Public consultation on the Privacy Act – Submission – OpenMedia

February 12, 2021

The Department of Justice
Government of Canada
Ottawa, ON K1A 0H8

Re: Modernizing Canada’s Privacy Act - Online Public Consultation

Dear Minister Lametti,

I am writing to you on behalf of OpenMedia, a community-based non-profit organization that works to keep the Internet open, affordable, and surveillance-free. We work toward informed and participatory digital policy by engaging hundreds of thousands of people in protecting our online rights. Our community comprises approximately 235,000 people throughout Canada.

Thank you for engaging the public around upcoming revisions to Canada’s Privacy Act. We welcome the opportunity to share public input to this long-overdue process. After considering how best to engage our community in the Privacy Act consultation process, we created a companion online survey that featured a subset of questions from the one featured on the Let’s Talk Privacy Act website.

We reduced the number of questions by over half, rephrased a few questions we found unclear, and have added a few that addressed additional reform options we consider important. More than 4,000 participants completed our survey and we’re proud to report that respondents came from every province and territory in Canada. All of the questions and responses, along with some demographic information, are appended to this letter for your consideration and use. We would like to take a moment to highlight some of the findings from our survey.

The most prominent finding from our survey is the massive support for increasing the regulatory role of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada in the public sector. Several of our unique questions centred around this theme:

Building on the theme of accountability, our survey results show that there is enormous public support for greater transparency measures from government when it comes to how public bodies handle personal information:

Our survey findings also show that Canadians support explicit consent being the primary mechanism for which public bodies collect, use, and disclose personal information:

Our survey respondents were also highly sensitive to purpose and context when it comes to the collection and disclosure of their personal information:

Our survey results indicated there is a clear public desire for harmonizing public and private sector privacy legislation, which would help to simplify the obligations of public bodies and private entities when it comes to the protection of personal information, along with removing some of the difficulties that arise when personal information flows between the public and private sectors, and delineating the regulatory role of the Privacy of Commissioner of Canada:

Lastly, the survey results show an interest in ‘future-proofing’ the legislation by providing a framework around the use of artificial intelligence. As previously noted by the data, this framework should be centred around principles of accountability and transparency:

We thank the Department of Justice for the opportunity to contribute to the consultation process and will make ourselves available to discuss our survey, methods, and findings. We are also hopeful that, in the spirit of transparency, the Department of Justice will provide the public with an anonymized version of the full dataset of their consultation responses, including to the online survey component. We look forward to the next steps of the consultation and to further opportunities for public debate and consultation as the department moves through the process of building a legislative amendment proposal.

Sincerely,

Bryan Short
Digital Rights Campaigner
OpenMedia

Matt Hatfield
Campaigns Director
OpenMedia

OpenMedia is a community-based organization that safeguards the possibilities of the open Internet.
OpenMedia Engagement Network // 1424 Commercial Dr - P.O. Box 21674, Vancouver, BC, Canada V5L 5G3 // 1-888-441-2640