Don’t bank on privacy
MAYBE STATCAN NEEDS OUR BANKING DATA TO FIGHT GLOBAL WARMING
Everyone suddenly burst out singing. One of those opening lines (Sassoon is your Google guide), once heard or read, never forgotten. But strange is the occasion on which it was memory triggered in at least one magpie mind. The prime minister was in full rhetorical aviation mode defending StatCan’s upcoming raid on half a million Canadians’ banking information — a deep, mass meant-to-be-secret dive into their personal privacy and day-to-day transactions — when he came up with a line that can make a serious claim to be the funniest thing ever said in the House of Commons by someone who wasn’t Herb Gray:
“When we restored the longform census as the very first thing we did, Canadians from coast to coast to coast cheered!”
Ah, yes, the famous ecstatic three-coast orgiastic cheer, only once before so explosively heard in modern Canadian times — following the deft triumphant moment of Paul Henderson’s goal during the historic 1972 Russia-Canada hockey showdown.
It would be too great a burden on our striking national postal service to ask readers to send in photos recording the day “everyone burst out singing” on the news of the long-form revival, so I won’t.
But we all know that the Henderson goal and the revival of the long-form census are forever paired in the emotional consciousness of the entire nation.
The truest measure of how outrageous or profoundly offensive a government initiative is, is how far its leader will travel into the badlands of absurdity and scalding irrationality in its defence. Mr. Trudeau would have been safer to fall back for explanation on the mass invasion of privacy with the Swiss Army knife of all causation (a prong for every need): that StatCan needed the information to fight global warming.
The difference between the dread long form and StatCan’s latest beaming of Sauron’s allseeing eye, is that with the former — under the threat of jail — a person makes it out himself. Which, we will agree, implies a consciousness of the action undertaken. However, as the vigilant Global News first reported, (a) the electronic trawling of credit bureau information, and (b) the upcoming search and seizure of half a million Canadians’ banking, credit-and-debit-card transactions, phone records and electricity bills, was organized without warning, announcement, acknowledgment, declaration or notice of any kind whatsoever.
StatCan was keeping absolutely private on its mass-scale dip into your privacy. (Scholastic tip — entry-level English courses might want to hang on to this as an easy glide into the idea of an irony so powerful that it shuts down the human brain.)
Mr. Trudeau’s other defence of the offence was that it was all in fealty to one of his famous catchphrases, his government’s passionate commitment to “evidence-based policy-making.” Evidence-based is understood of course to be in contrast to all previous governments’ embrace of less rigorous analytic tools, such as: séances, the daily horoscope, chanting under the midnight sun, the curvature of chicken beaks, seasonal fluctuations in Adrienne Clarkson’s eternal access to office expenses, and — by far the most reliable — the price of fish.
The evidence-based defence was most emphatically meant to offer contrast to that infamously policy-averse dilettante, a gadfly in government, Mr. Stephen Harper. Mr. Trudeau is on somewhat stronger ground here.
Mr. Harper’s aversion to the hard work of government, his scorn for real thought, his love of idle slogans, and most of all his temperamental hostility to the unexciting but crucial processes of deep reflection and careful judgment, made him a stench in the nostrils of all rational Canadians.
By 2016 Canadians were desperate for someone serious at the helm, a policy wonk, one with a hunger for data-mining, a master-student of deliverology, and a leader who would not shrink from uncaging the hungry tigers of Statistics Canada to feed at will and to the full upon the privacy of Canadians everywhere.
Such was the current which brought us a government that issues commands to the banks that effectively transgress those banks’ own pledges of protection and privacy, that offers its statistical bureaucrats stronger search powers than the Canada Revenue Agency (a surprise to most of us, I’d guess), and which does so without asking its citizens if they’re OK with it, or even telling them what’s going on. I suppose the feeling is, if you think you need the data for “evidencebased” policy, what matter privacy, consent or transparency?
This latter term is really the squad of flies in this particular ointment. For another of the Trudeau administration’s promises and priorities was to be the most open and transparent government ever. There’s a test for that pledge, too. About the only thing that takes longer than getting an oil pipeline built in Canada is getting a response to a Freedom of Information request for what the government is gathering about you.
There is not space to examine the great assurances of how protected this new data will be. There’s a tumid list of breaches of secrecy and government records for any who want to look it up. Files in dumpsters, medical records discarded, personal information of almost 13,000 public servants released — that sort of thing, trivial stuff. As for its virtuosity with computer handling, I remind readers that the Phoenix is both a mythical bird given to self-generation, and a joke of a computer system.
Those outraged at the casualness of privacy invasion, the feelings of violation — they are justified.
When a former statistician offers this as a rationalization for personal data collection: “... asking Canadians for consent is unworkable, because (of ) high refusal rates ...” I hardly think everyone’s going to break out singing.