Information & Ethics committee  No one is above the law, so all Canadians are subject to the law, including criminal law, and can be the subject of investigations. I think the RCMP stated yesterday that, although that might be a possibility, there are internal mechanisms to ensure that the surveillance of a m

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, there should be laws regulating the sale, import and export of these technologies. Should they be banned completely? We see in this study that there may be rare cases when the public interest would make the use of such technology by the state permissible, but definitely ther

Information & Ethics committee  There's certainly jurisprudence by the Supreme Court on the notion of police independence, which defines the limits of political direction over the work of police forces. At the same time, I've suggested that there could be certain legal prescriptions on the police, for instance,

Information & Ethics committee  I'll answer with regard to the private sector. In the OPC's investigation of facial recognition, we recommend that the law be clarified, that the government, the state, cannot do indirectly through the use of the private sector what it cannot do directly. I think that's a big par

Information & Ethics committee  I think they are generally sealed. You're going a little bit beyond my area of expertise here, but they're certainly generally sealed.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, absolutely.

Information & Ethics committee  That's what we recommended for facial recognition, which led to the NTOP process. Yes, the OPC should be involved in ensuring that these processes are sound and robust.

Information & Ethics committee  The RCMP has a culture of applying the legislation as it stands. As was said, it's true the RCMP doesn't have particularly extensive privacy expertise. In the past year of my term, I've seen a willingness on the RCMP's part to improve its privacy knowledge, but that's not its in

Information & Ethics committee  Yes.

Information & Ethics committee  That's partly why I encourage you to make it a legal obligation to conduct PIAs and to include the purpose and content of those assessments in the act. There's a real risk here. In many cases I've seen, the assessments were a purely mechanical exercise, and that serves no purpos

Information & Ethics committee  The law is crucial here. We have in Canada policies that promote privacy, but sometimes, frankly, they are a little bit hollow. It's a check box exercise. For PIAs and privacy by design to be meaningful, to recognize privacy as a fundamental right, to ensure there is adequate enf

Information & Ethics committee  No.

Information & Ethics committee  That there be transparency in the procurement process is certainly a very good idea. It's necessary, actually. On whether the name of a particular vendor should become public, I would go back to the general standard: There should be transparency as a rule, except if methods would

Information & Ethics committee  It's a daunting question. Yes, if government officials see a vulnerability in a system, they should notify the creator or the vendor of the system of the vulnerability as a principle generally applicable and implemented, yes. That said, encryption is a challenge to law enforcemen

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, although I will say that in the recent year or so, there have been interesting developments—a policy on artificial intelligence, for instance—but over my term, there was not a whole lot of activity. There has been more progress recently.