Federal Political Parties: At Odds with Canada’s Privacy Standards

Political parties in Canada are one institution over which individuals have few, if any, legal privacy rights. Individuals have no legal right to learn what personal information is contained in party databases, to access and correct that information, to remove themselves from the systems, or to restrict the collection, use and disclosure of their personal information. Parties can typically capture personal information from multiple sources, study it freely, and use it to target messages to your home, through email and text, and over social media platforms. A 10-year campaign to bring Canada’s federal political parties under the umbrella of comprehensive federal privacy law, and the oversight of the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, has been met with stiff and generally unified resistance. Amendments to the Elections Act in the recently passed Bill C-4 have consolidated a very weak regime of self-regulation, reflecting the disappointing reality that it is one set of privacy rules for government agencies and companies, and another set for political parties.  

What you will learn:

• What we know about the personal data processing activities of our political parties, and how new technologies, including artificial intelligence, are influencing political campaigns.    

• How the campaign for legal reform has progressed in Parliament, in the courts, and in the public arena.

• Why the status quo is untenable, both from the point of view of privacy rights, and of Canadian democracy.