Your Privacy Must Be Protected

Since Justin Trudeau became Prime Minister it feels like it has been one scandal after another – he is after all the only Prime Minister in Canadian history to have been found guilty three times of violating federal ethics rules.

Which is why when the news came out that the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) secretly tracked 33 million mobile devices during lockdown, it unfortunately came as no surprise.

Canadians value their privacy, and trust the government not to violate that. When the government announced the roll-out of their COVID-19 exposure app, many people were hesitant to download as they were concerned about the government misusing their private data. The government assured them that data wouldn’t be collected, but they were collecting it through different means all along.

Now Canada’s Conservatives have learned that the Liberals plan to continue collecting your location data for the next 5 years. This has raised a number of red flags for us, so we are now calling on the Privacy Commissioner to immediately investigate the report of the 33 million secret records already tracked, and the plan to continue to do this for 5 more years.

I am very concerned with the idea that the government has been secretly collecting private data from Canadians. This is something that should have been clearly communicated to the people it impacted, not quietly released in a media story on Christmas eve.

It is telling of the Prime Minister that his failure in managing this pandemic has included the secret monitoring of cell phone data. According to PHAC, part of their five year plan to continue monitoring Canadians mobile data isn’t even related to the current pandemic. Which makes you wonder, how far is this Prime Minister planning to go in secretly monitoring your mobile activity?

Violating anyone’s privacy is never acceptable, using the pandemic as an excuse does not make it any better.