Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks with Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre in the House of Commons on Wednesday.DAVE CHAN/AFP/Getty Images
It’s unanimous: Federal political parties agree that they should be above the law.
In this instance, the laws in question are provincial privacy laws that set limits on how your personal information can be used and provide individuals with some rights to know what information has been collected.
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberal government snuck measures into a bill on affordability – Bill C-4 – that would exempt federal political parties from those laws.
Last week, lawyers for the Liberal Party, Conservative Party and New Democratic Party appeared before a Senate committee to testify that this sneaky manoeuvre is (a) no big deal and (b) necessary for the maintenance of Canadian democracy.
Both of those things are untrue.
Federal parties downplay privacy concerns in Bill C-4
On this matter, both Mr. Carney and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre are in a conflict of interest. So are the MPs in both their parties, and the NDP. They are serving the interests of their political parties and harming the interests of citizens.
Federal politicians have been failing citizens on this score for years. They have failed to enact federal legislation that requires some transparency over parties’ use of personal information. The political parties don’t want the public to have even a glimpse into their data machines.
That’s despite the fact we have seen the danger, through several cases around the world of political campaigners harvesting data without consent from social media and other sources, building profiles including individuals’ opinions, purchases, personal connections and so on to microtarget ads and appeals – most notably the 2018 scandal around British-based Cambridge Analytica.
We know that political parties in Canada put a lot of time and money into collecting data on the public. We don’t know much about what they collect and how they use it.
Given that gap, a few citizens used provincial privacy legislation to try to find out what personal information of theirs was being used. The parties fought it in a lower court in British Columbia but lost. Now the B.C. Court of Appeal is reviewing the matter. That’s the reason the Liberal government is legislating now.
Senators push back on bill exempting political parties from privacy law
Lawyers for the Liberals, Conservatives and New Democrats insisted that the important thing is federal parties should not be regulated by provincial governments.
“Is it Parliament, or provincial regulators? That is the most important question at issue here,” Liberal Party lawyer Alexis Levine told the Senate committee on legal and constitutional affairs.
In context, however, that’s decidedly not the question. The question is this: Who will protect the public interest?
Parliament has pointedly chosen not to regulate. There is already federal privacy legislation, known as PIPEDA, but federal political parties contend they are not covered by it. It would take only a small legislative amendment to explicitly include them. Instead, political parties have spent years fighting transparency in court.
“It is very clear what their intent is, which is to keep it lawless,” Jim Balsillie, the former Blackberry co-CEO and founder of the not-for-profit Centre for Digital Rights, said at the Senate committee hearing.
To their credit, senators have stepped up to ask a few questions on the issue – while their colleagues in the elected house of Parliament shamelessly try to give their own organizations an exemption from the law.
Eventually, of course, it must be up to elected representatives to decide the substance of federal law – even if federal MPs seem unable to see beyond the corporate interests of their political parties.
But senators can help them. They should strip the privacy-law exemptions – Part 4 – out of Bill C-4 and send it back to the Commons.
The House of Commons could certainly put that section back in the bill and send it back to the Senate for passage. A better choice would be for the privacy measures to be hived off into a separate bill so that they can be considered properly on their own merits, rather than being smuggled through Parliament.
They could even be combined with measures to finally apply federal privacy laws to political parties. That is, if our elected politicians can see past their conflict of interest.