Submission of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology on August 27, 2010 regarding the Long-Form Census.
Introduction
The BC Civil Liberties Association is the oldest and most active civil liberties organization in Canada. Privacy is a core element of our mandate.
The Association has received very few privacy complaints about the long-form census and the small number of complaints in the main focused on the involvement of Lockheed Martin and not the nature of the census itself. As a civil liberties organization we are obviously concerned about the severity of the penalties that can be brought against citizens who do not fill out the census and question the policy justification for some of the more curious questions that have been included in the past. But while it goes without saying that the Association welcomes a strong stance on citizens’ privacy from the federal government, the focus on the census is concerning.
Firstly, the census is not even on the list of serious and urgent privacy issues in Canada – a list which includes the federal government’s Financial Transactions & Reports Analysis Centre (FINTRAC), the Canadian no-fly list, airline passenger data sent to foreign governments, airport body scanners, lawful access expansion of police surveillance of telecommunications and centralized electronic health records. Not only is the census an extremely unlikely starting place for defending citizens’ privacy rights, what is likely to replace a mandatory census – a voluntary survey supplemented with recourse to data mining public and private sector databases – is a genuine disaster for citizens’ privacy rights.
Data-Mining
Although the Association is not aware of a concrete proposal to replace the mandatory census, two themes consistently emerge in the discussion. The first is a voluntary survey of some kind and the second is “modernizing” by taking advantage of so-called “administrative data” and other data sources that already exist.
The current census does have a clear privacy advantage in being completely transparent as to what data is collected. Whereas data mining and data systems integration happen without citizens having any idea about what personal data is being disclosed. It’s effectively invisible.
The Federal government has an express goal of integrating data systems. The push to interoperability within government data systems – and between the data systems of different governments – is relentless. Data systems interoperability is said to create efficiencies, be convenient and benefit research. But of course it also creates data linkages that facilitate the compilation of de facto citizen dossiers, which is a Privacy Chernobyl in the making.
Longitudinal Labour Force File
The growth of the database nation presents a grave danger to democracy. Proponents of government-by-database will say that citizens are in favour of the convenience of government knowing everything about us without all the mess and fuss of actually asking us. History suggests that this opinion is wrong.
In the late 1990’s, then-federal Privacy Commissioner Bruce Phillips devoted two years to an investigation of Human Resources Development Canada. Of particular concern was the HRDC’s Longitudinal Labor Force File, which was a collection of personal data on virtually everyone in the country comprehensive enough to be de facto citizen dossiers. It drew data from across programs including: income tax returns, child tax benefits, immigration and visitor files, provincial welfare files, national training program, Canadian job strategy, employment insurance administration, the social insurance master file, and more. This early venture in “joined up government” was condemned by the Privacy Commissioner.  But more importantly for our discussion, it was condemned by the citizens of Canada. An outpouring of public anger about the Longitudinal Labour Force File compelled the HRDC to dismantle the program.
The position of the federal government and most provincial governments is one of actively promoting database linkages, in the current buzz phrase, for “horizontal government”. This is a direct attack on citizen privacy, which relies on discrete silos of information that limit the uses and access of personal data. Commissioner Phillips’ 2000 report explicitly stated that comprehensive information gathering is appropriate for Statistics Canada and not for government generally: QUOTE “Only Statistics Canada gathers comprehensive information about individuals but does so only for statistical purposes, not to make decisions about them. And Statistics Canada’s data is stringently protected; abusers can be fined and jailed.” UNQUOTE
Conclusion
Simply put, if there is a need to collect comprehensive information about citizens – and our Association does not have a position on that matter generally, beyond saying that the justification must be compelling and privacy and secure protections must be of the highest standard – it is infinitely more protective of citizens’ rights to have that information collected by and in the custody of Statistics Canada than it is to, alternatively, continue any further down the road of “joined-up government”, interoperability and data mining.
Privacy is an inherently comparative analysis. We need to know what benefits we will receive in exchange for diminished privacy and whether there are less privacy-invasive alternatives to achieve the same goals. In our submission, it is not possible to assess the proposal to eliminate the mandatory long-form census without understanding all the ramifications of what is being proposed in the alternative. We believe that the likely alternative presents much more danger to citizens’ privacy than is currently the case under the long-form census.  And we urge the government to present its alternative proposal in detail in order that a fair assessment can made regarding the census and Canadians’ privacy rights.
