The Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia, David Loukidelis, sent the following letter to the Prime Minister on the subject of the federal Privacy Commissioner's Annual Report.

January 29, 2003

The Right Hon. Jean Chrétien PC MP
Prime Minister of Canada
Room 309-S, Centre Block
House of Commons
Ottawa, Ontario K1A OA6

Dear Prime Minister Chrétien:

I write in light of the annual report tabled today in Parliament by the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, George Radwanski.

Over the last year or so, your government has introduced a number of laws and other initiatives that place ordinary Canadians under unprecedented police and state surveillance. As I have acknowledged in the past, some of these initiatives may be warranted to combat terrorism, but a great number of them cannot, as I have argued in detail before, be justified or defended. My main concerns relate to the following:

• The Canada Customs & Revenue Agency is creating a giant, extremely detailed database containing personal information of all Canadian air passengers for surveillance purposes. I twice wrote to the Hon. Elinor Caplan last year and called on her to dismantle this unwarranted surveillance of ordinary Canadians, which is slated to expand to all forms of travel to or from Canada. I do not oppose use of such data to identify passengers for secondary screening or anti-terrorist purposes, but the database as it exists if far too open-ended and intrusive.
• I remain concerned, for reasons I gave last year, that Bill C-17 goes too far in allowing the RCMP and CSIS access to passenger travel information for criminal, as opposed to anti-terrorist, purposes.
• The Department of Justice's consultation paper on lawful access to e-mail and Internet data raises the prospect of relaxing standards for law enforcement access to the e-mails and Internet browsing habits of Canadians. The proposal suggests that e-mail communications be subject to a lower standard of protection than now exists for telephone calls, letters or other private communications in the Criminal Code. The Department has not produced any evidence that existing rules under the Criminal Code are inadequate for fighting cyber-crime. For that reason alone I oppose any relaxation of existing legal protections for Canadians.
• I note with concern suggestions in some quarters that a national identity card should be introduced. In a free and democratic society, citizens are generally free to circulate without carrying any identification, let alone a national identity card. I propose to make my concerns about this known in more detail to the appropriate Committee of the House of Commons.

Privacy rights and civil liberties are not absolute and I acknowledge that present global uncertainties may necessitate new strategies to protect citizens. Any initiatives to expand the state's power to put ordinary citizens under surveillance must, however, be demonstrably justified, and tailored so as to present the least possible intrusion into our hard-won rights and freedoms. Many of your government's measures, in my view, fail this crucial test.

Yours sincerely,

ORIGINAL SIGNED BY

David Loukidelis
Information and Privacy Commissioner
for British Columbia

cc: George Radwanski, Privacy Commissioner of Canada
Stephen Harper, MP
Gilles Duceppe, MP,
The Right Hon. Joe Clark, PC, MP
Jack Layton, Leader of the NDP
Provincial and Territorial Commissioners and Ombudsmen