We call on you to withdraw the portions of the Making Life More Affordable for Canadians Act, Bill C-4, that amend the Canada Elections Act. The provisions of the Bill are a serious threat to Canadians’ privacy rights.
Provisions in Bill C-4 Part 4 grant federal political parties sweeping authority to collect, use, and disclose the personal information of people in Canada, subject only to the rules passed and overseen by the political parties themselves.
Modern privacy regimes around the world, including federal and provincial regimes in Canada, align to privacy principles first seen in CSA Standards. The principles spell out the importance of individual control over and access to personal information; transparency about how personal information is collected, used and disclosed; and independent third-party oversight with recourse.
Under Bill C-4, political parties abandon privacy principles.
Already excluded from Federal privacy law. C-4 exempts federal political parties from any provincial privacy laws that might apply to their activities at the provincial level. This is a direct response to ongoing efforts to compel federal parties to comply with provincial privacy rules, notably in the BC Supreme Court case Liberal Party of Canada v. The Complainants, 2024 BCSC 814.
C-4 strips power away from people. It explicitly exempts federal political parties from requests made by people in Canada for access to personal information about them held by the federal political parties. This, again, runs contrary to many core tenets of modern privacy regimes. It provides individuals with no legal right to control their own information. That includes the right of individuals to know what personal information is held by a federal political party, their ability to correct it, and withdraw consent for its continued use.
It lacks transparency, independent oversight, and reporting proportionate to the personal information that political parties have in their control. The parties cannot deny the value of personal information in Canadian democracy. Yet, Canadians can have little trust that federal political parties are acting appropriately. C-4 provides no independent oversight over how political parties handle the personal information that they possess about the very people they seek to represent. If a federal party or candidate acts inappropriately, individuals have little recourse.
In a time when everyday engagement with digital technologies and social services involves the collection of vast amounts of sensitive data, Canadians expect their government to enact legislation that strengthens privacy protections and prevents the unaccountable collection of personal information. Instead of doing this, the government has, in Bill C-4, places federal political parties beyond the reach of the privacy rules that govern public bodies and the private sector.
Privacy protections should increase in proportion to the sensitivity of the personal information involved. Political information is often viewed as some of the most sensitive. Canadians’ should have the highest protections applied by political parties with the strictest oversight instead of the lowest.
Finally, it is unreasonable to bury privacy-impacting amendments to the Canada Elections Act in an affordability bill. These provisions have serious implications for privacy rights in a participatory democracy, and they are being smuggled into law as “another measure” tacked to the end of an affordability bill.
We call on you to scrap Part 4 of C-4, and to introduce a separate bill that would amend the Canada Elections Act in a way that enhances the privacy rights of Canadians and holds federal political parties to high standards of accountability and transparency, including independent oversight, in their handling of personal information aligned to Canadas long held privacy principles.
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