Hello. Thank you very much for listening to me, and yes, Set Shuter is my real name.
I come from a single-parent family. I put myself through school. I got a degree in sociology and then another degree in sociology, and now I'm a video engineer, filmmaker, and comedian. One of the things I do every day is data management. I work for a relatively large post-production house here in the city. Every single day, I deal with how much it costs to keep data online, how data is tracked, etc.
One of my biggest concerns as a taxpayer who is happy to pay my taxes to live in this amazing country, which I'm grateful to live in, is how much money this is going to cost, what data is being collected, how it's being collected, how long it's being kept, how it's being kept, and what the budgeting is for this. I feel that there are many other things in this country that we could be tackling rather than keeping all the data that was discussed earlier by many other people—random text messages, email, etc.—and that we don't necessarily give a second thought to. Maybe it's being stored somewhere. Maybe my tax dollars are paying for that rather than something else, such as education, day care, your salaries, etc.
In terms of recommendations, I studied surveillance when I was doing both of my sociology degrees. In preventing Canada from becoming a surveillance state, which is happening around the world, I think accountability with an oversight committee would be great, and an oversight committee not just of parliamentarians but also of legal processionals and civilians. I think it's very important that people like us have a say. Having the oversight committee include civilians may give another perspective that is sometimes forgotten when you are a government official or a lawyer. It's just another perspective.
I think transparency is also very important. We need to know what you're doing, we need to know how, and we need to know what you're keeping and for how long, etc.
As a young person in this country, I want to say that I understand in this time that we need to have a balance between surveillance and people's individual rights. It's inevitable now. We live in a society in which surveillance is everywhere. We can't get rid of it. That's not the goal anymore. It's balance: keep our rights and our safety. I hear you talk about people's safety. I don't think terrorism is as much of a threat as the media would make us believe. I would rather keep my rights.
At the same time, I understand that there are many things going on in this world. It's very complicated, with the technologies we have. Our laws are not catching up to how quickly technology is innovating. I know that, and I know that many people understand that. I appreciate your committee's trying to make changes to this bill, which should not have been passed in the first place by a previously, I would say, tyrannical prime minister.
Thank you.