We live in an ever more digital world and 2022 will not slow down the magnitude of this shift. However, there is always a risk of skidding when you take a turn at full speed. This is just as true when it comes to the digital shift. In this second of a series of three articles: Quebec Arms.
Éric Caire officially took the lead on 1er last January of the brand new Ministry of Cybersecurity and Digital. A small promotion for the former Minister Delegate for Digital Transformation, who will now have the dual mandate of creating and securing a Quebec digital portfolio, while ensuring transparency in the use of public data.
In a world where cyberattacks are increasingly becoming a weapon prized by states seeking to harass their geopolitical rivals, Quebec is giving itself the tools to avoid being easy prey. Minister Cairo even goes a little further and does not close the door on providing the province with a team of computer security experts ready to act actively against possible opponents.
“I believe that the best defense is the attack”, responds to the Duty the former soldier when asked what he thinks of a possible “Quebec cyberarmy”. “I am open to all ideas,” he adds.
The creation of the Quebec Ministry of Cybersecurity and Digital is inspired in part by the Agency for Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security created by the United States government in the summer of 2021. This agency received the mandate from President Joe Biden to coordinate all non-military cyber defense efforts. It is independent of the Department of Defense and Homeland Security, but its director, Chris Inglis, a former National Security Agency (NSA), has inflows into its two sister organizations.
Minister Éric Caire will no doubt meet with federal representatives from the Treasury Board and the Communications Security Establishment, which share responsibility for cybersecurity across Canada. In Quebec, the law that led to the creation of his department grants him the powers to act within the government apparatus, as well as with companies doing business in the province.
“Bill 6 allows us to act with organizations and companies to ensure the cohesion of our cybersecurity activities. We will not tell companies what to do, but we can impose fairly strict protocols on them, ”he said. He illustrates this ability by recalling the speed with which the Legault government forced the closure of nearly 4,000 websites in just a few hours in mid-December following the discovery of a major software leak.
“Before, we would have had to talk about it for months in committees with decision-makers who know nothing about [technologies] says Éric Caire.
ClicSÉQUR finish
The Legault government has been promising it for years and we will see the first manifestations of it next summer: Quebec’s digital identity is coming. The first step will take place next June, when the ClicSÉQUR identification service used by government websites will be gradually replaced by something better suited to today’s digital reality.
ClicSÉQUR uses, among other proofs of identification, the bank details of Internet users. That too should go away. “People’s identity should not be private. This data will be held by the government,” says Éric Caire. Software tools will be produced for the public to use this proof of digital identification online or in-store. It will be safer than presenting your driver’s license to the cashier, assures Minister Cairo.
Merchants will also be better equipped to interact with this digital solution than they currently are to check the vaccination status of their customers. The VaxiCode Vérif application, which allows the QR code of vaccinated Quebecers to be scanned, is generally installed on the personal telephone of store workers, which does not fail to raise questions of safety, ethics and responsibility.
“VaxiCode is a lightweight digital wallet. There have been mistakes, it’s true, but a real digital wallet will not have the same dynamic,” promises Minister Caire.
Open government: yes, but…
A government that harvests digital data about its citizens will inevitably be held accountable for how it manipulates that data. Quebec will therefore have an obligation of transparency regarding their collection, aggregation and protection.
Under the changes introduced by the adoption of Bill 64 on the protection of personal information in Quebec, the Commission de l’accès à l’information (CAI) inherits the role of public watchdog vis-à-vis organizations that do not comply with disclosure and governance requirements in their own management of citizen privacy data.
To obtain certain data from the public sector, it is necessary to fall back on the Quebec law on access to information to which the CAI is subject. This is regularly criticized for being easy to circumvent by state employees wishing to conceal certain information. Both this law and the CAI are the responsibility of Éric Caire.
Will access to information be better when it is digitized? The Minister promises that yes. The government, he says, will publish in a structured way on the Internet all the data deemed non-sensitive that it possesses. They may be consulted by the media, among others, without having to make an official request.
The Minister estimates that approximately 80% of the data held by the government will be accessible in this way. He adds that government agencies will now have to justify why certain data cannot be disclosed, rather than the reverse. “There is a way to improve things. What we are doing now has never been done before. We have a game plan that is quite ambitious. »
Éric Caire recalls that in October 2020, Quebec joined the Open Government Partnership, a Washington-based NGO that brings together some 150 administrations around the world and whose objective is to improve transparency and reduce corruption by the adoption of new technologies. The first deadlines imposed by this partnership arrive in 2023.
In the meantime, there will be a provincial election next fall. This leaves very little time for the new ministry to make its mark. If he wants to forget blunders like those of La Place 0-5 and the bumpy launch of the VaxiCode application, he will have to act quickly. He may have to go on the attack.