cover image: 2023-05-19 Bill C-47 LCJC Submission (English)

20.500.12592/7rg291

2023-05-19 Bill C-47 LCJC Submission (English)

19 May 2023

Background The Canada Elections Act sets out how federal political parties can collect, use, and distribute voter information.1 Under the act, political parties must “adopt a policy for the protection of personal information and to publish it on its Internet site.”2 Parties may only use that information to communicate with electors about election-related matters, but they are otherwise unrestricte. [...] The Committee should listen to the public and the experts People in Canada have long recognised the need for political parties to maintain robust privacy standards. [...] Judge and Michael Pal,15 Colin Bennett and Robin Bayley,16 as well as the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada,17 and the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy, and Ethics (ETHI)18 in saying that more meaningful privacy obligations for political parties are well overdue. [...] Everyone would be better served by a law that holds political parties to fairer standards, gives the public access to the personal information that political parties hold about them, empowers an independent officer to monitor political parties’ compliance with the law, and codifies a framework which recognizes just how essential privacy rights are to democracy. [...] That the Office of the Privacy Commissioner and/or Elections Canada be empowered to conduct proactive audits of political parties and political third parties regarding their privacy practices; 4.
Pages
6
Published in
Canada