“The past,” wrote novelist L.P. Hartley, “is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”
Although Hartley wrote those words in 1953, they’ve never been truer than they are today in our highly digitized society. Just 40 years into the past, for example, the adjective “digital” was often used to describe a type of watch rather than a way of storing information.
Indeed, in the Canada of 40 years ago, Canadians could not have imagined having an endless flow of digital information at their fingertips through their mobile phones. Nor, more importantly, could they have imagined that those phones would provide governments with an endless flow of information about them.
Despite these revolutionary changes, we’re still using the same legal framework to protect Canadians’ privacy as we used in the old country. Canada’s Privacy Act, enacted in 1983, still governs how federal institutions collect, share and store personal information despite the fact that the Canada of 1983 stored information on paper.
Clearly, they did things differently there. And using their laws to govern our use of information is like using rules designed for the horse and buggy to regulate the operation of the motor vehicle.
Modernizing Canada’s privacy laws is therefore imperative — and urgent. This was a point repeatedly emphasized in a report this week from the House of Commons Ethics Committee. In January, the committee began an investigation of the Public Health Agency of Canada’s (PHAC) collection of mobility data to determine mobility patterns during the COVID-19 pandemic.
There was no suggestion that the data was collected…
Schrems II Judgment Day
The Court of Justice of the European Union (“CJEU“) issued its judgment today in …
