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Annual Report to Parliament 2001-2002

The Privacy Commissioner of Canada

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Commissioner's Overview

It is my duty, in this Annual Report, to present a solemn and urgent 
warning to every Member of Parliament and Senator, and indeed to 
every Canadian:  

The fundamental human right of privacy in Canada is under assault as 
never before. Unless the Government of Canada is quickly dissuaded 
from its present course by Parliamentary action and public insistence, 
we are on a path that may well lead to the permanent loss not only of 
privacy rights that we take for granted but also of important elements 
of freedom as we now know it.  

We face this risk because of the implications, both individual and 
cumulative, of a series of initiatives that the Government has mounted or 
is actively moving toward. These initiatives are set against the backdrop 
of September 11, and anti-terrorism is their purported rationale. But the 
aspects that present the greatest threat to privacy either have nothing at 
all to do with anti-terrorism, or they present no credible promise of 
effectively enhancing security.  

The Government is, quite simply, using September 11 as an excuse for 
new collections and uses of personal information about all of us 
Canadians that cannot be justified by the requirements of anti-terrorism 
and that, indeed, have no place in a free and democratic society.  

As of the date this Report went to press, January 17, the Government 
has shown no willingness to modify these initiatives in response to 
privacy concerns. Whether the Government's awareness of the 
imminence of this Report will have brought about any change by 
the time the Report is tabled, I cannot foresee.  

I wish to emphasize at the outset that I have never once raised privacy 
objections against a single actual anti-terrorist security measure. 
Indeed, I have stated repeatedly ever since September 11 that I would 
never seek as Privacy Commissioner to stand in the way of any 
measures that might be legitimately necessary to enhance security 
against terrorism, even if they involved some new intrusion or limitation 
on privacy.  

I have objected only to the extension of purported anti-terrorism 
measures to additional purposes completely unrelated to anti-terrorism, 
or to intrusions on privacy whose relevance or necessity with regard to 
anti-terrorism has not been in any way demonstrated. And still the 
Government is turning a resolutely deaf ear.  

Specifically, I am referring to: the Canada Customs and Revenue 
Agency's new "Big Brother" passenger database; the provisions of 
section 4.82 of Bill C-17; dramatically enhanced state powers to monitor 
our communications, as set out in the "Lawful Access" consultation 
paper; a national ID card with biometric identifiers, as advanced by 
Citizenship and Immigration Minister Denis Coderre; and the 
Government's support of precedent-setting video surveillance of public 
streets by the RCMP.  

These initiatives are all cause for deep concern because of the 
intrusions on privacy that they directly entail. But they are even 
more disturbing because of the thresholds they cross and the doors 
they open. Each of these measures establishes a devastatingly dangerous 
new principle of acceptable privacy invasion.  

The CCRA's database introduces the creation of personal information 
dossiers on all law-abiding citizens for a wide variety of investigative 
purposes. Section 4.82 of Bill C-17 requires, for the first time, de facto 
mandatory self-identification to the police for general law enforcement. 
The "Lawful Access" paper advocates the widespread monitoring of our 
communications activities and reading habits.  

A national ID card would remove our right to anonymity in our day-to-day 
lives. The RCMP's video surveillance constitutes systematic observation 
of citizens by the police as we go about our law- abiding business on 
public streets.  

These are not abstract or theoretical concerns. If these measures are 
allowed to go forward and the privacy-invasive principles they represent 
are accepted, there is a very real prospect that before long our lives here 
in Canada will look like this:  

# All our travels outside Canada will be systematically recorded, tracked 
  and analyzed for signs of anything that the Government might find 
  suspicious or undesirable. "Big Brother" dossiers of personal 
  information about every law-abiding Canadian -- initially travel 
  information, but eventually supplemented by who knows what else -- 
  will be kept by the federal Government and will be available to virtually 
  every federal department and agency, just in case they are ever handy 
  to use against us.  

# Any time we travel within Canada, we will have to identify ourselves 
  to police so that their computers can check whether we are wanted for 
  anything or are otherwise of interest to the state.  

# Police and security will be able to access records of every e-mail we 
  send and every cellular phone call we make. Information on what we 
  read on the Internet, every Web site and page we visit, will likewise be 
  readily available to government authorities.  

# We will all be fingerprinted or retina-scanned by the Government. This 
  biometric information will be on compulsory national ID cards that will 
  open the way to being stopped in the streets by police and required to 
  identify ourselves on demand.  

# Our movements through the public streets will be relentlessly observed 
  through proliferating police video surveillance cameras. Eventually, these 
  cameras will likely be linked to biometric face-recognition technologies 
  that will match our on-screen images to file photos -- from such sources 
  as drivers' licences, passports or ID cards -- and enable the police to 
  identify us by name and address as we go about our law-abiding 
  business in the streets.

I am well aware that these scenarios are likely to sound, to most 
people, like alarmist exaggeration. Certainly, the society I am 
describing bears no relation to the Canada we know. But anyone who is 
inclined to dismiss the risks out of hand should pause first to consider 
that the privacy-invasive measures already being implemented or 
developed right now would have been considered unthinkable in our 
country just a short year ago.  

I am not predicting that all this will necessarily happen. But I am 
warning with all the intensity at my disposal that, in each instance, 
once the principle has been accepted and the precedent has been 
established, further intrusions on privacy are only a matter of degree.  
That makes them virtually inevitable.

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Full document at - http://www.privcom.gc.ca/information/ar/02_04_10_e.asp

Cheers, Steve..

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