We're very fortunate to have you on the committee. Welcome to the committee and to opportunities that I'm sure you'll take full advantage of in your new parliamentary career.
I have three brief reactions.
The first is around the confusion about the facts. As members of Parliament, we have a duty to avoid confusion and to avoid creating fear when there should be no fear. I mentioned earlier that those data were and are anonymized, de-identified and aggregated. Anyone who has had basic training in statistics knows that data that are de-identified, anonymized and aggregated cannot be used for personal information purposes. You don't need a Ph.D. in statistics to understand that.
The second thing is that we have worked with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner from the very start, following all the rules and regulations, and we keep working with and we value very much the work of the Privacy Commission.
The third thing is that this has not been secret. It was announced in March 2020. On the web since 2020, 1.7 million Canadians have been able to see those data on an application called COVIDTrends.
Canadians can see this on the WeatherCAN application or l'application météo. There's no secret about this. It's been public; it was announced; it's there. Canadians can look at the data, and we've been using it to protect the health and safety of Canadians.