Information & Ethics committee  Thank you very much. I'm delighted to be here and to have this opportunity. My name is Colin Bennett. I am a professor and the chair of the political science department at the University of Victoria. For 20 years I've been writing about this subject in Canada and overseas. I've

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you. To get to the point of this statute, the first point, a very important one, is that it is about giving individuals the right to control the information that relates to them. For 30 to 40 years now we've been hearing about the way personal information is captured by or

Information & Ethics committee  The CSA code is used as a template at the moment, rather than as an enforcement mechanism. One thing that could be done is more explicit recognition, probably in section 24, that the commissioner may require registration to that standard. It might also be more explicitly stated i

Information & Ethics committee  The commissioner has the power already to educate and to publicize. There are a number of issues inherent in your question, if I could break them out a little bit. The first has to do with public education. The commissioner can do that right now, and obviously that is constrain

Information & Ethics committee  That's correct.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes.

Information & Ethics committee  Well, you're right that it's not clear at the moment. It's not clear because there is that exemption in the B.C. legislation. The definition of “work product”.... I'm very familiar with the case you're talking about, because I have to declare that I did do some work for the comp

Information & Ethics committee  Excuse me, I'm from British Columbia.

Information & Ethics committee  I'm not getting translation at the moment.

Information & Ethics committee  Maybe I could say something from some of the survey evidence that we have in Canada about what individuals think about privacy. It is true that the vast majority of Canadians do not know about the legislative protections and do not know about the recourses that are available to

Information & Ethics committee  Yes. With respect, there's a good deal of survey evidence that suggests individuals are concerned about new technologies and their use for surveillance purposes when they do not see a legitimate public purpose. When I talk to audiences, including my students, and I begin to ask

Information & Ethics committee  Yes.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes. There is a good deal of analysis about the extent to which PIPEDA is costly in monetary and resource terms, etc. My own view is that the costs of being privacy unfriendly far outweigh those. The costs of having a bad reputation in the marketplace, of being seen as unfriend

Information & Ethics committee  There are plenty of examples, particularly with identity theft issues, where the stock of a particular company has plummetted as a result of bad publicity. It's difficult to quantify, and I don't have the information in front of me at the moment. I could certainly submit it to yo

Information & Ethics committee  Yes. On the issue of the work product thing, I'm not sure what I would have to add beyond what's in the Privacy Commissioner's paper on that. I'd have to go back to it. I can't quite remember. I think there were three or four different options that were included there, one of w