Chair:	* Rick Kasper (Malahat-Juan de Fuca NDP)
Deputy Chair:	* John Weisbeck (Okanagan East L)
Members:	George Abbott (Shuswap L) * Pietro Calendino (Burnaby North NDP) * Glen Clark (Vancouver-Kingsway NDP) * Gerard Janssen (Alberni NDP) * Steve Orcherton (Victoria-Hillside NDP) * Geoff Plant (Richmond-Steveston L) * Erda Walsh (Kootenay NDP) * Katherine Whittred (North Vancouver-Lonsdale L)
Clerk:	Craig James

* Denotes member present

[ Page 77 ]

The committee met at 3:09 p.m.

C. James: This being the first meeting of the Special Committee on Information Privacy in the Private Sector for this session and there being no Chairperson, I call for nominations for Chair.

G. Janssen: I nominate Rick Kasper.

C. James: Any further nominations? Any further nominations? Any further nominations?

I presume you accept.

R. Kasper: Yes.

C. James: There being no further nominations, I'll put the question.

Motion approved.

[R. Kasper in the chair.]

R. Kasper (Chair): Our second item of business is the election of a Deputy Chair. First call: are there any nominations?

A Voice: John Weisbeck.

R. Kasper (Chair): There being no other nominations, John, will you accept?

J. Weisbeck: Yes.

R. Kasper (Chair): I'll call a second time. Are there any further nominations? Third and final time: are there any further nominations?

I assume, John, that you accept.

J. Weisbeck: I will.

R. Kasper (Chair): Okay, I declare John. . . . Oh, we have a motion.

Motion approved.

R. Kasper (Chair): Okay, John.

Now our next item of business is the status of committee business. We have a bit of a report from the Clerk of Committees and our committee researcher. Go ahead.

[1510]

C. James: Very briefly, everyone has in front of them a copy of the terms of reference, which are identical to the terms of reference for the previous session. So you can take that if you like and refresh your memory in terms of the actual two points that are before the committee -- but not restricted entirely to those issues.

I can turn it over to Wynne, who can bring the committee up to date on what's been happening over the past little while.

W. MacAlpine: First of all, you've got three pages handed out. There's a draft outline for a proposed preliminary report. On the second page are the recommendations which were accepted and passed with Bill C-6 on April 4 and an article on health information, advertising and the public sector.

I'm just going to go through what the committee has done to date, by each meeting. October 4 was the first meeting, where the Chair and Deputy Chair were elected. At that time it was also agreed that public hearing dates for the committee would be December through January.

On November 4 the committee discussed their workplan. It was agreed to have preliminary briefings from the B.C. information and privacy commissioner and ISTA. It was also concluded to invite academics, consumer advocates and businesses to discuss the scope of threats to personal privacy by private sector information practices; what other provincial jurisdictions are doing to regulate information collection, use and disclosure by private sector organizations; the status of federal Bill C-6; and the extent of provincial jurisdiction over the private sector. Members considered inviting, as expert witnesses, Dr. David Flaherty and Dr. Colin Bennett. It was also suggested that the Clerk of Committees staff prepare a reading list to assist members in understanding the issues surrounding privacy in the private sector. The possibility of commissioning a research paper was also considered. It was agreed that the workplan would be put together by the Chair and the Deputy Chair with the Clerk of the Committee.

On November 18 there were briefings to the committee by Stuart Culbertson, Byron Barnard, Jacquie Edwards and Chris Norman of ISTA. David Loukidelis, the information and privacy commissioner, also spoke.

The committee published a call for submissions on December 4, December 5, January 8 and January 9. These ads also announced the committees' public hearings: January 20 in Vancouver, January 21 in Richmond and January 24 in Victoria. Rick Kasper was interviewed on CFAX Radio in Victoria in December and spoke about the committee and its work for an hour. Out of this the committee received 15 written submissions and heard from 13 witnesses. This doesn't necessarily reflect the level of public interest in the issue.

The office of the information and privacy commissioner receives approximately six calls per day from individuals on what they perceive to be private sector abuses of personal information. Many of these have to do with insurance companies, banks, credit unions and other credit-granting agencies. Many have to do with complaints from patients whose physicians have refused to give them access to their medical files. ISTA also recorded a good level of interest during its consultation process which led up to the discussion paper.

[1515]

Chris Norman, who is here, reported that the chambers of commerce and their business affiliates in Penticton, Kelowna and Nelson were enthusiastic participants. Consultations in Prince George and Fort St. John were also well attended. The committee may consider inviting witnesses to appear in another round of hearings. A list of possible witnesses was circulated to the committee in February, and ISTA has provided the committee with a list of its participants in the consultation process.

[ Page 78 ]

If the committee would like some background on IT developments in the health sector, they may want to invite representatives from the B.C. Ministry of Health's information management group and the B.C. health industry's network on the B.C. telehealth initiative and ISTA on what IT protocols and privacy-enhancing technologies, if any, have been designed to protect privacy in the telehealth applications.

Some possible research options are to have our office prepare an update on international developments, including the U.S., the U.K., Germany, France and Sweden. This could also include a review of the recent Quebec legislation on privacy for the private sector; a review of the submissions received by the federal committee reviewing Bill C-6; a comparison of privacy protection models; an overview of government health information initiatives and health information legislation federally and provincially in Canada; and an overview of database principles explaining terms like "data warehouses," "data matching" and "data mining." Conference notes from The New Wave of Privacy Protection in Canada, the conference held in Vancouver March 9 and 10, will be made available at an upcoming meeting.

As mentioned, the committee suggested during its initial discussion of the workplan that the Clerk of Committees staff prepare a reading list to assist members in understanding the issues, so that's another possibility, and the possibility of commissioning a research paper. The proposed preliminary report is another thing you may want to consider.

R. Kasper (Chair): You've heard the outline. Does anybody have any questions of Wynne?

G. Clark: I'll just ask one question, Mr. Chair. What's the time frame? The committee has been meeting for a while and has done a lot of work -- you in particular, Mr. Chair, and I commend you for it. I think the issues are becoming clearer. It's partly for my own edification, but I guess for the committee's. . . . It seems to me that we should put a fairly tight workplan together and try to produce a product. So I just wonder whether you had any thoughts in terms of what might be a reasonable expectation of time.

Then if we try to compress the time a little bit and say that we want to get something done by September -- you know, a finished product that could go into the legislative calendar, assuming there is a legislative sitting in October or something like that. . . . If that's the case, then we marshal our resources to meet that through a self-imposed deadline. For example, we may want to commission an expert to do a paper, as you suggested, and do that fairly promptly, then try to get all our ducks in a row so we can crystalize the issues and then have a real debate, political or otherwise, with respect to what we might put in proposed legislation.

K. Whittred: I really would like to put forth a slightly different perspective. I don't think this committee has been in effect that long. I believe it's only October since this committee was formed. Since that time I know that some of us have attended a variety of conferences enhancing our own knowledge in the area, but one of the things that I have learned is that I don't think that there is much understanding in the public as yet. I think that this was reflected very much in the submissions that we had from the public. They were rather sparse. There was a lack of submissions from a number of groups that we would have thought would have had a great deal of interest in this subject.

[1520]

Further to that, I think that the whole area of the health community -- and that was an area that, I must confess, I learned, when I was at the conference in Toronto and then again at the recent conference here. . . . I did not know that there was as much controversy in the community as there is. I think that that is a huge area that has yet to be canvassed. From my perspective, I would suggest that I do not think this is something we can put a very firm time line on. I think that we have a great deal of work to do and that there are a great many areas in the community yet to be canvassed before we can actually talk about producing a product.

G. Janssen: One thing I know, having been on this committee -- and some members were also on the previous committee to review the present legislation we have -- is that the two are much different. Right now technology and information systems are moving so quickly that I don't think we're ever going to be on top of it. So the question becomes one of either of the two arguments we have just heard. Do you deal with what you have now and have an ongoing committee or an ongoing review as technologies develop so that we can stay on top of this?

We've certainly seen. . . . There's a conference in Vancouver right now on the way that computer systems, information systems, are being used by the criminal element. I don't know how you harness that or put checks on that in place and how you stop personal information in that regard. Virtually on a daily basis, as we see, we are being bombarded by new technologies. In many cases our children are further advanced in what's happening than we are, and that is going to continue.

I have some sympathy for both arguments, but I think we have to act on what we know. Then I'd hate to have members of the committee meet on an ongoing, continual basis, but I'd also like to see if perhaps we could develop in our plan a way of trying to stay ahead of the technologies. We have to identify virtually every area where people's privacy is put at risk -- what is acceptable to be out there in the public domain and what is acceptable to be shared in that public domain. I suggest we either act on what we know or at least give direction to what we feel we should be doing, virtually on a daily basis, as we move forward.

G. Plant: I don't have any problem with moving forward as quickly as we can. But I think that with respect to Gerard's comments, the issue is not so much to try to keep up with technology as it is to try to get a set of principles in place that are independent of technology but will allow us to look at protecting privacy rights irrespective of technology.

My real concern is that I don't actually think we've engaged the public in this yet. I know that there have been some public hearings, and I'm sorry that I wasn't here for them. I haven't yet read the submissions that have been filed. But 13 submissions and however many people who spoke to the public hearings doesn't strike me as being a massively high level of involvement on the part of the public in this. I'd sure like to figure out a way that we could, without unnecessary delay, just get some better sense of where the public is on this thing. If that means trying another round of hearings or something -- I'm not sure -- or at least, at a minimum, stimulating debate by making sure that the people who are on that list that we got way back when are contacted for their

[ Page 79 ]

views. . . . I'm not saying that September is totally out of the question, but I don't think we're ready yet to start arguing about what principles we ought to be applying.

[1525]

S. Orcherton: I actually agree with both perspectives on how we deal with this. But I want to go back a little bit to when the Chairperson was on CFAX talking about this issue. I listened to that show, and it was actually quite amazing how many people started to call in, looking for information and asking questions. I think part of the problem we've got is that the public doesn't have a vehicle to grab onto that encourages debate and discussion. That's why we've had. . . . It's sort of a grey area out there. People have some notion that there are some issues around information and information technology. They're not sure how they affect them. They're convinced that they do, but they don't know how that is and how that occurs and how, in fact, they can grapple with it.

I'd argue that we should do something tangible in the short term so we can use that as a tool to engage the public in further debate. I think there are clearly more questions than answers out there right now on these kinds of issues that the committee is grappling with. I'd argue to do a bit of both: get some kind of report that frames discussion and debate, perhaps by September or whenever that's feasible, to start asking questions -- a discussion document, if you will -- and then carry on from there.

Really, the public hearings and so on are very lacklustre in terms of the public's participation. But I'll tell you that when you were on that show, Mr. Chairman, the phone lines clearly lit up. I mean, there were people waiting to talk about this issue more and more, because there were actually questions going out to the public about it. Right now we need the questions out there that people can engage in.

R. Kasper (Chair): One of the things -- I guess as an overview -- is that I would agree that there has to be a greater level of public participation. I was more than disappointed that those who had a specific interest -- i.e., the business community -- sort of overwhelmed the numbers, as far as activity from the hearings and also from correspondence to date. At the same time, you know, I think we have to have the basis of a document or a plan of attack to address the two concerns.

One is to generate more public involvement or discussion and perhaps a broader way of achieving written submissions from the public and also perhaps to contact ISTA and to find out how they generated their interest. Maybe a little more communication with specific business communities -- i.e., chambers -- might be an approach, and perhaps revisiting the list and specifically asking for some written submission from the same people that ISTA had a discussion with on Bill C-6, when they conducted a survey as to what they thought British Columbia should do.

I think that in the short term, perhaps myself and the research clerk and the Deputy Chair could put together a business plan that would achieve both things without losing sight of what our task is -- that is, to make recommendations on two specific issues under our terms of reference. We've got to keep that in mind. Then at the same time as we're putting together a plan to deal with that. . . . I think Wynne has given us a fairly good draft outline, which is the basis for a preliminary report. Perhaps that in itself can help generate more public comment, without reinventing the wheel.

I'm concerned about the fact that if the committee does come to the conclusion that we should perhaps have some form of legislation that may mirror the federal legislation, because of the three-year time delay as far as enforcement in British Columbia, we may not be able to get on any legislative calendar. I think there is interest from the ministry to hear from this committee and to see what those findings are in fact going to be.

[1530]

G. Clark: That was really my point, Mr. Chairman. I'm not interested in rushing through for the sake of rushing through or short-circuiting the process. I was just hoping that we might make a modest contribution if there is -- what I hear -- a legislative session in the fall. If we're not ready, we're not ready; we won't do it. But if it is possible, it would be desirable to have something that we could give to the House to do legislation this fall. If it's not possible, then we don't do it. But if that would be a target. . . .

I just have one question, Mr. Chair. I'm not sure how the committee works. But it seems to me if you wanted to try to, in my words, expedite the process a little bit, then I think you should engage one or more experts to prepare material for us, which we could put out to the public and for our own edification. I don't know if you need a motion to that effect or not, in terms of hiring people. I'm not sure.

Interjection.

G. Clark: You don't? The Clerk -- I can hear him -- is signalling that it's not required.

P. Calendino: It's in the terms. . . .

G. Clark: Then let me just say that I encourage that, if you. . . . I'm quite pleased with the committee, you, the Deputy Chair and the researcher. I just encourage you, then, to consider engaging perhaps even more than one on aspects of this, so that we could have a uniquely British Columbian perspective -- sort of leading-edge -- on the topics which the Legislature has asked us to look at.

E. Walsh: I was going to say also that I would really like to see a draft report in place in the fall. In the past, while we were listening more in the public sector with freedom of information as we went around the last. . . . I'm sure it feels now like it's been 20 years, but I know it's only been about the last two years that there was definite. . . . In the public -- in their mind's eye -- they felt very strongly too that they would really like to see some legislation on protecting personal privacy and also, though, on access to information in the private sector. We did hear that in the past, in the meetings and in the different discussions. But I'd really like to further that discussion, to see that -- a draft report -- in place by fall, so that we can in fact further our discussions with the public on this.

J. Weisbeck (Deputy Chair): I think everyone has made some very valid points here today. But I would like to sort of err on the side of caution. I think we should proceed very cautiously. I feel very uncomfortable with having legislation

[ Page 80 ]

as our goal, because I think, for me, that seems a long way away. So the idea of having some reports, getting the public more involved, would certainly be the way that I would like to see it happen.

So we'd probably have an initial report and deal with that and then ultimately give something to the House, possibly in the fall, if we are going to have another sitting, with the final report. But I would certainly like to leave the legislative part of it out of the picture for awhile. I just don't think we're ready for it.

G. Janssen: Well, if we're concerned that perhaps we haven't had enough public input, I've usually found that by the time you put legislation forward, you get lots of public input. So depending on how controversial you want to make that legislation, you're sure going to get the attention of the private sector and the public on any bill that's put in front of any legislature or parliament anywhere.

J. Weisbeck (Deputy Chair): But the public doesn't get a chance to debate it in the Legislature.

G. Clark: You can do an exposure bill too, you know.

G. Janssen: White Paper.

P. Calendino: We already put a paper out.

G. Plant: One other idea that we were talking about earlier might be for you, Mr. Chairman, and perhaps the Deputy Chair: co-author a sparkling little op-ed piece that could be sent around and see if the community newspapers pick it up, with the information that would be necessary for people who read it to write back. I'm looking for a way to avoid the monster travelling road show.

E. Walsh: I'll second that.

A Voice: I am too.

G. Plant: Gerard's idea and the idea of an exposure bill are interesting. I have two comments about that, although they're sort of off the cuff. First, if there's no public interest at all in the subject, then one of the questions we're going to have to answer is whether we recommend that there be any legislation. After all, there will be legislation whether we want it or not. If we can't wake the public up on this subject, then we may decide in our wisdom as a committee that there's actually a reason for it -- and that is that they don't care. I mean, that's a discussion we'll have to have at some point.

Secondly, I'm not sure that this is the subject for an exposure bill. I just worry that we could bring the wrath of all sorts of sectors of the public down on us quite unnecessarily, if we decide that what we really want to do is draft something that would set everybody's hair on fire, just for the sake of causing public discussion.

[1535]

E. Walsh: That would generate discussion.

G. Plant: So if you, Mr. Chairman, and the Deputy Chair can think of an efficient, effective and relatively expeditious way of generating a bit more public discussion, that would sure be a way, from my point of view, of advancing our progress.

P. Calendino: I actually like what Gerard is saying -- that if you do want public input, put something controversial out there, and everybody will flock to you.

G. Janssen: I didn't say controversial.

P. Calendino: If we're going the route of having an expert draw up a draft paper, perhaps when we go out to the public, we could indicate that this would be the basis for eventual legislation, which will also attract the public's interest. We advertised the last round of this committee we had. It was in all the major papers, and the interest was what it was. I'm not sure that just by putting an ad in the paper, we're going to get much more than that, unless there is something out there that really gets the interest of people to come and participate.

Aside from the special interests like the health sector and the chambers of commerce, I'm not sure that the public will be out there cheering for something that is going around the province or even taking submissions. There has to be something that attracts not only the eye but the fears of people.

R. Kasper (Chair): I just want to remind members that when we had our hearing on January 21, there was representation from the Retail Council of Canada. In the presentation we received, I think it would be fair to assume that the underlying message was that in British Columbia, we should get on with some form of legislation or regulation. It would be in the interests of both consumers and retail business, whether it's the brick-and-mortar type or the electronic retail that exists in the province. I just thought I'd remind members of that. I think what was presented was a fairly compelling argument as to why something should be done in our province.

After saying that, I think it would be appropriate, based on the time, to at least entertain a motion that would give both John and myself some specific instructions and to take into account what members have said, so that we both address a fairly tight time frame and establish a way to generate additional input. It can come from either the public at large or business interests -- I think both.

K. Whittred: I would agree with what you just said, but what I want to add to the discussion is to simply point out to this committee that there was not a broad response to our public hearings that were held in January. Further to that, there was a private conference held at about the same time -- a little bit later; I think it was actually in March -- where there were several hundred people who paid several hundred dollars to go to this conference, which proves to me that there is an appetite in the public for this discussion.

G. Clark: They just don't want us to be part of it.

K. Whittred: That could in fact be. . .

G. Clark: There's a message there, I think.

[1540]

K. Whittred: . . .the case. Alternatively, we have not harnessed that energy. We as a committee have not harnessed the

[ Page 81 ]

energy which is obviously in the community. I think that all of the suggestions that have been given are good ones. But regardless of what we do in terms of a workplan, which we must have, I think we must harness, one way or another, the public response that is out there.

G. Clark: How do you suggest. . . ?

G. Plant: I move that we authorize the Chair and the Deputy Chair to design a more specific, detailed workplan for the committee, taking into the account -- to the extent that they consider appropriate -- the comments made by members during the discussion we've just had.

R. Kasper (Chair): Questions? Any more comments?

Motion approved.

R. Kasper (Chair): Is there any other business? Motion to adjourn.

The committee adjourned at 3:41 p.m.

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