2022-23 Departmental Results Report (DRR)

Operating context

The OPC’s strategic and operational environment is constantly evolving, given that the technology is developing at an increasingly rapid pace. This offers encouraging and exciting possibilities for meeting many of the collective challenges that we face and improving the lives of Canadians. However, taking advantage of these new technological opportunities while finding the right ways to protect and promote our fundamental right to privacy will be a key challenge for Canada’s institutions in the coming years.

An important step toward meeting this challenge was taken when the federal government introduced Bill C‑27, the Digital Charter Implementation Act, in June 2022. Following its referral to the Standing Committee on Industry and Technology (INDU) in the spring of 2023, we shared our submission with the committee and published both our submission^{Footnote 1} and 15 key recommendations^{Footnote 2} on our website. The introduction of Bill C‑27 is a step in the right direction, but it can and must go further to protect the fundamental privacy rights of Canadians while supporting the public interest and innovation. We look forward to providing advice and supporting the committee’s work in achieving private-sector privacy law reform for the benefit of Canadians during its study of the bill.

Meanwhile, we have been looking ahead in preparation for this legislative reform. Should Parliament adopt Bill C‑27, we will be ready to take on the new responsibilities it lays out and provide support to Canadians and businesses as they navigate the new legislative framework. We were pleased to learn that, in the most recent federal budget, the government proposed temporary funding over five years to help us operationalize the new processes required to implement the proposed bill and to help us carry out our existing mandate.

With the end of the temporary funding that we received in Budget 2019, our office has faced some capacity and resource challenges. Over the past year, our backlog of privacy complaints older than 12 months has increased. We also continued to deal with the consequences of the underfunding of our data breach function. We have made great efforts to absorb the high costs of conducting breach investigations. However, due to the small size of the office, there was insufficient capacity to absorb the full magnitude of the breach growth we experienced. In addition, significant ongoing litigation before the courts, including a case involving Facebook, as well as the growing volume of unfunded government initiatives and new policy obligations that require concrete actions, contributed to our resource challenges and added to the complexity of our work. To mitigate these challenges, our office focused on process improvements aimed at greater efficiency, economy and collaboration.

During the past year, we expanded our collaborative work with other data protection authorities both domestically and internationally to forge stronger relationships in policy development and enforcement collaboration to better protect Canadians’ privacy and to facilitate commerce. Domestically, we regularly met with our provincial and territorial commissioners throughout the year to discuss common challenges and to ensure a coordinated response to privacy issues. We continued our collaborative enforcement work through the Domestic Enforcement Collaboration Forum, supporting joint investigations including Tim Hortons^{Footnote 3} and TikTok.^{Footnote 4} We also formed a number of working groups with our domestic counterparts to examine important matters including health privacy and digital ID. Internationally, we cooperated with counterparts to leverage resources, develop common policy positions, share best practices, and more effectively enforce privacy laws globally. Our participation in international fora helps our office play a leadership role on digital issues with the ultimate goal of influencing the adoption of higher standards for data protection around the world while enabling international commerce.

The past year has also been one of transition for our organization, with the arrival of Philippe Dufresne as the new Commissioner and Richard Roulx as the new Deputy Commissioner for the Corporate Management Sector. In addition, our office transitioned to the hybrid work environment as adopted by the Treasury Board Secretariat, implemented and leveraged new information management tools (cloud) and prepared for the potential new responsibilities we expect as a result of legislative reform.