Information & Ethics committee  It's the question of consent and ensuring that it is in fact meaningful consent, informed consent. We're very concerned about attempts to expand implied consent where you ought to have known that we would be using this. Somebody is saying “I agree” in order to use a service or a piece of equipment, and suddenly it's showing up in strange new places and having possibly very serious negative effects on them.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, or sometimes there's more.

Information & Ethics committee  Better than live.

Information & Ethics committee  As an organization we don't have an official position on the right to be forgotten. We are not intervenors in either the Equustek-Google case or the Facebook case. In our submission to the Privacy Commissioner's consultation, we did set out some conditions that are important and some concerns that we have about how this is currently being done in Europe.

Information & Ethics committee  My apologies first of all, but I'm strictly limited to your 2:30 deadline because we're having a bit of a problem out here in British Columbia with a privacy breach, strangely enough, one that affects both the public and the private sectors. So, I will have to go at 2:30. I will also try to keep my comments as brief as possible to allow the maximum time for questions.

Information & Ethics committee  The charter is more overarching. I'm a little reluctant to try to interpret somebody else's argument that I just saw in terms of the transcript, having read it once. I thought it was interesting, but I would really have to take a look at it. I can speak to our experience in B.C., where we do have a necessity test, and it does work.

Information & Ethics committee  There are independent remedies in the charter for a breach, and of course we have privacy rights in the charter in sections 7 and 8. That would be independent of anything to do with the actual Privacy Act itself in terms of something being necessary. When you have a charter breach or after you find a breach, you look at section 1 in terms of whether it is justified, because rights are not infinite and uncontradictable.

Information & Ethics committee  I think the Spencer case provided a very good guideline to us in terms of the importance of metadata and in terms of it being personal information that is protected. I know that some parts of the law enforcement and security communities would rather Spencer had been decided a different way, but that's what the Supreme Court of Canada had to say about metadata, that there is an interest in it.

Information & Ethics committee  It is confusing, and I think the government itself is confused, because in its backgrounder to the green paper on national security and Bill C-51, it talks about that very problem. At one point it says that because the act authorized disclosure, it satisfies paragraph 8(2)(b), which is the lawful authority exception, but the act says that it's subject to other acts that prohibit or restrict the disclosure of information.

Information & Ethics committee  I don't disagree with Madam Bernier, but I think that including the necessity in the act itself works along the same lines as the Oakes test for proportionality. It has that aspect to it, because that's the way we generally interpret things.

Information & Ethics committee  It's authorized by any law.

Information & Ethics committee  We presented yesterday, so I guess we're—

Information & Ethics committee  In our experience, companies that have the black boxes absolutely do not want anybody to know anything about it. A lot of times they're in a competitive situation and that's understandable, but I think there's a difference between knowing exactly how you make the box actually work and knowing what goes in and generally what the buttons are on the blender.

Information & Ethics committee  Part of it is that the government has a lot of purchasing power. A lot of companies want to sell to government. Their contracts are subject to freedom of information legislation. If they were dealing with another company, that would not be an issue for them. Some companies may not want to bid on federal contracts because they're concerned about the level of disclosure they would have to provide on the workings or the methodology of the black box—i.e.

Information & Ethics committee  We talked about this earlier in the context of the Access to Information Act. There are quasi-criminal penalties for interfering with access rights. What needs to happen is some sort of sanction so that people treat these as actual rights and not as helpful suggestions that you really shouldn't do this.