I'm sure you can appreciate that I've been listening intently to all the interventions, and I have to say that I'm always amused at the suggestion that we rush on to other important points of work when the government side, I have to share, has been speaking for the majority of the time to this point.
I don't think the subamendment and the amendment are complicated. In fact, I think the idea of putting a pause on procurement while we wait to hear from the ministers in a lexical order makes sense. We would pause the procurement, we would do the study, we would listen to the experts and then we would form an opinion. To try to have them run together.... I'll note that had this not been flagged on whatever it was—Christmas Eve—and had we not had that emergency intervention, I believe there's a likelihood that the procurement would have gone forward without any scrutiny.
When I hear words like “anonymized”, I have to think that at some point in time the data is not anonymous. Rolling up information, I would suggest that, at points of the interception of this information, it is individualized. When I hear phrases like “trying to suppress [the] individual data”, I'm also.... These are all things that I think further my concerns. For me, I just want it to go on the record that my biggest concern overall, perhaps, is the commodification of personal information. It's not just about the processes through which we've gotten to this point, but the way in which we've allowed private corporations in the telecom cartel to take information that ought to be private and sell it. In this case it's sold to the government in this way, but there's a whole host of other ways in which private information is being bought and sold as a commodity, which I have a significant interest in.
I would agree. I don't think there's anything untoward about Mr. Fergus's subamendment. It states, as I understand it, that it is to the resolution of our committee work. To me, it feels a bit redundant to where Mr. Villemure's original amendment was, but I support both. I would just go on the record to state that I hope, given the feedback around the table of wanting to move forward on this work, this isn't something that we end up sitting through in a filibuster just to kind of grind it out, rather than moving forward on it. Hopefully, we'll get to a vote ASAP, and then we can get on to other business.