Dr. Sara Bannerman (Professor and Canada Research Chair in Communication Policy and Governance, McMaster University, As an Individual)

Spoke on

Thu Oct 31 2024

Thank you inviting me.

Today I want to discuss the privacy measures in Bill C-65 and my relevant research.

Bill C-65 purports to provide a complete personal information regime for political parties, but it's far from complete. It fails to subject political parties to the 10 privacy principles that are understood as core to privacy regimes. It's designed to undermine existing privacy law that applies to political parties. In its current form, it's a privacy-busting bill, a bill that would undermine existing privacy rights for Canadians.

Bill C-65 has many missing pieces. It doesn't meet a number of fundamental privacy principles. It doesn't meet principle 2, that the purposes of collection should be identified. Instead, it requires only illustrative purposes.

It doesn't meet principle 3, that knowledge and consent should be given. Instead, it gives near blanket permission to collect and use any type of personal information. Most Canadians that my team surveyed felt that sensitive information like ethnicity, religion and social media information should never be collected and retained by political parties, or only with an individual's explicit consent. Bill C-65 would allow any entity, which could be data brokers, tech companies, people search or foreign entities, working with a party to collect and use any breadth of personal information while they're working for the party.

It doesn't address principle 4 on limiting collection. There are no limits on the types of personal information that parties and entities can collect. My team's work suggests placing the most sensitive types out of bounds.

It doesn't address principle 5 on limiting use. While it incorporates two new limits, it doesn't prevent giving personal information to third parties like social media companies or others; using personal information to profile electors; making statistical inferences about personality types, interests, opinions, religion, sexual orientation or anything else; nor any uses involving AI.

It doesn't address principle 6 on ensuring accuracy, nor adequately principle 7 on safeguarding personal information. Instead, it allows tech companies or any other entity working with political parties potentially total unbridled access and use, with little or no meaningful protection or oversight.

It doesn't address principle 9, giving a right of individual access for electors to know what information parties hold about them, nor principle 10, the right to make a complaint or challenge a party's compliance with these principles.

Bill C-65 aims, according to Kevin Lamoureux's speech, to “engage more people and increase the confidence” of Canadians in elections. My team's work surveying Canadians raises the concern that failing to subject political parties to the 10 basic privacy principles may threaten both of those objectives.

We found that, first, respondents were not aware of parties' data collection and the range of data they may collect, particularly on political views, ethnicity, income, religion or online activities and IDs.

Our second finding relates to engagement. We found that awareness of parties' collection may reduce electors' willingness to interact with political parties online.

Our third conclusion relates to confidence. We found that increased awareness of datafied campaigning goes hand in hand with growing concern as opposed to confidence about collection.

Finally, very few respondents saw data collection as important to the democratic process. If collection is important to democracy, our respondents were not convinced of that.

Bill C-65 seeks to undermine the applicability of a complete privacy law, B.C.'s PIPA, that currently applies to political parties. It seeks to undermine a leading B.C. privacy case that recognizes privacy rights for Canadians in relation to political parties. It seeks to displace those rights.

Bill C-65 would undermine privacy, engagement and confidence. It would facilitate parties' exploitation of electors' data without limits, transparency or consent.


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