Many Canadians have welcomed the early moves by the Carney government to knock down interprovincial trade barriers and cut red tape for infrastructure projects to ensure Canada’s prosperity.
But while these measures demonstrate some progress in resisting Trump’s threats to Canadian sovereignty, the government’s actions elsewhere tell a bit of a different story.
Notably, a series of bills simultaneously eroding Canadians’ privacy rights across various domains will heighten, not reduce, risks to our national security.
The first concerns arise with Bill C-2. The Citizen Lab has that this proposed law contains vast data-collection powers that appear “designed to roll out a welcome mat for expanded data-sharing treaties or agreements with the United States.” Like so many of the Citizen Lab’s , this caution is likely to go ignored.
Bill C-4 is also unsettling. It enshrines the legal architecture for Canadian federal political parties to harvest personal data in precisely the ways that have upended American democracy in recent years — a worrying development as we potentially transform into a two-party system mirroring the United States.
Burying that proposed law in an omnibus bill while pushing it through the finance committee — and not the proper committee on Access to Information, Privacy, and Ethics — is a misuse of parliamentary procedure just small enough to evade the scrutiny of average Canadians.
Bill C-8 would drastically increase the powers of a spy agency that has consistently . The deeply respected Intelligence Commissioner — whose oversight the bill specifically bypasses — that the provisions in this proposed law will create the equivalent of unwarranted search powers.
Last fall, when civil society called out risks about Bill C-8’s predecessor bill laying out the red carpet for inappropriate data-sharing with countries like the United States, government officials dismissed those concerns; but at precisely the same time, they in those very kind of acts.
This broad erosion of our privacy rights has been facilitated by the government’s refusal to modernize key legal protections that are obviously out of date. We have consistently failed to update the Privacy Act, which governs how the federal government handles our personal information. That law has not been meaningfully updated since Mark Carney was a high school student.Â
This inertia extends to our privacy regulators, too. Various privacy commissioners have been conducting an investigation into TikTok that was supposed to finish, at the latest, 17 months ago. If this is our response to a company that our government actively considers a national security threat, what are we doing to prepare for unidentified threats?
Here we might stop to think about the more than 300,000 personal smartphone devices used by our federal public servants that remain largely unregulated. As the last Chief Information Officer of Canada : “We have a fairly open environment, in which about 90 per cent of Government of Canada devices allow downloads of whatever the user would like.”
Security risks to public servants’ sensitive data are not hypothetical. In October 2023, the company that moves members of the Department of National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces that required an alert to everyone with a relocation file at the company. But such is our level of concern about data security that, in February, the company’s contract at a value of $98 million through to 2032.
We have watched these incidents happen over and over again, while ignoring the urgent need for stronger privacy and data protection laws for the private sector. Here, too, we have been waiting well over two decades for reform.Â
As privacy reform stalls, highly invasive data collection and use is accelerating. The mining of publicly and quasi-publicly available data using AI continues to pose critical questions that must urgently be addressed.
The government’s own activities in this domain require better regulation, as the Hogue Inquiry noted when it setting up proper privacy guardrails on data mining practices. But like so much else in her report, this was ignored.
Many Canadians may feel that the erosion of their privacy rights poses no concern because they have nothing to hide. But the national security implications of these new bills — combined with the failure to address necessary gaps where they have been obvious for years — will leave Canada in a worrying posture for years to come.
It is time to recognize that better privacy for what it is: better security.
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