Good morning.
The B.C. Civil Liberties Association is the oldest and most active civil liberties association in Canada, and privacy is a core element of our mandate. The association has received very few privacy complaints about the long-form census, and the small number of complaints we have received have been, in the main, focused on the involvement of Lockheed Martin and the implications of the U.S.A. Patriot Act rather than the nature of the census itself.
As a civil liberties organization, we are obviously concerned about the severity of the penalties that can be brought against citizens who do not fill out the census, and we might question the policy justification for some of the more unusual questions that have been included in the past. But while it goes without saying that the association welcomes a strong stance on citizens' privacy from the federal government, the focus on the census is concerning.
Firstly, the census is not even on the list of the serious and urgent privacy issues in Canada today. That list includes, for example, the federal government's Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre, or FINTRAC; the Canadian no-fly list; airline passenger data sent to foreign governments; airport body scanners; lawful access expansion of police surveillance of telecommunications; and centralized electronic health records.
Not only is the census an extremely unlikely starting place for defending citizens' privacy rights, what is likely to replace a mandatory census—that is, a voluntary survey supplemented with recourse to data mining public and private sector databases—is a genuine privacy disaster for citizens' privacy rights.
Although the association is not aware of a concrete proposal to replace the mandatory census, two themes consistently emerge in the discussion: the first, the voluntary survey, which has been alluded to; and the second component, which has received less attention, which I would like to draw your focus to, the taking advantage of so-called “administrative data” and other data sources that already exist.
The current census does have a clear privacy advantage in being completely transparent about what data is collected, whereas data mining and data systems integration happen without citizens having any idea about what personal data is being disclosed. It is effectively invisible.
The federal government has an expressly stated goal of integrating data systems. The push to interoperability within government data systems and between data systems of, in fact, different governments is relentless. Data systems interoperability is said to create efficiencies, be convenient, and benefit research, but of course, it also creates data linkages that facilitate the compilation of de facto citizen dossiers, which we suggest is a privacy Chernobyl in the making.
The growth of the database nation presents a grave danger to democracy. Proponents of government-by-database will say that citizens are in favour of the convenience of governments just extracting their data without all the mess and fuss of actually consulting them, but history suggests that this opinion is wrong.
In the late 1990s, then federal Privacy Commissioner Bruce Phillips devoted two years to an investigation of Human Resources Development Canada's longitudinal labour force file, which was a collection of personal data on virtually everyone in the country, comprehensive enough to constitute a de facto dossier. It drew data from across programs, including income tax, child tax benefits, immigration and visitor files, national training programs, employment insurance administration, the social insurance master files, etc. This early venture in joined-up government was condemned by the Privacy Commissioner, but more importantly for our discussion today, it was condemned by the citizens of Canada. The outpouring of public anger about the longitudinal labour force file compelled HRDC to dismantle the program.
The position of the federal government and most provincial governments is to actively promote database linkages for, in the current buzz phrase, “horizontal government”. This is a direct attack on citizens' privacy. Citizens' privacy relies on there being discreet silos of information that limit the use and access of personal data.
Commissioner Phillips' 2000 report explicitly stated that comprehensive information-gathering is appropriate for Statistics Canada, and not appropriate for government generally. The report said, Only Statistics Canada gathers comprehensive information about individuals but does so only for statistical purposes, not to make decisions about them. And Statistics Canada’s data are stringently protected; abusers can be fined or jailed.
In conclusion, simply put, if there is a need to collect comprehensive information about citizens—and our association does not take a position on this matter generally beyond saying that the justification must be compelling and the security and privacy protections of the highest standard—it is infinitely more protective of citizens' rights to have that information collected and in the custody of Statistics Canada, where the data collection is transparent and historically well protected, than to rely on mining data indirectly and invisibly. There is a critical loss of accountability when our data trails supplant us in our interactions with government.
Privacy is an inherently comparative analysis. We need to know what benefits we receive in exchange for diminished privacy and whether there are less privacy-intrusive alternatives to achieving the same goals.
Therefore, in our submission, it is not possible to assess the proposal to eliminate the mandatory long-form census without understanding the ramifications of what is being proposed in the alternative. We believe the likely alternative presents a much more dangerous situation for citizens' privacy than is currently the case with the long-form census, and we urge the government to present its alternative proposal in detail in order that a fair assessment can be made regarding the census and the privacy rights of Canadians.
Those are our submissions. Thank you.