You can also read the full text of the bill. Michael Geist. Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Michael Geist. I'm a law professor at the University of Ottawa, where I hold the Canada research chair in internet and e-commerce law and am a member of the Centre for Law, Technology and Society.
My areas of speciality include digital policy, intellectual property and privacy. I served for many years on the Privacy Commissioner of Canada's external advisory board. I'm also chair of Waterfront Toronto's digital strategy advisory panel, which is actively engaged in the smart city process in Toronto involving Sidewalk Labs.
As always, I appear in a personal capacity as an independent academic representing only my own views. This committee's study on government services and privacy provides an exceptional opportunity to tackle many of the challenges surrounding government services, privacy and technology today.
Indeed, I believe what makes this issue so compelling is that it represents a confluence of public sector privacy law, private sector privacy law, data governance and emerging technologies. The Sidewalk Labs issue is a case in point. While it's not about federal government services—it's obviously a municipal project—the debates are fundamentally about the role of the private sector in the delivery of government services, the collection of public data and the oversight or engagement of governments at all levels.
For example, the applicable law of that project remains still somewhat uncertain. Is it the provincial privacy law? Is it both? How do we grapple with some of these new challenges when even determining the applicable law is not a straightforward issue? My core message today is that looking at government services and privacy requires more than just a narrow examination of what the federal government is doing to deliver the services, assessing the privacy implications and then identifying what rules or regulations could be amended or introduced to better facilitate services that both meet the needs of Canadians and provide them with the privacy and security safeguards they rightly expect.
