Canada’s political parties are in cahoots.
The Liberals, Conservatives and New Democrats are attempting to grant themselves the right to do what they want with your personal information — without your knowledge or third-party oversight.
The only people raising a stink about it are Canada’s independent, non-partisan senators.
“It received zero attention — nothing to see here — in the House of Commons,” Alberta Sen. Scott Tannas told his colleagues. “If we don’t do something, the public will not become aware of this — and the corresponding dangers.”
At issue is an amendment to the Canada Elections Act tacked onto Bill C-4, the legislation that gives most Canadians an income-tax cut and eliminates the so-called carbon tax. The measure — which received no study from MPs — makes federal political parties subject only to privacy rules that they establish for themselves.
Unlike businesses or government agencies, which must abide by federal privacy laws, there are no minimum standards. The parties are not obligated to ask you for your consent to collect your data or tell you what they’ve collected. They aren’t prevented from selling or trading your information, and they don’t have to give you a right to correct your information, or tell you whether your data has been compromised. They are not limited in any way from using your information as they see fit.
“I’m here to tell you that something is going to go very, very badly wrong if you pass C-4’s current text into law,” Matthew Alexander Hatfield, the executive director of Open Media, warned the Senate’s legal and constitutional affairs committee Thursday, after independent senators fought for the right to study the clause despite push back from Conservative senators and partisan Liberals in the upper chamber.
Hatfield said he’d recently met with some of the companies working for federal parties. “I assure you they do not talk about anything as basic as using personal information online or employing cookies,” he said. “They talk about their capacity to geotarget people so tightly, they reach only a handful of people in certain physical offices … They boast about being able to identify not just that someone is likely to vote and who they’ll probably vote for, but to determine whether that person went to a polling booth on election day and voted — and that’s just the start.”
In an era of AI bots that can create extremely convincing arguments and use vast surveillance data markets, Hatfield said, it would soon be possible to target every single voter with individual messages. “We are looking at a bill that will let each individual party set their own rules about how they will use this technology. It doesn’t make any sense,” he said.
Part four of C-4 is also backdated to 2000 to protect political parties from litigation arising from court decisions, like a ruling by the B.C. Supreme Court in 2024 that found federal parties are subject to the province’s privacy law.
The new measure not only protects parties from tougher provincial regimes, it exempts businesses acting on their behalf from provincial and federal privacy rules. It only obliges a political party’s privacy officer to state that the party is complying with its own policy for the protection of personal information — with no framework to allow the commissioner of Elections Canada to compel witnesses or see documents.
Witness after witness told the committee that the measures in C-4 are a significant departure from established Canadian privacy norms and a risk to democracy.
“There are no limits to the type of personal information parties and their agents or volunteers can collect,” said Sara Bannerman, the Canada Research Chair in Communication Policy and Governance at McMaster University.
“Political parties hold information now that is as valuable as the money they raise,” said Jason Woywada, executive director of the B.C. Freedom of Information and Privacy Association.
This bill, he said, “does not simply modernize electoral rules, it removes guardrails protecting the personal information of Canadians at a time when global experience tells us those guardrails are increasingly important.”
“The question is, is this about serving narrow, specific political actors, or is this about serving Canada and Canadians?” said former BlackBerry CEO Jim Balsillie, the founder of the Centre for Digital Rights.
Representatives of the NDP, Liberals and Conservatives, who worked together on the B.C. court case and co-ordinated their messages Thursday, urged senators to understand their need for one privacy regime rather than 13. But they failed to explain why they needed no minimum rules.
“Privacy regimes focused on commercial transactions are not fit for purpose when applied to political dialogue,” argued the Conservatives’ counsel, Michael Wilson
The Liberals’ lawyer Alex Levine basically told senators to butt out and acquiesce to the will of the House, because C-4’s part four “offers a rare cross-partisan point of consensus amongst major political parties in Canada.”
But independent senators, often deferential to elected MPs, seem willing to flex their muscle.
On Thursday, the committee voted to recommend to another Senate committee that part four be deleted or separated from C-4, and failing that, that the contentious part be subject to a two-year sunset clause, giving the government time to beef up the privacy regime.
Alberta Sen. Paul Simons told her peers it was incumbent upon appointed independent senators to exercise their unique responsibility and say, “My dear friends, in the other place, you made a mistake in regulating yourself in this way.”
“We’re now the chamber of sober first thought on this issue,” said Nova Scotia Sen. Colin Deacon.
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