Sure. Thank you very much for the question. It's part of why I wanted to bring up the issue of the mandate of the various agencies.
As I'm pointing out, the real-life effects of this are right now. People who are talking about such issues as how we are going to make an effective national pharmacare system in Canada meaningful for people's health are saying, “Oh, dear; what about SCISA and the fact that Health Canada is impacted by this detrimental impact on patients' information rights?” That is affecting people in their ability to essentially govern ourselves, benefit our health, etc. On a very real level, these discussions right now are impeding our ability to effectively govern ourselves.
On an individual level, it has mass implications. As I say, I am of the opinion—and I share it with various of my colleagues—that if you were going to do one thing to reduce the abuse power of SCISA, make it so that you could not have bulk data transfers as part of it.
If there was confusion about what individual suspicion standards of information sharing should have happened in the past, again, we could have clarified those in the Privacy Act. Instead, we enacted an act in which it was very clear that bulk data transfers were facilitated. The kinds of profiling that bulk data is used for have a devastating impact not only on some individuals, which they have brought to our attention that they do not deserve—they may find themselves on the no-fly list, the slow fly list, or other various aspects, on the basis of profiling without any individualized suspicion—but entire communities are impacted by being under the threat of racial and religious profiling.
I could go on about this subject for quite a while, but I'm going to keep it narrowed to those examples because I think they speak to both the front-end chill and the ultimate impact of where we do have very reasonable grounds for suspecting SCISA was essentially enacted, which is about the bulk data holdings.