Information & Ethics committee  I tried to surface this earlier, and I said that I think you guys need to be engaged in a dialogue with the public, because I had the exact same example with my health care records. I don't want someone to see them on any given day, but if I'm lying in the street dying, I definit

Information & Ethics committee  One of the things about the Estonian model is that it emerged after the Soviets left Estonia. They really had very few services, very few business processes in place, almost no infrastructure in place, and they really needed to build a state from scratch. I think the Estonians w

Information & Ethics committee  For me, there is not really a big choice here. The foreign actors are already very interested in our systems, and there is a long history of them penetrating our systems already. I believe that five, six or seven years ago, Treasury Board was very compromised, to a degree where I

Information & Ethics committee  I agree. I get very torn. I love this subject because this is the future I teach about. This is the endgame that we want to drive towards. Everything I'm trying to talk to you about today is the questions that I ask myself. What happens if we win? What happens if we succeed? W

Information & Ethics committee  It may, in the first instance, but there are two concerns that I would have following on that. The first is that people who are most likely in need of state assistance tend to be those who are most likely to be marginalized. I can actually imagine a two-track system, where those

Information & Ethics committee  A lot changes, such as the scale at which you can do things. Right now, things may be digital, but my ability to share information between ministries and identify who exactly is David Eaves, and figure out which file is about that David Eaves versus possibly another David Eaves

Information & Ethics committee  My fear is that the Privacy Act is actually impeding certain types of activities and innovation that we would want to have, and not necessarily preventing certain types of activities that we don't want to have. That's why I worry about the current state of the Privacy Act. I don'

Information & Ethics committee  It's a question of what the implications are of making that choice. We could say, okay, your social security number is now your unique identifier, so let's start putting your unique identifier against every piece of information that the government collects about you, maybe at th

Information & Ethics committee  I don't think that was me, sir.

Information & Ethics committee  My second grand point was about our breaking the social contract. I think some people don't trust the state, so they don't want to share information at all. Others think the state is simply not capable, so they're happy to hand over data because they don't think the state is actu

Information & Ethics committee  I will just make two comments. First, I would say that one thing that makes this topic particularly challenging and that I want to make sure we understand in this room is that we're talking about moving from systems that we call vertically integrated, in which you're dealing wit

Information & Ethics committee  All the constraints you have just mentioned.... The Estonians did have a greenfield, which meant that they did not have existing infrastructure, and it's much easier to build something from scratch than it is to try to basically rebuild a plane while it's flying in the air. I

Information & Ethics committee  But there, I worry that a single actor would have control over this type of infrastructure and they could use that control to leverage control over other parts of government to prevent them from launching services or force them to design services in certain ways that please them

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you. Good evening, everybody. My name is David Eaves. I'm a lecturer here at Harvard University. I teach technology in government and digital transformation at the Harvard Kennedy School. That said, I was born and raised in Vancouver Quadra, so I know Ms. Murray, who may