I have to say that when I read Bill C-76 the fact that the parties were required to have a position at all on the sale of data was quite surprising. I like to think I read pretty widely on what political parties do, and I don't think there was a widespread sense that the sale of data was happening at all.
I think it does really matter in the sense that parties now have a lot of information about voters. We're in a world where that data has real monetary value. I do take very seriously the point that we want to facilitate and encourage conduct between political parties and individuals, so this may mean that whatever the privacy rules are in Bill C-76—or may come in the future—they may be very different from the public sector generally or from the private sector. I think that's appropriate. The trade-off, then, is that parties need to be using that data for political purposes. A part of the rules for registration is that the party has to prove they're actually engaging in political purposes and that they're not actually a commercial entity pretending to engage, pretending to be a political party. There's case law on that.
I viewed the issue as potentially broader than what you've suggested. What did occur to me is that perhaps parties—members of the committee may know better than I do—sell data to provincial or local branches of a party because you may not be able to make a non-monetary contribution, which the giving of a dataset may be. Selling data might be the way to actually comply with provincial rules. That would be one narrow exception where I think it would be entirely appropriate, but then selling to a private entity what's collected under the offices of a public political purpose still does trouble me.