I appreciate what you're saying, Mr. Ayoub, but it is relevant, because it's specific to government advertising. We asked the question, when the bureaucrats were here, about the analytics and who had access to it. We were told specifically that non-exempt staff working for the government had access to the analytics, but the public didn't. Obviously, therefore, there is information being kept.
We're talking about a Canadian who has both in the past and since the election been hired by the current government and used this information to meddle in the U.S. election quite significantly. This is a very large story. Assuming therefore that he's had access to the exact same information that the Canadian government has collected, it is important that the Privacy Commissioner come specifically to talk to the issue of Canadian advertising that we studied in committee.
There is a comment here from her. She says that Canada's federal private sector privacy law, the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, generally requires consent for the collection, use, and disclosure of personal information in the course of commercial activities. She goes on to say that organizations must identify the reasons for collecting personal information and ensure that these purposes are limited to what a reasonable person would expect under the circumstances.
I don't think a reasonable person in any circumstance would expect, by clicking on a government site—whether about accessing government services or fraud services or any information—that their information would be taken by Facebook and made available to the likes of Christopher Wylie for his use or for political uses.
Again, this was never settled in our study. It is very important, especially with everything that's going on and what this gentleman has done, what parties have done, and what the current government is caught up in based on the fact that it hired Christopher Wylie with taxpayers' money. It is important that she come and address the specific use of Facebook, Twitter, and Google by government for advertising, and the privacy rights of Canadians who are accessing these Facebook sites, etc. The government stated that it is almost exclusively using social media now for advertising.
I'm not done—