Industry committee  I think it's critical that the Privacy Commissioner has order-making power. As I say, we have no indication here that we've seen any privacy commissioner with order-making power act anything other than sweetly reasonably. There is a question of will this not be heavy-handed, will organizations that make inadvertent mistakes be somehow characterized as bad players, etc.?

Industry committee  [Inaudible — Editor] ... useful around that qualification of what you are required to do in terms of consent is that it brings to light for the organizations involved that uses of big data, metadata, the kinds of data analytics that many people don't consider when they are looking at consent simplicitors.

Industry committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Again, my name is Micheal Vonn. I'm the policy director of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association. We are of course a non-partisan, non-profit society and one of the oldest and most active civil liberties and human rights organizations in the country.

Transport committee  Yes. The idea that Canadians would be denied the ability to transit that space because Canada, if it decided that it was unable to do so because it could not simply--

Transport committee  I'm not sure which particular databases I'm referring to in that interview. It certainly has nothing to do with--

Transport committee  Right. In order to make that answer complete, it would be very long. What I'm referring to is the push towards what's sometimes called e-government, or the horizontal government movement to integrate government databases. It has been an express push in the federal government, and it certainly has been an express push in the Government of British Columbia.

Transport committee  We would be most pleased to consult with our staff counsel, Carmen Cheung, who wrote this particular report. I'll ask if she has materials that she believes would be relevant that she would be happy to forward through the association. I don't have my colleague here to make that reference now, but I'm happy to look.

Transport committee  No. The nub of the issue here is that you are subject to a denial of permission to travel on the basis of nothing that you can know about and nothing that you can challenge before an arbitrator that doesn't exist.

Transport committee  To that concern there isn't a domestic one.

Transport committee  Not relative to that concern, but as I say, why the issue here would come before a Canadian court is because you need legislation in Canada that will fit with this. That's the conduit through which a Canadian court becomes seized of this.

Transport committee  I'm sorry; I have no insight into what the United States might choose to do in those circumstances.

Transport committee  It's an interesting argument. I'm not sure if it actually holds.

Transport committee  It also raises that point--why other countries don't consider this needful in terms of their security interests--as one aspect of this, and of course it raises the point about the exception. I'm afraid the exception of Canadian overflights domestically is incredibly vulnerable if the argument is supposedly that this is needful for security.

Transport committee  Of course, passenger information for Europeans who are coming to the United States is required. Our understanding—and again I'm not prepared to say that we have any particular inside knowledge, but this is according to media reports, and so on—is that the U.S. will be looking to branch out and of course to make its secure flight program applicable to many other countries, including members from Europe, but their Parliament is kicking back on this.

Transport committee  That is simply a dizzying array of matters to address. If I could first address the reputational point, I certainly did not bring myself before this committee as an international law expert. I specified that I was drawing upon our report in the UN Security Council's 1267 regime and the rule of law in Canada.