Since the Carney government took power, it has shown an odd pre-occupation with preserving the power of federal political parties to use the personal information of millions of Canadians under fewer restrictions than those faced by practically any other organization in the country. It started with the quick introduction of Bill C-4, an “affordability measures” bill that buried provisions exempting parties from provincial privacy laws and substituted a weak system that applied retroactively to the year 2000. The Senate found the approach so deficient that it sent the bill back with a sunset clause requiring something better within three years, only for the government to reject the amendment and rush the bill to royal assent within hours. Now political party privacy is back in another bill, and the government is back to trying to shut down study and debate. The apparent hope is to pass rules that do not meet modern privacy standards and hope no one notices.
Post Tagged with: "c-4"
Still Not a Privacy Law: Bill C-25’s Political Party Privacy Provisions Fall Short Again
The government’s treatment of political party privacy has been one of the most dispiriting digital policy stories in recent memory. Last year, it buried political party privacy provisions in Bill C-4, an “affordability measures” bill, that required far less of political parties than of virtually any other type of organization in Canada. The rules were designed primarily to shut down litigation in British Columbia that opened the door to applying the provincial privacy law to federal political parties. Bill C-4 ensured that provincial law would not apply and, for good measure, added a clause making the new rule retroactive to the year 2000. The Senate found the bill so outrageous that it sent it back to the House with a sunset clause that would give the government three years to develop something better. But the government rejected that too and rushed the bill to royal assent in a matter of hours with virtually no debate.
Two weeks later, the government introduced Bill C-25, an Elections Act reform bill that includes updated privacy provisions for political parties and which dropped just before Parliament took a holiday break.
Government Enacts Political Party Anti-Privacy Rules With Bill C-4 Royal Assent Sprint
I’ve written extensively about Bill C-4 and the government’s effort to bury political party privacy rules that largely eliminate privacy obligations for federal political parties and apply the new rules retroactively to May 2000. This past week’s Law Bytes podcast featured Senate hearings on the bill, which ultimately resulted in an amendment to require the government to establish actual privacy obligations within three years. The government yesterday rejected the amendment and the bill received royal assent in a lightning-fast process.
Nobody Wants This: Senate Rejects Government’s Anti-Privacy Plan for Political Parties By Sending Bill Back to the House With a Sunset Clause
Faced with a bill that would leave political parties subject to weaker privacy rules than virtually any other major organization in Canada, the Senate voted yesterday to amend the bill by including a sunset clause on the privacy provisions that gives that the government three years to come up with something better. The change is designed to allow the new rules, which as the Senate heard repeatedly from experts and privacy commissioners are not real privacy rules at all, to apply immediately but expire in three years. This will have the effect of killing a B.C. privacy challenge that sparked the legislation in the first place. The bill heads back to the House of Commons, where the government can either accept the change and have the bill pass or reject the change and send it back again to the Senate. If it is sent back, the Senate is unlikely to oppose the privacy elements in the bill again.
Time for the Government to Fix Its Political Party Privacy Blunder: Kill Bill C-4’s Disastrous Privacy Rules
Just weeks after last year’s election, Mark Carney’s government committed not one, but two privacy blunders in rapid succession. First, Bill C-2 – literally the first substantive bill of the new government – buried lawful access provisions in an omnibus “border measures” bill that would have established unprecedented warrantless access to the personal of information of Canadians. Second, days later it introduced Bill C-4, which was framed as affordability measures bill but included provisions that exempt political parties from the application of privacy protections. The bizarre assault on privacy felt like an opportunistic attempt to insert unpopular rules in the hope that few were paying attention. The strategy was failure: the government ultimately introduced a new border measures bill with lawful access removed (new lawful access rules are expected in their own bill this year) and now a Senate committee which studied the Bill C-4 privacy rules has recommended that they be killed, removed from the bill, or subject to a two-year sunset clause.
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