My concern is in making sure that you have the resources. I've been on this beat for about eight years, and the various offices of Parliament come before us and talk budgets. There are always constraints and limitations, but in your office, it seems to me, the mandate is changing—it's dramatically different. The Commissioner of Lobbying has always dealt with dodgy questions of lobbying here and there; the Ethics Commissioner deals with what is dealt with there. I have nothing against their work. It's very important work, but it would seem to me that.... This office was created in 1977. The Privacy Act was passed in 1983 for the public sector, and then PIPEDA was passed in 2000.
When I came on this file, your office would be dealing with lost hard drives and USB sticks, and the breaches tended to be corporate mistakes. These were questions of corporate governance, the lack of protocols in the office. What we're dealing with is the emergence of surveillance capitalism, and it's a very different beast, where there's a direct corporate interference in the lives of citizens, which is profoundly undemocratic, by companies that have enormous powers.
I'm getting to my point in a roundabout way. Is your role transforming from a regulator to an investigator? If that is the case, should we be rethinking how the office works and what your tools are? To ensure the privacy rights of Canadians in this world that is emerging around us, are the old tools sufficient?