Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise here today to talk about cybersecurity. It is a question that I asked in the House of Commons with regard to a number of incidents that have taken place. Most specifically in that time frame, the University of Calgary paid a lump sum of $20,000 for a potential breach and BlackBerry came public and showed that it shared personal private emails with law enforcement agencies outside of Canada. I asked the public safety minister at that time what the Liberals were doing to protect Canadian privacy. The response was astounding. It was that they would leave it essentially to the courts.
The good thing is that there has been precedent-taking pressure on the government, and it actually did have a Security and Prosperity in the Digital Age consultation that took place on cybersecurity. The reality is that it is a sleeper issue that is significant in the Canadian economy relating to privacy, data sharing, and also a number of different economic issues that are at play.
It is not just personal privacy that is at play here. It is also, most important, very much a fluctuating element of the economy that is going to be discussed in the future. It is quite significant for even investment considerations. There were 178 million personal records exposed by data breaches in 2015, so we have almost 200 million data breaches there, and the cost from the breaches is rising from basically $400 billion in 2015 to $2.1 trillion by 2019 according to an estimate by Lloyds and Juniper Research on the global issues of cybersecurity. We are talking about a trillion-dollar issue for the global economy right now, and 43% of those data breaches were caused internally so we know there are also practices in the workplace that are very serious that need to be looked at.
There are a number of examples that I can point to that are very important to the data breaches, and then there is no reciprocity back to the consumer, back to the private citizen, back to the employer, and to the agency that is serious enough right now. Today, there is an exposure that the web-dating site FriendFinder actually had 400 million user accounts or 20 years of customer data leaked most recently. There was also an issue at the University of Ottawa where a ransom was paid for the potential exposure of data there. WikiLeaks notably is another issue most recently being claimed as part of the American electoral system. Ashley Madison, another dating site, was breached causing lots of concern over some individuals. Then we have LinkedIn as well, which had 167 million accounts that were attacked.
What we have asked for is specific updating of Canadian laws as we move more to the digital age. It is important. When we look at personal commerce, our personal email exchanges, and we look at the use of services, there is going to be some expectation of trust and privacy and protection by the user.
Consider the seriousness with which the Liberals should be taking this issue. We pay for the devices we use, we pay for the services we are using, and we pay for the external type of activity that goes through our service provider. We should be provided with at least the opportunity of protection of services. BlackBerry, for example, exposing people's personal information and at the same time not respecting their rights as a consumer is one thing; then there are privacy acts altogether.