Greetings from occupied downtown Ottawa. I have to say that while I would normally support the right to protest, I’m really concerned, tired of and frustrated by the so-called freedom protests that have been so incredibly disrespectful of my neighbors and my community.
Can you blame me? I’m supposed to teach this term at Ottawa University (which is immediately adjacent to downtown Ottawa) and many students and teachers just don’t feel safe walking to campus, given the incidents we keep hearing about that are just a little too close for comfort. So we are doing the classes by Zoom yet again, for now. It’s going alright, especially because a handful of students turn on their videos so that I’m not just lecturing to a black screen.
Right now, we’re covering the Privacy Act and public sector privacy issues more broadly. I made a sad joke today that my lecture notes haven’t changed much in the more than 15 years that I’ve been teaching the class because we don’t have modern privacy rules for the government. Of course I try to keep things fresh and interesting, but you get my point.
This is not to say that many public servants aren’t fighting the good fight, as I often see them trying to exceed legal requirements to do privacy properly via best practices. I tip my hat to them and figure they’ll be ahead of the game when our lawmakers actually update the law.
But it seems that instead of doing that, our lawmakers are busy holding hearings on how the Public Health Agency of Canada obtained nonidentifiable, aggregated location data from Telus to monitor how people were moving around during the pandemic, to inform and understand the impact of public health measures. The Privacy Commissioner of Canada is investigating the entire issue.
What has me puzzled is that instead of waiting for their officer of Parliament to finish the investigation, parliamentarians feel it’s necessary to hold hearings about the same thing simultaneously. So far, they’ve heard from the health minister, the chief medical officer and other PHAC officials, the privacy commissioner, and a handful of other experts, including Dr. Khaled El Emam, Dr. Ann Cavoukian and Dr. Teresa Scassa, and I think we can expect more witnesses over the next few weeks. I admit there are some thought-provoking issues arising in the discussions and it’s always interesting to see how our laws apply in situations that seize the public’s attention, especially when we’re dealing with values we hold equally dear, like public health and safety and privacy.
Anyway, it will be interesting to see whether their report will complement what the OPC is already doing on the file or if these committee meetings will inform a new iteration of draft private sector privacy legislation (that we can no longer call Bill C-11, by the way).