things I constantly hear when I speak to governments that are doing very innovative things on digital is that part of it is that they have a licence to innovate. They have a population that trusts that their state has their best interests at heart, that their state will be open and honest about mistakes when they happen, and that their state has appropriate systems in place to manage those errors so they're not large-scale.
I don't think we have that culture right now in the Government of Canada. One of the previous witnesses—I believe it was Mr. Fishenden—suggested that one way we could improve the culture of privacy and the accountability around privacy would be to institute a new extra-governmental oversight body. I would strongly disagree with that. We have a history, in the federal government in particular, of looking at all accountability issues as ones where we need to create more oversight, more rules, more top-down punishments.
What this creates in the civil service is this absolute fear that in trying anything new and different, if it doesn't go right, you're going to be smacked down so hard that, first, you should lie about it when it happens, and second, you just shouldn't even try it in the first place. It's incredibly frustrating for employees who are trying to do things that are different, but it also just puts a full stop on a lot of the innovations that we're talking about here, which will in many cases rest on work from within the civil service. There will be parliamentary leadership, and we will need to have ministers behind it, but civil servants are going to do the grunt work, if we're planning on moving towards any of these sorts of models.
I think a model that focuses on accountability for learning could be a really important part of generating a culture in the Government of Canada that respects privacy but also allows us to be more innovative in our services.
Yes, I think that's something we need.