Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee, for the invitation to speak with you today.
I've been studying public health surveillance from a sociological perspective since 2003, when I started my doctoral studies. Over the years, since completing my doctoral work, I've continued to write about surveillance in public health and medical care contexts.
As a sociologist, I tend to prioritize different questions from the ones public health professionals might when considering public health surveillance systems. I share public health professionals' evaluative concerns that touch on questions of efficacy, efficiency, utility, timeliness and so on, but as important or even more important to me are social questions about how surveillance or its effects might be experienced by people in their everyday lives.
I'm interested, for example, in whether people might be advantaged or disadvantaged by surveillance. In my research, I tend to ask critical questions about public health surveillance systems. Perhaps it goes without saying, but I should also stress that while I ask critical questions, I am not against surveillance. In fact, I participate nearly every week in the FluWatchers surveillance initiative, which is operated by the Public Health Agency of Canada. This is one of the surveillance systems that provides data for the COVIDTrends website mentioned by Minister Duclos in his remarks before this committee.
I believe that public health surveillance can be valuable and I wouldn't want to see the Public Health Agency's innovations thrown out with the bathwater, but I'd like to use my time here today to put one critical question about equity on the table for the committee's consideration.
Members of this committee have been asking vital questions about privacy and consent in relation to the Public Health Agency's mobility tracking work. In addition to my fellow witnesses here today and witnesses from whom I believe the committee is going to be hearing in the days to come—Dr. Christopher Parsons, Dr. David Murakami Wood, Dr. David Lyon and others—these issues are going to be well covered. I want to say that I share the concerns of these witnesses.
I want to add an emphasis to what they're saying and a focus on equity questions, particularly this question: Who may experience intensified risks or harms as a result of mobility tracking?
In her remarks before this committee on February 3, Dr. Tam mentioned that mobility tracking could be used to understand the efficacy of public health measures. She stated:
Mobility data at this kind of aggregated level can be used when provinces and territories or local jurisdictions enact public health measures to reduce contact rates or to ask people to stay at home, for example, to see whether those measures are actually working.
What would happen if these data were to show that people, for example, in a Montreal neighbourhood where I live, are not, in fact, staying home? Is it possible that these data would correlate to an intensification of policing or enforcement in that neighbourhood? I would like to know if the Public Health Agency of Canada is thinking about mobility tracking in relation to social scientific work on policing the pandemic, for example, led by Dr. Alexander McClelland, Alex Luscombe and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.
Because of such equity questions, I would like to encourage the Public Health Agency and the Government of Canada to be more forthcoming in their discussion of emergent surveillance and contact tracing technologies. I think I'm nearly out of time, but I can give you an example of what I'm talking about with reference to the COVID Alert contact tracing application, if members want to pose questions about this.
Let me conclude by saying that I'm speaking today informed by the previous research that I've done and not from empirical data that I've been gathering about this particular mobility tracking initiative. I'll ask the committee members to please keep this limitation in mind while considering my preceding remarks.
I'll stop there. Thank you.