Public Safety committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, honourable members. I'm here as the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, and the relevance to the topic we're discussing today is that under the Privacy Act my organization has the authority to take complaints, to investigate, and to audit the perso

Public Safety committee  I think, as the honourable member pointed out, these are fundamental principles that are simply being reiterated and positioned for you, ideally, in the network world of modern intelligence sharing. I would think and hope that we could go forward with the necessary review and mec

Public Safety committee  They may be separate and aside, but they're also connected, as I pointed out. Yes, we can go ahead, but we have to leave a place for the important recommendations and what will come out of that report.

Public Safety committee  I think they've been on the table for a long time.

Public Safety committee  Could I add to that, honourable member, that it's not just who's on the committee, who the committee reports to, but what the committee can do. What are its powers? I think one of the reasons we have diagnosed that the public complaints committee against the RCMP has not been e

Public Safety committee  You hit on a very important point there, honourable member. One of the bases of not only the Privacy Act but generally fair information principles is that the information about an individual has to be accurate. That individual, in democratic societies, has to have the right to ha

Public Safety committee  What I'm saying is that we don't have to continue to think about them as always being mutually exclusive. That's the challenge of the society that we live in. We have to protect our citizens. That's probably the number one role of government right now—physical security, integrity

Public Safety committee  Yes, I'm aware, and I'd ask maybe Mr. Baggaley if he could talk to this. I believe Treasury Board is working on a directive of this kind, because members of my staff have been consulted.

Public Safety committee  By raising the issues and by raising interest in the various aspects of privacy--and there are many--parliamentary committees in the last few years have helped to make Canadians much more aware of their privacy rights and how they can be improved, so we certainly appreciate your

Public Safety committee  There are many components of fair information, which is part of our privacy. Our privacy can have many dimensions, but in terms of information about us, you go through the sequence of how the information circulates about us. One of the fundamental principles is that an organizati

Public Safety committee  Could I ask Assistant Commissioner Bernier, who is a specialist on the Privacy Act, to answer?

Public Safety committee  In my opinion, you have raised an important issue, namely, the type of categorization that both the police and people working in national security need to do. The message that I would like to give you today is not that any type of categorization is prohibited under the Privacy Ac

Public Safety committee  Under the terms of the Privacy Act, there has to be an agreement or an arrangement. In the work that my office has been doing in the area of national security, we have noted that, over the past five years, there often has not been clearly defined parameters. Rather, we have seen

Public Safety committee  Okay.

Public Safety committee  Yes, thank you. Mr. Chairman, my office isn't really equipped to evaluate the cost of these various recommendations. I believe the Treasury Board is. Perhaps the point I could make to this committee is that the opportunity costs are the important factor to look at. If we had i