The government is set to introduce its long-promised privacy reform legislation early this week, with the recognition of a fundamental right to privacy expected to serve as a foundational element of the bill. Establishing privacy as a fundamental right would be a welcome and long-overdue development, one that many have called for and that was set to be added to Bill C-27, the prior attempt at privacy reform. Yet the framing is difficult to square with the government’s actual record on privacy, which over the past year has involved a steady stream of privacy-invasive measures that leave the fundamental rights rhetoric feeling more like virtue signalling than a genuine commitment. Simply put, the government cannot credibly claim to treat privacy as a fundamental right while actively undermining that right through a series of other bills and efforts to sideline the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.
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