My view—and it's still my view because it hasn't been demonstrated to be wrong—is that the Statistics Act says that the confidential information holdings of Statistics Canada, the information provided by Canadians and their organizations for statistical purposes, can be in the hands of only Statistics Canada employees. There is a provision in the act that says that Statistics Canada itself can recognize people from other organizations as deemed employees but on the assumption that Statistics Canada is meaningfully in control of their activities while they are in contact with that data.
I have argued from the beginning that the governance arrangements around Shared Services, which require us to transfer to them all these confidential information holdings, are actually inconsistent with the Statistics Act and are a violation of the Statistics Act because they are not, in effect, in any meaningful and acceptable way, deemed employees of Statistics Canada. In my view, that issue is still unresolved.
Normally when I raise that issue, the argument I get back from Shared Services Canada is that we have all these bells and whistles that keep the data safe. That's not the point. The point is that, by law, they shouldn't be there in the first place.