Mr. Speaker, I am particularly interested in this topic. I have had the honour since 1987 to be associated with the program on strategic computing in the public sector at Harvard University. I have worked with a research group there headed by Dr. Jerry Mechling who is acknowledged to be one of the two most knowledgeable people in public sector information management in the world. It is a personal honour to know Jerry and to be able to work with him and with the team of faculty and researchers he regularly assembles from all over world to consider these issues of how our policy and use of information technologies needs to evolve in order for the citizens of the world to derive the most benefit.
The process we utilized was that three times a year we would call together senior practitioners from the state, federal and local governments in the U.S., from Canada and other countries around the world. We would then draw together experts from the vendor communities like IBM, Dell, Microsoft, et cetera, and from the user communities.
At a conference last year a cross-section of about 120 chief information officers and faculty from schools all over the U.S., with a substantial representation from Harvard, considered the question that is addressed in this legislation. We wrestled with the question and asked people how we should move this forward. We asked how we could build a sense of comfort to encourage the average person who may not be technically adept or who may not have a lot of familiarity or facility with computers to become involved in and adopt electronic commerce.
Since 1987 we have had a great deal of these research meetings. In the initial stages we always talked about technological issues. We needed better case tools. We needed to refine object embedding. We had to sort out the whole process for prototyping. We needed to constantly improve the way in which we built our various services. We needed more band width. We needed better routing.
The consensus from some of the most senior people in the field last year was that the problems in e-com at that point were 2% technical and 98% policy. The technical side of the networks had advanced to a point where there were still some technical problems. There are some issues that still need to be resolved and there always will be because this field is evolving incredibly fast. For the most part those issues were addressable.
What was lacking was a policy and legal structure that would allow us to take the next step. We asked what that question meant, what would a government or a business have to do tomorrow in order to take the next step. A whole list of issues arose which we worked down to a dozen.
The number one and number two issues were that we had no choice but to deal with the privacy regime and we had to do it proactively. We could not sit back and wait, let a bunch of disasters happen and then have the public rise up and push us to do it. Governments around the world needed to be proactive in putting in place privacy legislation which stated very strongly to everybody that this is important and they are going to protect it. There are a lot of ways to do that but that was considered to be a critical factor in allowing e-commerce to advance.
One of the participants gave an interesting example. This was IBM but it is typical of a lot of high priced consultants. He was part of an IBM group doing a workshop with technicians, people who are very comfortable, very familiar with the use of technology. IBM was there to sell its new commerce server. At the start of the workshop he asked the some 200 experienced practitioners, users of the technology, how many of them had bought something on the Internet. About three hands of the 200 people went up in the air. That is what he wanted.
He launched into a discussion about how the new server was going to protect them and how they were going to deal with cryptography and how they were going to deal with the protection of the persons. He went through a whole exercise and at the end of it asked with all of that, how many people would purchase on-line. One more hand went up. Even in that community, which was adept and comfortable and knowledgeable with the technology, there was still an emotional and personal resistance to engaging too much on-line.
The second point raised in that discussion was the issue of leadership. There is an interesting conundrum throughout the world and certainly we see it here. The technologies that are driving business, driving commerce, driving daily life are all technologies that were not in existence when most of the members of this House were in their training years.
When I went through university, the computer was something which sat in a building somewhere and I interacted with it with a series of punch cards. I am not the oldest member in this House. The first IBM PC appeared on a desk in 1980 when a lot of us were well into our working careers.
The people who have evolved into the legislative leadership positions, people in cabinet and senior administration, are people who have grown up and gone through life without the individual comfort with these technologies that someone growing up and going through school and university today will have. I suspect there are lots of examples. My son is four years old. He has been using his computer for a year and a half. My daughter at age six thinks nothing of accessing her Disney programs or other things on the Internet.
Our children are growing up with a completely different relationship to these technologies from what we have, yet we are the people who are in control of the decisions about what they can and cannot do. It creates a problem because some of the fears about the technology are the traditional fears about black boxes and mystical powers that may arise from them. I say that without wanting to be too facetious.
One of my jobs a few years ago was to train senior managers in data analysis on computers. I noticed something early on particularly with people in this age range. There is almost an equation. If someone does not know how to use a computer, then they are somehow stupid. I do not know how to use woodworking tools very well but I do not consider myself stupid. Yet somehow if a person cannot use a computer, a fear arises.
I remember once a gentleman was highly frustrated. He was having trouble getting the model to work and was having trouble with a simple keyboarding thing. I pulled him back from the computer and told him to relax. He said he could not deal with computers. I asked him what he did. He was a jet pilot, a brigadier general in the Israeli air force. He flew a machine every day that had nine computers in it and thought nothing of it. However, his interaction with that box angered him.
The reason I even bothered mentioning this is that there is an element of that kind of fear when we approach these technologies.
We are charged in this House, and I say exactly the same thing to our Prime Minister and others, with doing what we can to put in place all the protections that are necessary for every person in Canada. I frankly believe that our legislation is going to serve as a model for other parts of the world.
We must say to every person in Canada that we take their privacy seriously and that we are going to protect it. We are going to ensure that their information is handled as safely and securely as it is possible to make these systems function. At the same time we are going to say it is going to improve their quality of life.
I read the submissions by the four opposition critics who spoke on the bill when the minister introduced it. I was rather pleased. I think in all four of them we see a recognition of the necessity for doing this and an acceptance of the issue.
We see in it some traditional fears about change. Will there by disillusions? Anytime we produce a change in the market there will be some disillusions. People can create enormous scenarios about how serious those may be but that is an area that needs to be considered. I would argue it is also the reason we need to be proactive and move quickly rather than wait and have the rest of the world make these changes while we have to play catch-up.
On the issue of leadership I would point out, without wanting to be too self-congratulatory of the government, the Minister of Industry and his deputy Michelle d'Auray, the leader of the e-commerce unit.
We Canadians are modest and we tend to be almost a little shy about talking about how good we are. People in Canada are not aware of exactly how far ahead of the rest of the world Canada is.
John Manley since the day he assumed his office has been providing exactly the kind of leadership the professionals I was talking about want to see happen. Manley is the—