Mr. Speaker, the member raises a critically important issue. On the narrow question of putting information together today to solve an important problem today, the answer the member has received is absolutely right. Prohibitions in the current Privacy Act prevent that.
Some of the prohibitions were written at a time that predated the existing Privacy Act. If we look back at legislation through the last half of the last century, it is literally peppered with prohibitions on sharing information because of people's inherent fear of the combining of information. The image the public has about government's use of information technology is a frightening one. It is “big brother”. It is the malevolent, all controlling government.
I was in the state of Texas last week talking to the e-government folks there. Texas has 529 separate statutes preventing the sharing of information. That is an attack that has to be made, not to reduce people's right to privacy but to restructure it in light of what the tools enable.
I have said publicly in many venues that our current privacy commissioner is wrong. His approach to the privacy legislation is wrong. He does a disservice to our government and to Canadians in his approach to the delivery of privacy protection. It is outmoded.
We think of these tools as providing a bit of fast exchange. However what the knowledge economy is about is by assembling information it creates new understandings of how things work by bringing information together.
The big changes that drove the big movements in large private structure organizations were based on an ability to all of a sudden see the organization in ways they could not before. They could now assemble information about the organization and extract knowledge from it.
Government prohibits the assembling of the knowledge. How the heck can we build a comprehensive view of what government is all about to enable change? It is a huge problem, and the member is absolutely right.
Do I think that kind of combining should take place when it is in the best interest of citizens? Absolutely, but the minister is quite right. It is prohibited under the Privacy Act, which is why the House has to get its head around the changes that are necessary in that legislation.