Evidence of meeting #7 for Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was used.
A recording is available from Parliament.
11:30 a.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Pat Kelly
With that, we will go next to Monsieur Villemure.
Mr. Villemure, you have the floor for six minutes.
11:30 a.m.
Bloc
René Villemure Bloc Trois-Rivières, QC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to thank the witnesses for joining us this morning.
I'll start by asking each witness a quick question. We can then delve further into the topic.
Mr. Lyon, was the process described by Health Canada in this case fairly opaque or transparent?
11:30 a.m.
Professor Emeritus, Queen's University, As an Individual
The process that was described by Public Health Canada....
I'm not sure that I grasped the question, really.
11:30 a.m.
Professor Emeritus, Queen's University, As an Individual
I don't think you can make a simple “one or the other” here. There are aspects of transparency, and there are aspects of opacity. Really, I think that question distracts us from the real issues in front of us.
11:30 a.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Pat Kelly
With that, I've just stopped your time, Monsieur Villemure. We have about five minutes left.
Bells are ringing. At this point, I will need unanimous consent to continue this meeting.
My proposal, if I do have everyone's consent, is to proceed and let Monsieur Villemure finish his round, and give Mr. Green his round. That will still leave us sufficient time to get to the chamber, for those members who will do so. If that's the will of the committee, then I'm going to proceed in that way.
11:30 a.m.
Some hon. members
Agreed.
11:30 a.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Pat Kelly
We will continue.
You have five minutes and eight seconds, Monsieur Villemure.
11:35 a.m.
Bloc
René Villemure Bloc Trois-Rivières, QC
Okay. I'll move on to another question.
Regarding the case at hand, several people have spoken to us about a worthy aim. You have all done so this morning. However, there's a tendency for some to downplay the significance of the risks or the choice of methods. Minister Duclos, like the Public Health Agency of Canada, seems to dismiss these risks out of hand. Yet they're real.
Mr. Lyon, you said that data collection is a form of surveillance. While we don't like the word “surveillance,” things are the way they are. I suppose that surveillance completely excludes the idea of consent.
11:35 a.m.
Professor Emeritus, Queen's University, As an Individual
Yes, consent is very difficult to obtain. Dr. Murakami Wood already pointed this out in his talk, and that seems to me to be exactly right, that the notion that we could somehow gain consent.... The notion of consent is really important. It's really significant, and there are particular ways in which it could be sought, as Dr. Parsons pointed out, but it becomes increasingly difficult to obtain consent in the current data collection, data analysis environment within which we're living right now.
11:35 a.m.
Bloc
René Villemure Bloc Trois-Rivières, QC
I gather that just because it's difficult to obtain consent doesn't automatically make it impossible to obtain some form of consent.
11:35 a.m.
Professor Emeritus, Queen's University, As an Individual
Absolutely not. There needs to be much broader public education, as it were, so that we understand what we're doing when we supposedly give consent and when we actually give consent.
Yes, there is far more to be done here.
11:35 a.m.
Bloc
René Villemure Bloc Trois-Rivières, QC
Okay.
Mr. Parsons, I gather from your remarks that Telus or BlueDot didn't seem to have considered the consent issue.
What are your thoughts on the Telus program in terms of surveillance?
11:35 a.m.
Senior Research Associate, Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto, As an Individual
As I noted in the full brief I submitted to the committee, Telus and Babylon Health have been in situations in which the Alberta privacy commissioner found that simply agreeing to a privacy policy is insufficient and does not constitute consent.
The Privacy Commissioner of Canada and the guidance on meaningful consent identify a range of activities that private industries such as Telus could undertake. To date, as far as I'm able to tell, none of those methods have been clearly undertaken. As such, information has been collected without meaningful consent or first being approved.
11:35 a.m.
Bloc
René Villemure Bloc Trois-Rivières, QC
Mr. Wood, you spoke earlier about whether there's a need for transparency and accountability. I think that all these measures are meant to maintain or increase trust.
In your opinion, could this case undermine people's trust in institutions to some extent?
11:35 a.m.
Director, Surveillance Studies Centre and Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, Queen's University, As an Individual
Yes. I think there are two reasons for this.
One of them is direct, in that the actions of the government itself, in this case, and Telus as a corporation do indeed lead the public to suspect that maybe something is wrong, and therefore decrease trust.
However, there are also indirect ways in which trust is being decreased here. I'm sorry to say it, but I have to ask members of the committee to take some responsibility here too—at least politicians in general, not individually. There's also a political aspect to this, where both media and politicians have been involved in hyperbole, an exaggeration, around this case for political gain. That's on both sides, by the way.
It doesn't help, either, when we get reportage that says 33 million Canadians are being tracked. People start to believe that it means their individual communications are under surveillance, when that is not the case. Some of the reporting and, indeed, some of the quotes I've seen from politicians have been very irresponsible.
There are different kinds of trust problems here, but certainly the government and Telus have also been involved in decreasing trust.
11:35 a.m.
Bloc
René Villemure Bloc Trois-Rivières, QC
I simply thought that the challenge at the outset was to weigh privacy against public health and to create a balance between the two.
Yet, the further we proceed, the more I realize that partisanship and public health are being weighed against each other.
Do you also feel this way?
11:40 a.m.
Director, Surveillance Studies Centre and Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, Queen's University, As an Individual
As we know—and those of you who are in Ottawa will know especially well right now—partisanship and public health are unfortunately in a kind of death struggle right now on the streets of Ottawa. I don't want to comment any further on that, but I will say that we have had a big problem in the last year or two with partisan understandings of public health priorities.
I don't think it helps, and I think it has played into some of the ways in which this particular scandal is understood.
11:40 a.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Pat Kelly
With that, we will go straight to Mr. Green.
I will suspend the meeting quite abruptly—or I plan to—at the end of Mr. Green's six minutes.
Go ahead, Mr. Green.
11:40 a.m.
NDP
Matthew Green NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I appreciate the opportunity for this intervention. Having these witnesses before us today has been really helpful.
I would agree; I'm less interested in fault-finding in this moment and more interested in finding systems-level and legislative changes to these symptoms. This case is symptomatic, as has been identified, of the larger current concerns under our Privacy Act.
What I'd like to do with the majority of my time is allow each witness about a minute and a half for their intervention to provide, with fullness, in whatever way they can, what they believe should be the reforms, improvements or key points, as it started to go down that line, on improving our Privacy Act. Your submissions will become, hopefully, part of the recommendations from this committee, and this is what I'm most interested in.
So, [Technical difficulty—Editor] Dr. Murakami Wood, and then go Dr. Lyon and Mr. Parsons. Whatever you don't add in here.... You can provide in writing whatever further remarks and recommendations you have to improve our Privacy Act, so they can be considered by our analysts when we open up the discussion on recommendations.
Go ahead, Dr. Murakami Wood.
11:40 a.m.
Director, Surveillance Studies Centre and Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, Queen's University, As an Individual
Thank you.
I'm going to completely defer to Dr. Parsons in terms of the specific reforms that might be suggested to the Privacy Act. He has made a much greater and more comprehensive study of these things than me.
However, I'm going to borrow the old 1960s situationalist slogan, “Be realistic, demand the impossible.” The impossible I want to demand is in fact the complete abolition of the existing Privacy Act and PIPEDA. I want to see an entirely new architecture for information, data protection and privacy to be built in Canada at a federal level—and maybe at a provincial level too, because we have wildly incompatible provincial legislation situations at the moment, as you all know.
That's my recommendation. Every time these kinds of things happen, at the base of the problem is the fact that we have this archaic and out-of-date system for understanding how privacy relates to society—
11:40 a.m.
NDP
Matthew Green NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
Thank you. My apologies for the intervention. I just want to make sure that Dr. Lyon and Mr. Parsons have an intervention. We have only a very short time.
Go ahead, Dr. Lyon.
11:40 a.m.
Professor Emeritus, Queen's University, As an Individual
I'm not going to repeat the same comments. Dr. Parsons really has the best ideas on the actual changes that are required. However, I also agree that we need to do something far broader.
I would like to recommend that we spend more time considering how these things are done in other countries. As I mentioned in my comments, in the European Union there isn't a question about whether this is or isn't surveillance. You start with the notion of surveillance, which is very broad. Then you recognize that there are different aspects to it and different kinds of harms that could result and different kinds of social benefits that could result.
I think looking at how other countries operate would be very helpful, specifically the European Union. More than one of us has mentioned the importance of looking at what is happening there, because the way in which the law is being reinterpreted for the present data-focused age is really highly significant.
