Information & Ethics committee  So we have Canadian courts saying they can do it. Our Supreme Court of Canada will presumably render its view as to whether or not Canadian courts get to decide for the rest of the world by asserting jurisdiction in that fashion.

Information & Ethics committee  There are. It's not so much a working group as it's an issue that I've done a lot of writing on. I appeared before the committee on international trade and was one of the panellists at one of the town halls that the government held on the TPP. There are some privacy provisions.

Information & Ethics committee  Those companies still have to meet Canadian standards if they operate in Canada or are collecting information, let's say in the privacy context, from Canadians. It's not that they get a free pass in that regard. It's that, if we take a look at the U.S. strategy, notwithstanding the claims that people like Donald Trump are making about whether or not the U.S. is a winner or loser on the TPP, the U.S. has long sought to carefully and closely align its commercial interests with its trade policy.

Information & Ethics committee  I have a couple of comments. First, I'm not particularly supportive of the right to be forgotten. I have seen it come up in a context. Actually, I sit on the board of CanLII, the Canadian Legal Information Institute, which makes Canada's laws and decisions available online. Those have been available online for a long time.

Information & Ethics committee  Unless you establish clear signalling and a prioritization within the act, you end up with what we have had for the last period of time, which is that privacy too often becomes an afterthought on legislation that has a significant privacy impact. On the legislative side, baking privacy into the process is important, not so much privacy by design, so to speak, as it's sometimes referred to, but rather ensuring that there's a recognition that considering the privacy implications of legislation is essentially part of the legislative-making process.

Information & Ethics committee  I'd start by noting that some of my writings around opt-in consent have tended to focus on the private sector side, where we have legislation in PIPEDA that opens the door to both an opt-out and an opt-in system. It seems to me that the opt-in standard is a more effective one from a privacy perspective, and I think leaves individuals with much better knowledge about what they're actually agreeing to and how their information is going to be used.

Information & Ethics committee  I'm supportive of that recommendation, and supportive of it for the same reason that I'm supportive of some of the shift toward thinking about access to information in a more wholesome manner that captures some of that as well, which I know the government has talked about. Again, when I think about some of the issues that I have focused on in the past, that divide between ministerial offices and departments is increasingly blurry.

Information & Ethics committee  I'll start with the typical lawyer response. I think it depends. I can envision a couple of scenarios drawn out of your particular example. I can envision a scenario where, let's say in Ontario, OHIP or the provincial Ministry of Health has reason to believe that an individual has been outside the province or outside the country for an entire year and thus shouldn't qualify for health insurance.

Information & Ethics committee  I'll start by saying I think it depends a little bit on who's doing the reporting. Let's start with law enforcement and some of those law enforcement requests. We know that it took many years to even get to the point where law enforcement was tracking some of this kind of information.

Information & Ethics committee  Thanks for the question. On that last bit, I think it's not necessarily an either-or issue. I do think there is unquestionably a role for this committee on some of those issues. For example, one of the other issues that I've been spending a lot of time on lately is the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the TPP.

Information & Ethics committee  David hits on a good point. In a breach-disclosure regime you do need thresholds. People who are ardently pro-privacy are going to say that if we adopt the lowest of thresholds so that just about everything is going to get reported, not only are there going to be significant costs associated with that to organizations, but the reporting and disclosure system is largely going to turn into noise from the perspective of individuals.

Information & Ethics committee  I do. Most of my thoughts, I must admit, are within the private sector context. I haven't been privileged enough to see what takes place within those internal discussions between the Privacy Commissioner and a government department. I do believe—and I guess I would differ with my colleague—that order-making power is necessary, certainly in a private sector context.

Information & Ethics committee  I can start by saying it's always a challenge to keep pace with technology, and we all, I think, recognize that the legislative process moves at a different speed than technology does. That's, I think, a given. Filling in where technology has raced ahead and there is a need for an urgent response, I think, at times will make sense.

Information & Ethics committee  I could start by saying that, interestingly, Canada itself, on the private sector side, for example, has been viewed as a model. That's not to say that PIPEDA is perfect. It is not.

Information & Ethics committee  There is definitely room for improvement there, but if you take a look at some of the competing perspectives on privacy, you see that the European perspective tends to adopt more of a human-rights-oriented approach, and the U.S. perspective tends to be somewhat more commercially oriented.