Thank you for having me.
When I teach privacy law, one of the first things we do at the beginning of the term is have a discussion about reasonable expectation of privacy and what it is. It's always a great conversation, especially amongst the budding young law students, who are keen to say you have a reasonable expectation of privacy in everything. They want to say it's everywhere, but it isn't.
That is why you are having this discussion today. On the one hand we have our cellphones, and we've heard testimony already saying that obviously we have a great expectation of privacy in our cellphone. We've even had the Supreme Court say the same thing, that on our devices we have a greater expectation of privacy.
On the other hand we have the borders, and—no joke—the courts in Canada have been strong in their position that we have zero expectation of privacy at the border. That's something the courts have said. Here are a couple of quotes from an Ontario Court of Appeal case from 2006:
No one entering Canada reasonably expects to be left alone by the state, or to have the right to choose whether to answer questions routinely asked of persons seeking entry to Canada. ...The state is expected and required to interfere with the personal autonomy and privacy of persons seeking entry into Canada. Persons seeking entry are expected to submit to and co-operate with that state intrusion in exchange for entry into Canada.
We have these two competing forces, and I applaud the committee for trying to come to terms with it and come up with some meaningful recommendations. We're better off focusing on what we are doing here and some real solutions that we can impose here in Canada, as opposed to trying to figure out what to do to fix Canadian privacy rights in the United States, which is a pretty hard task to do from here.
Now the Privacy Commissioner has made a couple of recommendations in this respect, and I applaud them. For example, and Mr. Geist alluded to this, if Europeans have the privacy shield protecting them, why doesn't Canada have something similar? The starting point is the Judicial Redress Act in the United States, and the Privacy Commissioner has made a comment about this: it would be a simple fix just to list Canada as one of the countries that is afforded protection under this act in the United States. So it's not to say there is nothing that can be done to help Canadians while they are abroad; it's just that we have to recognize that if you are abroad, your privacy rights are not going to be the same as when you are at home.
The last point is let's concentrate on what we can do at home, and I won't reiterate it because I thought Mr. Geist said it really well: Privacy Act reform. Let's get our own house in order. This act is old, and it is in dire need of modernization. I'll end it there.