This is meant to be based on evidence that we heard, and I'm trying to reflect on a single witness who spoke against this idea of the parties moving into the modern era and falling under some sort of privacy rules.
As we heard, Chair, from the current Chief Electoral Officer, there are none that parties are subjected to—zero. It should be of concern not just from the Canadian voter's point of view that we collect a lot of information about Canadians—not just voting intentions but all sorts of information—from the electoral lists. Parties are in the business of accumulating and cross-tabulating data on citizens to understand their voting motivations and their intentions. That's the primary objective of most political parties in their very existence right now, along with raising money and all sorts of other things.
The current examples in front of us from the U.S. and the U.K. should be important. We don't want to fall into a similar scenario in which an important election or referendum is affected because one or all of the parties' data systems were hacked. We also heard from security experts that our parties' data systems are not secure.
This is a clear and present concern. In the most recent Quebec referendum, for example, which was a very close vote, if after the fact—or during, but certainly if after the fact—it was learned that the Parti Québécois or the Liberals had serious breaches of their databases and that those voters were targeted by outside influences to vote one way or another on the question, you can imagine the fallout from that on whoever won or whoever lost. For a country like ours, which, as Mr. Dion used to say, works better in practice than it does in theory, we shouldn't have anything built into our political or democratic infrastructure that threatens our ability to conduct ourselves and to have the will of the voters expressed as cleanly as possible into the parliament they elect.
Marc Mayrand was joined by, of course, our Privacy Commissioner, who said, and I quote, “Nothing of substance in regard to privacy”, and a requirement to have publicly available data policy is a 'hollow” requirement.
The Chief Electoral Officer, whom members on the government side have referred to continuously in support of amendments you have made, said:
If there is one area where this bill failed, it is privacy. The parties are not subjected to any kind of privacy regime.
In answer to a question he said, “I think the time has come for that, and privacy commissioners around the country are of the same view.”
David Moscrop joined that conversation in support of bringing this in.
Victoria Henry from Open Media said that the “omission of political parties from privacy legislation is a concerning gap”.
I'm quoting there, as I will Dr. Dubois, when she said:
This proposed legislation does not include any form of audit or verification that the policy is adequate, ethical, or being followed. There are no penalties for non-compliance. There are no provisions that permit Canadians to request their data be corrected or deleted....
All that's in this bill right now, as committee members know, is the requirement that parties simply publish a privacy policy somewhere on their website. It doesn't say whether that privacy policy should do anything, and it doesn't say that if the party breaks that privacy policy as stated, there is any consequence.
That is meaningless. It really is, folks. If a Canadian challenges a party and says, “I think you've lost my data. I'm getting all sorts of calls from certain groups or certain people trying to sell me things, and I told you on my doorstep that I'm concerned about the environment”, or “I'm concerned about taxes”, there are exactly zero consequences contemplated under Bill C-76 for a data breach from any of the parties. This has to be concerning. This is way beyond right-left partisan politics.
This is simply about trying to address a gap in our legislative ability to run free and fair elections in this country. I've talked with the minister from day one about this. From having talked to some congressional colleagues in the U.S., who said, “If you do anything, fix this gap. You guys are naive; you're boy scouts; you think you're not going to be got after because you're nice people”....
That's not the way it works. Outside influences, inside influences, just looking to disrupt—again, imagine the experience we had in Quebec—a fundamental question going on within one of our provinces, not even to push voters, but to cast doubt....
As we've seen, Chair, when we're talking about election laws, one of the things we're always safeguarding is that on election night, when the results are released in each of our ridings and then the grand result is released for Canadians, win or lose, Canadians accept the results as being good, whether they like them or not—but they weren't tampered with and they weren't affected.
This is one of the things that maintains that assurance for Canadians. Without this, we're in a whole different world, because we collect an enormous amount of information about Canadians. I seem to be the only one around this table admitting that, but we all know it for fact to be true, and we don't have the proper protections, because data is so powerful these days. We watch it all the time. It's only going to increase.
This problem is not going to get better on its own, right? It's not as if parties are going to give up collecting data and are not going to get increasingly sophisticated, yet our security systems are not in place to protect what is so valuable to the functioning of our democracy.