Evidence of meeting #47 for Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was consent.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Full Professor, Department of Criminology, University of Ottawa, As an Individual
My colleague Jacquelyn Burkell at Western said it shouldn't be a right to be forgotten but a right to forget. We all do this. We all reinvent ourselves. We all go through experiences that we wouldn't necessarily want thrown back at us later on. I think that the right to be forgotten, as it's been articulated in Europe, is really about ease of access, especially if there's a public benefit to having that ease of access. Then that's part of the balancing. But even if you look at court records, court records have to be public because justice has to be public. It has to be seen as having been done. But when they started putting up matrimonial matters, and neighbours were looking up neighbour to see how much somebody made, it created all sorts of problems, so they took that off the Internet. It's still public; it's still available. That ease of access is what was causing the problem.
I think the potential with the right to be forgotten is that it's talking about that ease of access. Google is not a library. It's not the way we find everything. When there's publicly valuable information, you can still have journalists access that information at courthouses and through other investigative means. Just to build on what you were saying, to a certain extent it addresses the fact that we're relying on these tech companies to be curators, librarians, or journalists. If you look at the fake news crisis we're in right now, they're not journalists. We're realizing that there's a value in a democracy in having people who look at information and collect it for particular purposes, and companies are not playing that role. It's not even something they can do.
I think the challenge here is thinking of new ways to allow us as a democracy to curate information so we can create the privacy that individual citizens need to live their lives, but at the same time allow public debate to be nourished and enriched by good, curated investigative journalism and other sources of information like that.
Conservative
Matt Jeneroux Conservative Edmonton Riverbend, AB
That's excellent.
I have about 45 seconds left.
Quickly, Mr. Gogolek, under PIPEDA, do you find there's enough on child protection? The Privacy Commissioner said there is. We've heard another public interest advocacy group saying there's not. Do you think there needs to be a separate stand-alone piece on that, recognizing the provincial jurisdiction on a lot of that?
Executive Director, B.C. Freedom of Information and Privacy Association
It's a very complicated question. There is a jurisdictional question. I think we would probably be more comfortable dealing with the consent issue straight up, whether children of a certain age are able to provide it, rather than dividing them off from the rest of us [Inaudible—Editor]?
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Blaine Calkins
Thank you very much.
Mr. Cullen, go ahead, please, for seven minutes.
NDP
Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
Thank you very much.
Thank you for the testimony.
Ms. Steeves, I want to pick up on the recent Federal Court decision with respect to the right to forget. Court cases were being posted on a foreign website, which then made them searchable so you could type in your neighbour's name and find out all sorts of things. Have we started down the road of the right to forget or the right to be forgotten?
Full Professor, Department of Criminology, University of Ottawa, As an Individual
My colleague Michael Geist has argued that it is a foot in the door and that we're moving in that direction.
Full Professor, Department of Criminology, University of Ottawa, As an Individual
It's a de-linking kind of thing. To me, with the CanLII thing, it's closer to the way courts responded to their actual paper copies of records, so it seems to me that we're not quite there yet. I think it's something that would best be articulated by a thoughtful piece of legislation.
NDP
Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
Legislation....
You've suggested that journalists or librarians are the arbitrators of what becomes searched, of what is searchable.
Full Professor, Department of Criminology, University of Ottawa, As an Individual
They're not the arbitrators but the curators. Those are different.
NDP
Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
Well, being a curator means having a great deal of power in someone's hands. That's to say that we're going to allow them to organize the information, and that what becomes searchable and accessible will be in their hands. Who plays that role? It's certainly not the Privacy Commissioner, and it's certainly not Parliament.
Full Professor, Department of Criminology, University of Ottawa, As an Individual
Well, right now we're letting it be Google—
Full Professor, Department of Criminology, University of Ottawa, As an Individual
—and I'm suggesting that when it's in the hands of librarians, there's a variety of different types of libraries, and there are stores I can go to if I want to access information. Similarly, with journalism, there is a broad range of different kinds of news outlets that we can rely on to feed that public debate.
NDP
Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
I acknowledge the problem we have with Google being the one demonstrating that, with the profit motive they may have and their organizing of things in the way that is most beneficial to them, yet I'm not sure that I'm satisfied with the alternative solutions you've offered, that librarians writ large or a store that I go into.... I think finding that out would help articulate what that thoughtful piece of legislation would look like in terms of the way we curate such private and personal information.
As for the right to forget, I thank God every day that I didn't have social media when I was a kid. I'm not going to tell you why, but I don't think I could have been elected if everything had been posted, and I think that may apply to some other colleagues around the table too.
I'll tell you later, Chair.
NDP
Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
My time is short, Mr. Gogolek. I assume you're referencing the B.C. PharmaNet breach today, in which 7,500 British Columbians had their personal medical information leaked—including for some of them, all of their medications and their medication history—by the net that tracks and tries to share information among pharmacists, which is a noble thing, because we want pharmacists to be able to track for all sorts of good public health reasons. I understand that the government knew about this last fall and that it's coming to light only today. How does the privacy law in B.C. or what happens federally not impact this decision by a government or a government agency that knew about a breach involving something so personal not to release that information for months and months?
Executive Director, B.C. Freedom of Information and Privacy Association
This is one of the lacunae we have here in British Columbia, where PIPEDA actually has been updated to provide for breach notification. Here in B.C., we've had recommendations for this going back two years, and the provincial government has, for reasons best known to itself, decided not to act on this.
NDP
Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
What is the breach notification right now in B.C. and what should it be federally?
Executive Director, B.C. Freedom of Information and Privacy Association
Federally, we would be looking for something stronger than what's currently in PIPEDA, but of course there is breach notification right now as a result of Bill S-4 from the last Parliament.
NDP
Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
Just to be very clear, when a breach happens, what is the law in British Columbia right now in terms of when notification has to be given?
Executive Director, B.C. Freedom of Information and Privacy Association
Do you mean by the public sector?