Thank you for accepting my invitation.
I wrote a report for the Privacy Commissioner in 2012. At the time Jennifer Stoddart was receiving a number of complaints about political parties. She couldn't do anything about it, so she asked me to do some research on what the main federal political parties were doing in terms of the capture of personal data.
It's complex, but essentially what happens is that the information from the voters list is distributed under the authority of the Elections Act, and then it's supplemented by information from a whole range of an expanding number of sources: telephone polling, door-to-door canvassing, social media, commercial databases, and so on. Techniques that we are currently seeing in the United States have slowly been migrating into Canadian politics. Many people are concerned about this. Political parties are one of the only types of organization in Canada that do not have to abide by the basic common sense, fair information principles, many of which are not controversial. The three main parties do have privacy codes, and they have been making some strides.
What to do is a bit of dilemma, because political parties are sui generis. They're not government agencies, so they don't really fit under the Privacy Act. They're not commercial organizations, and therefore PIPEDA would be a stretch.
What I advised both the Privacy Commissioner and the Chief Electoral Officer a couple of years ago when this was discussed was that an interim step would be to negotiate a code of practice. Based on the 10 privacy principles in PIPEDA, the main political parties would be invited to develop privacy codes that would give individuals basic rights of access to their data and would also oblige the large number of workers and volunteers who work for parties during election times to hold that data securely. The adherence to those codes of practice would be a condition for receiving the voters list at the election under the Elections Act.
I thought that was a good interim measure to at least get party officials to get their mind around this issue. It would not, therefore, deal with the complexities of statutory change, which would obviously be controversial.