Information & Ethics committee  I'll add to what my colleague said. I think it might be useful just to flesh out a little an example of why when datasets are combined they can be way more privacy intrusive than the sets considered in isolation. I can give you an example from the private sector that helps to make this point.

Information & Ethics committee  That's a very broad statement, so it's tough to fully endorse it. I do think that information sharing by itself is not necessarily a bad thing. As you point out, obviously agencies need to be able to work together, and if you have two agencies with a different mandate, and one of them has information that is of relevance to the other's duty, certainly information sharing is not necessarily negative.

Information & Ethics committee  It's difficult, because I'm not viewing things through their lens. It's a little bit difficult to express that. I do want to echo the remarks of my colleague when she said that there hasn't necessarily been a proper case made for the necessity of new legislation. We've taken a position for improving the legislation rather than repealing it largely because, as a matter of advocacy, we generally look toward how to make systems better rather than toward repealing legislation entirely, because there's always a risk that the legislation is going to reappear.

Information & Ethics committee  I think the recommendations that have been spelled out, first by the Privacy Commissioner and then by Roach and Forcese, are a good start. I think that expanding the role of the Privacy Commissioner, as it appears is being done—particularly the move to order-making power, which I was ambivalent about—is a good step in this regard.

Information & Ethics committee  Proper oversight is key. I just mentioned how I don't necessarily have the full picture. It's important to have an oversight body that has access and can view the full picture. There can be a danger in terms of stovepipe oversight, whereby oftentimes the overall harm of a particular system is greater than the segmented harm of each individual component of it, so it's important to allow an oversight body to get the full picture and to have access to classified information that would let them fully see if the measures that are being taken are appropriate to the needs of the security agencies.

Information & Ethics committee  I would echo that there needs to be an independent civilian oversight rather than bundling this into the Privacy Commissioner. I'll start by saying what I should have said at the outset as well, which is that I want to also congratulate you on the reforms to the Privacy Act, which look great.

Information & Ethics committee  Thanks very much to the committee for their kind invitation. I'm sorry I can't be there in person this time. My name is Michael Karanicolas, and I am employed as the senior legal officer for the Centre for Law and Democracy, an NGO based in Halifax. We work to promote foundational rights for democracy, with a particular emphasis on freedom of expression and increasingly on privacy, given that many of the biggest threats to freedom of expression currently present in overly intrusive surveillance systems.

Public Safety committee  That's right.

Public Safety committee  I'm not sure that BillC-51 itself deals with encryption, but I can certainly answer that question. Think of encryption as being like a safe. You can put material into it and you can lock it, or you can open it and have the material accessible. When you talk about strong encryption, you are minimizing the ways in and out of that safe, as opposed to allowing for a different way of access or multiple different combinations.

Public Safety committee  That's an idea that's been floated quite a lot. There's been a lot of discussion about that in the U.S,. and it always comes up against the wall because there's very strong resistence from the technology community, which says this will weaken everybody's security. Generally the government has asked for it a bunch of times and backed down a bunch of times.

Public Safety committee  You can restrict it to search for particular information, but it will be difficult to craft a legislative formula forward that allows for warrantless access, I think, in the wake of the Spencer decision.

Public Safety committee  I work in Pakistan and Afghanistan, so I spend a lot of my time in countries where the terrorist threat is considerably higher than it is here. I wouldn't say I'm not afraid of terrorists, but having been in countries where there is a stronger threat, I would say that maybe my guard is a little lower when I'm in Canada.

Public Safety committee  That's part of the idea of proportionality in human rights law, which says that certain civil rights can be suspended in times of emergency—for example, if we were at war, with tanks rolling in the streets. You see that happening and it's not necessarily illegitimate, but when you suspend something like that for something like the threat of terrorism, which is an indefinite threat that we're going to be facing, then there are real challenges.

Public Safety committee  Yes, I think that's a problematic provision.

Public Safety committee  You're absolutely right that a lot of our advocacy—and I'll mention this at the outset—has been on access to information within Canada. That's been our focus, but as an organization, CLD works on foundational rights for democracy. We do quite a lot of work on freedom of expression, and digital security has been part of that.