There are a couple of different examples.
One is around a digital ID for government services. If you think about having a digital ID—and we'll talk about what that looks like from a citizen's perspective—the citizen owns that digital ID. They own that code. There's no master database where all the digital IDs are stored and it becomes a target.
What happens when you use your digital ID is that you actually validate that the ID you have is in fact you. There's another layer of protection in there called “multifactor authentication”. It basically is another factor to ensure that if I just pick up somebody's cellphone or I get access to somebody's digital ID, I also need to have another factor to ensure that assurance.
I want to go back a bit on that first question you had around that idea of “are we are exchanging lots of information among the provinces?” The goal is to actually have a very minimalistic approach in terms of how that works. From a citizen's perspective, one thing we're going to be doing is a consultation with Canadian citizens around how a pan-Canadian infrastructure could work and how digital ID is seen as being beneficial to citizens and to businesses.
As individual provinces start to build out their digital ID infrastructure, like you said, you can envisage a world where a citizen has a digital ID. They go in to get a licence for their car: “Can you show me your driver's licence?” Well, that can be pulled up in a digital wallet. You could have a credential that's your driver's licence. You could also have a credential that's your proof of vaccination. That would be attached to your digital ID.
If you think of one of the gaps today in a lot of provinces, you showed your vaccine credentials, probably on your phone, and then you had to produce a physical piece of identification to confirm that you were in fact Paul Wagner. Digital ID actually brings those two things together, binds them and creates that seamless transaction.
