(Ottawa) The House of Commons Ethics Committee is expected to hold an emergency meeting later this week to investigate the Public Health Agency’s decision to collect data from millions of cellphones to understand travel patterns during the pandemic.
The House of Commons is still on the holiday break, but Conservative and Bloc MPs have called on the committee to meet urgently after it was revealed the agency was trying to expand the practice of collecting data for longer. of another year.
The first data tracking contract expired in the fall. On December 16, the Public Health Agency of Canada issued a new call for tenders to track cell tower location data nationwide between 1er January 2019 and May 31, 2023.
The notice specifies that the data must be accurate, accessible and quickly, as well as guarantee confidentiality and transparency. They must not contain personal identifiers.
Ethics committee chairman Pat Kelly, a Conservative MP for Calgary, told The Canadian Press he is “consulting with members of all parties and will hold a meeting later this week” to consider the implications of the fundraising. of cell phone privacy tracking data.
Last week, Conservative MP John Brassard wrote to Privacy Commissioner Daniel Therrien and asked him to investigate. Mr Brassard said the collection of data by the Public Health Agency was tantamount to tracking Canadians and raised many “red flags” over privacy.
On Monday, he wrote to Mr. Kelly to call for an emergency meeting of the ethics committee.
“It is vital that we do not allow the response to COVID-19 to lead to a permanent setback in the rights and freedoms of Canadians,” he said at a press conference in Ottawa.
He wants to know what measures have been put in place to protect privacy.
The Bloc Québécois spokesperson for ethics, René Villemure, made a similar request to Mr. Kelly on Friday and said that the committee had the power to demand the suspension of this call for tenders pending the outcome. of the investigation.
Mr. Villemure mentioned that the start of this process by public health just before Parliament stops for the holiday break “seems to him to be a process more opaque than transparent”.
Matthew Green, the NDP member of the ethics committee, also wants any further follow-up to be suspended during the investigation.
Mr Green said the collection of cell phone data was “an intrusion into the privacy of Canadians, who deserve to know what kind of information the government collects and plans to collect about them.”
A spokesperson for the Public Health Agency of Canada made a statement on Monday saying the agency had consulted with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner about every step of data collection “to ensure that the ‘access and use of mobility data follows best practices’.
The statement says the agency will only consider bids for the data collection contract “from vendors who meet the Government of Canada’s stringent security, legal, confidentiality and transparency requirements.”
“This means that subcontractors must demonstrate that the data they provide is anonymized, aggregated, cleaned and pre-processed by removing all personal identifiers,” the agency added.