2020-21 Departmental Results Report (DRR)

Operating context

In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, which emerged in Canada in March 2020, the urgency of limiting the spread of the virus posed a significant challenge for government and public health authorities who sought ways to leverage personal information to contain and gain insights about the novel virus and the threat it presents.

Throughout 2020-21, we saw technology being used to control the virus’ spread and leveraged it to safely continue essential operations. However, the pandemic greatly accelerated the digital revolution, which was already rapidly advancing, and thereby transformed the social and economic spheres in a context where our laws are not adequate to protect Canadians.

Technology offer major benefits, however technological progress in domains such as health, education, data analysis, artificial intelligence, genetic profiling and the Internet of Things raise new and complex risks stemming from the nature of personal information in use. The privacy implications and, by extension, the risks to fundamental rights and freedoms, are immense. The increased importance of technology in daily life highlights the need for laws that both uphold privacy and promote technological innovation. These unique challenges posed by the COVID‑19 pandemic have made it clear that we require effective privacy regulation. To support federal institutions in this regard, we completed a comprehensive update and published guidance documents on privacy during the pandemic, as well as a contextual framework to help them protect privacy amid COVID-19 initiatives. Using the framework, we reviewed the COVID Alert app and advised the government in this regard.

For a number of years now, the OPC has called for the modernization of federal privacy legislation. Last fall, the federal government tabled Bill C-11 ^{Footnote 1}, the Consumer Privacy Protection Act. In addition, the Department of Justice launched a public consultation ^{Footnote 2} on the Privacy Act. These two initiatives represent a major reform of privacy legislation. In the past year, on top of our usual work, we analyzed these initiatives, wrote a submission ^{Footnote 3} to Parliament and issued recommendations on Bill C-11 (issued on May 11, 2021). We have also written a submission ^{Footnote 4} to the Minister of Justice and Attorney General (March 22, 2021) regarding the reform of the Privacy Act, to ensure that stronger measures to protect Canadians’ privacy were included.

As part of Budget 2019, the OPC received funding to enhance its ability to deliver on its mandated obligations within the current legislative framework in the face of the exponential growth of the digital economy. This new funding has allowed us to work toward delivering optimal benefits to Canadians, ensuring that advice and guidance was provided to organizations on how to protect privacy. The funding also allowed us to meet and even slightly exceed our goal related to the reduction of the overall backlog of complaints older than a year. While this infusion of funds has helped us reduce our backlog and increase our capacity, there is still a very significant gap. Given the marked acceleration of digitization caused by the pandemic, we continue to struggle meeting the demand in guidance, advisory work and to assist our investigators to address complaints filed by concerned Canadians. To address this gap, we believe that our Office should have the ability to choose which complaints to investigate, in order to focus our limited resources on issues that pose the highest risk or may have the greatest impact for Canadians.

Finally, this past year has been one of transition for many organizations. Our Office was no exception and had to quickly adapt its processes to continue serving Canadians and supporting its internal programs during the pandemic. In this regard, we rose to the challenge and remained fully operational while working remotely.