PACC President Sharon Polsky MAPP appeared today before the House of Commons’ Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security to take part in the Committee’s study of Bill C-26, An Act respecting cyber security, amending the telecommunications act and making consequential amendments to other acts.
The Bill provides sweeping powers to compel information sharing, but without the necessary checks and balances that are a hallmark of democracy. The broad powers will facilitate unsupervised collection, use, and broad disclosure of personal information — threatening individuals’ privacy and hampering organizations’s ability to comply with privacy laws or provide accurate responses to access-to-information requests.
Protecting the nation’s critical infrastructure is important but, as Ms Polsky said in her remarks, the current vague language of Bill C-26 opens the door to companies being given unreasonable orders to spy on or deny service to any person, company, or group whose conduct or commentary the government deems a threat to the security of Canada. Allowing Bill C-26 to become law in its current form — and granting elected representatives and unelected bureaucrats the overbroad and unaccountable authority — will further undermine public trust in the government, public service, and federal institutions.
