Thank you.
I'd like to thank both of you for being here. There's a lot of information here. What we really want to get down to is what the remedies are, what things we can do as legislators, because I think a lot of this is very alarming to our constituents and to Canadians.
I want to be sure that I'm understanding exactly what the problem is. You mentioned, Mr. Vickery, that data multiplies, so you can't actually prevent it, but you can contain it, and that these spills are happening all the time. This to me is a very bad combination. On the one hand, you have the issue of legitimate use of data. Let's say a political party is going door to door, and they run into somebody who says,“I really like your child care platform. I'm going to vote for you because of that.” They make a note of that so that the next time they do something on child care, they can let them know. Even if the person gives consent and says, “Yes, please keep me updated about that”, you've got that. Then that goes into a database. The issue to me is not so much whether the candidate goes back to the person and says, “Hey, look at this great policy we have”, but whether it is then shared, either accidentally or maliciously, with, say, Toys“R”Us, who says, “Ah, they're concerned about child care, therefore let's sell them toys.”
Is that where we're looking? Is that the problem, or is it vice versa, that Toys“R”Us might be accessing somehow this political data...or you're looking at what Toys“R”Us is selling to kids, or somebody on Facebook who shows they have kids, and inferring it? So it's the cross-purposes of data: is that where the issue resides?