Thank you very much.
I'll now speak for seven minute. Just to be fair, I will put the gavel beside the clerk and if I go over the time, he will hit me with it.
I find this fascinating, and Mr. Anthony seemed to tread lightly. I find that very surprising.
I used to be a digital believer, and in the digital believing world things were going to be better, we were going to move faster. The longer I am in this job, the more wary I get. I think “tread lightly” is a very interesting example.
I just want to talk a bit about my sense of how Canadians see privacy and digital innovation. I was talking with tech people in the U.S. and they were marvelling about and saying that we really take this stuff seriously.
We had a serious digital copyright battle that involved citizens and letter writing campaigns. The net-throttling issue was a big issue. It was Canada that did the first investigation of Facebook, but at the same time, as Mr. Boysen has pointed out, people here hate identity cards. I think of my voters and they would be up in arms over this.
We look at Statistics Canada as a good example of how not to do this. Statistics Canada has a worldwide reputation and the trust of Canadians. They thought they were doing something in the public interest, but it struck Canadians the wrong way.
What would your advice be to a government that may think that gathering more information is in the best interest? You talked about the danger of the opportunities they say will emerge from increased efficiencies from mining, aggregating and sharing data, but you're saying that we need to require evidence to show that. What are the parameters we need to be looking at on this?