Thank you.
I'm going to take 10 seconds of my time to correct the presentation that was made of me. I've been at McGill University for 10 years. I'm in the faculty of law and in the department of philosophy at McGill University.
I'm not an expert on privacy. My work has focused on a number of areas, but two that are significant or relevant to our present discussions are, on the one hand, the justification and the limits on the justification of rights limitations in a liberal democracy. What processes and arguments can be put forward in order to justify limiting standard liberal democratic rights and freedoms? I have done that across a wide range of rights, including religious rights. How do we justify the limitation of religious freedoms?
The other aspect of my work that is relevant to our discussions today has to do with the conditions of trust in government. What are the conditions? How does government make itself trustworthy, which is probably the most important question, and what are the mechanisms through which it can, in a legitimate manner, elicit the trust of the population?
There are relevant things to say in both those domains, and I'll say them quite briefly.
I live in Quebec, and my perspective is probably coloured by that fact. In general, there has been a kind of process in Quebec of what I would call armchair proportionality testing that has occurred in a fairly regular way, where the government has imposed upon itself to present to the population justifications of the fairly substantial restrictions that it has imposed on people's freedoms and rights, mobility rights, and rights of association. It has often experienced push-back, when it's been felt that either it hasn't shown there was enough evidence to prove that the restriction was one that was necessary to achieve the goal, or that perhaps it was overly restrictive, given the achievements of the goal.
There is a kind of parallel between the sort of formal demonstration of proportionality one finds, for example, in the Oakes test, and the kind of garden-variety proportionality testing that makes it the case that the population looks at restrictions that have been put in place, and says, “Okay, we may not agree totally, but at least there is an attempt at being transparent and public about these restrictions.”
Here's where I think data tracking is a problem: we are not dealing with restrictions. We are not dealing with measures that restrict the ability of Canadians to move around or to associate. Surveillance is relatively invisible, in that the objective is not to restrict our activity, but rather to measure it. The pressure on the government to justify surveillance is not as high as for a restriction. Obviously, when someone is told that they can no longer take part in a particular activity, they will demand a justification.
I think that the government may be tempted to not provide a justification, but it should resist that temptation. If it isn't open and transparent about the surveillance objectives and limits, whether they are limits in time or limits on the type of data being collected, the information risks coming out in a newspaper article and triggering distrust in Canadians. However, this distrust may be without cause. If the government had simply provided the same type of justification that it provides when it imposes restrictions, it is highly likely that the issue of trust and distrust would not have arisen.
In my opinion, that's the difficulty in this current context. There needs to be reflection not only about the measures that federal and provincial governments must take to justify their restrictions, but also about the measures that they must take to ensure that they don't trigger distrust among Canadians.
I will make a comment to the government that was made by a committee member when talking about the general public. If the government has nothing to hide about how it wants to use the data, why isn't it open and transparent? Why doesn't it get ahead of the issue by telling the media and Canadians its intentions and the specific and circumscribed methods that it will use to collect the data?
I'll stop there because I'm probably out of time.
I look forward to your questions.