In 2001 and 2002, I worked with a great team and a great minister—Norm Sterling, for those of you who remember him—to develop a made-in-Ontario privacy regime. Those rules were meant to protect the public but also to provide a competitive and predictable environment to attract technology firms to Ontario. The draft legislation was ultimately abandoned internally months after I had left the department. I'm happy to elaborate if anyone cares.
Parliament enacted the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act nearly 20 years ago. That act is what triggered Ontario's initiative to in turn try to develop made-in-Ontario legislation that would be more applicable to Ontario's local and provincial circumstances. Here we are again, facing an incrementally different world with a new regulatory challenge in the form of anonymized and public realm data issues.
We know that on the initiative of councillors Joe Cressy and Paul Ainslie, Toronto City Council has launched an effort to develop its own data policy. Ontario is consulting on a data strategy as we speak, but ultimately the authority that created a broad framework to address these issues in the earliest days of the Internet was right here on Parliament Hill.
A national approach may be appropriate now—whether it's to empower libraries, empower municipalities or just set a common framework for the country to work with—if it leaves room for innovation, if it's balanced and if it guides local governments and provincial governments without freezing out local preferences, as the original federal legislation did.
I hope that, in any questions, I'll have the opportunity to speak to other issues on the Quayside debate. It's a complex one, but I'm sure the primary reason we were invited to join you today is that we've spoken out on the virtue of public realm data regulation and we've made it clear that the Toronto Region Board of Trade's support for this regulation can be and is a pro-business and a pro-Quayside position, just as much as it is a pro-public interest and pro-individual position in terms of protecting the rights of our customers, our citizens and our taxpayers ad infinitum.