The Information Technology Landscape in Canada

About Canada

Telecommunication
Infrastructure

Privatization and Deregulation

e-Commerce

IT Usage

The mission of the Canadian Department of Justice (DOJ) is to support the Minister of Justice in working to ensure that Canada is a just and law-abiding society with an accessible, efficient and fair system of justice; provide high-quality legal services and counsel to the government and to client departments and agencies; and promote respect for rights and freedoms, the law and the Constitution. The Department of Justice works with other federal departments to enact legislation for electronic commerce and protection of intellectial property and privacy in Canada's public and private sectors. You can find information about the Laws of Canada at the DOJ website. You can also monitor the status of legislation that is in the House of Commons or the Senate on the Government Bills page at the Parliamentary Internet website.  [Canadian Presentation http://canada.justice.gc.ca/Presentation/index_en.html]

E-Commerce and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)

The DOJ was active with the government agency Industry Canada in drafting the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (Bill C-54 now, Bill C-6). The Bill was introduced in the House of Commons in 1998, and provides for security when using the Internet. Bill C-54 is the first legislation to impose standards for handling of consumer personal information by the federally regulated commercial sector. The Department worked with the Uniform Law Conference of Canada on the Uniform Electronic Commerce Act (UECA) which is legislation similar to Bill C-54, that governs foreign government communications and delivery of services to Canada via electronic technology. Further, the DOJ is involved with the development of a federal government Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) to provide security for government agencies in their electronic business activities.  [Canadian Department of Justice, Overview of Recent Activities and Departmental Achievements August 1999]

Privacy

The Canadian Parliament places great emphasis on the importance of privacy in Canada. To ensure that privacy is afforded proper attention, the Parliament appointed a Privacy Commissioner of Canada as its agent to be a specialist ombudsman and to monitor the federal government's collection, use and disclosure of its clients and employees' personal information. The current Privacy Commissioner is Mr. Bruce Phillips a renowned Canadian journalist. The mission of the Commissioner's organization is:

• to be an effective ombudsman's office, providing thorough and timely complaint investigations to ensure Canadians enjoy the rights set out in the Privacy Act.
• to be an effective privacy guardian on Parliament's behalf, performing professional assessments of the quality of the government's adherence to the Privacy Act.
• to be Parliament's window on privacy issues, arming it with the facts needed to make informed judgements through research and communications.
• to be the primary national resource centre for research, education and information on privacy.

The European Union Directive on Privacy Protection (the Directive) has been in effect since October of 1998 and requires Union member countries to regulate, by law, the processing and transmission of personal data. The intent is to protect individual privacy by prohibiting improper collection, use, and transfer of data relating to or identifying a specific person. Articles within the Directive restricts flow of personal data across international borders to countries that do not provide adequate protection for that data.  [Gindin, Susan E., As The Cyber-World Turns]

There are 40 countries that have or plan to enact compliant statutes. Canada and the United States are countries that currently do not provide adequate protection. Canada expects that passage of the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (Bill C-54, now Bill C-6) will put the entire country in good stead relative to requirements of the directive. The Quebec province has its own provincial statute, and is currently the only jurisdiction in North America with a private sector data protection law that meets the EU requirements. The European Union and the United States are in negotiations over the US proposed plan for compliance and the EU has agreed to allow data flow to continue uninterrupted while the negotiations continue.

Bill C-6 was passed by the House of Commons on October 26, 1999 and is now being debated in the Senate. The bill contains a primacy clause such that the law takes precedence over subsequent acts of Parliament unless specifically provide for otherwise.

The Bill:

1. Provides for protection of personal information. It governs the collection, use and disclosure of personal information in the course of commercial activities, in connection with the operation of a federal work, undertaking or business, or interprovincially, or internationally in accordance with these principles:

• Accountability
• Identifying The Purposes For The Collection Of Personal Information
• Obtaining Consent
• Limiting Collection
• Limiting Use, Disclosure And Retention
• Ensuring Accuracy
• Providing Adequate Security
• Making Information Management Policies Readily Available
• Providing Individuals With Access To Information About Themselves
• Giving Individuals A Right To Challenge An Organization's Compliance With These Principles

Allows the Privacy Commissioner to receive complaints, conduct investigations and attempt to resolve the complaints. Certain matters can be pursued in Federal Court for resolution.

2. Authorizes enacting regulations to deal with "paper only" requirements in federal statutes and regulations to ensure proper administration or compliance in an electronic environment using electronic technology. The Bill identifies characteristics of secure electronic signatures and allows enactment of regulations prescribing technologies or processes to certify an electronic signature as secure.

3. Amends the Canada Evidence Act to "facilitate the admissibility of electronic documents, to establish evidentiary presumptions related to secure electronic signatures, and to provide for the recognition as evidence of notices, acts and other documents published electronically by the Queen's Printer."

4. Amends the Statutory Instruments Act to authorize electronic publication of the Canada Gazette.

5. Amends the Statute Revision Act to authorize electronic publication and distribution of the Consolidated Statutes and Regulations of Canada.

Please see Industry Canada's site for the latest news concerning the progress of the bill: http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/virtual_hosts/e-com/english/privacy/632d32.html

[Canada's 36^th Parliament, 2^nd Session, government bills, House of Commons, C-6]

Some interesting thoughts from the Annual Report of the Privacy Commissioner for 1998-99:

Did You Know…? Not worried about your privacy? Perhaps you should think again. Here are just a few of the stories we heard in the past year.

• A.C. Neilson, the market rating company, has patented a facial recognition system which secretly identifies shoppers to track their buying habits.
• Two Ontario grocery stores asked welfare recipients to thumbprint their cheques before cashing them. Ontario welfare cards contain digitized thumbprints. Both stores stopped after a shopper complained to the Ontario Privacy Commissioner.
• Police caught a Toronto-area group secretly videotaping debit card users entering their PINs, tapping stores' phone lines to steal the data, then using it to empty customers' accounts.
• What you eat, wear, watch, ride in and play with is increasingly tracked by companies to uncover patterns of consumer behavior—for example, marketers discovered that men who go out to buy diapers in the evening are more likely to pick up beer on the way home.
• Some Web sites track "click stream" data—what pages you view and what information you download, and some leave "cookies"—data that helps the site identify you next time you visit.
• Employers now can check out job applicants' Web surfing to examine their hobbies, interests and attitudes. According to a Calgary security-management corporation doing background checks, "a (Web) search can tell a lot about a person, good and bad."
• The Québec government is considering creating a central computer database on every Québecer, including names, photographs, and basic identifying information.
• Nissan Web site visitors who wanted information its new Xterra sport utility vehicle got a whole lot more—the e-mail addresses of 24,000 other potential buyers.
• Several chain stores admit giving law enforcement agencies the shopping habits of their loyal customer card holders.
• Urine samples cannot tell whether someone is "high" on drugs, only whether he or she has used the drug in the past 30 days.
• Your employer can read your e-mail, access your computer files, track your Internet traffic and listen to your voice mail.
• If you're one of 7.2 million Air Miles Cardholders, every time you swipe that card you're sharing your buying decisions with 134 corporate sponsors. The company sorts and packages the data on behalf of its corporate sponsors and "anything Blockbuster Video knows about an individual's viewing preferences, the local liquor outlet can know too—and vice versa".
• Some of that personal information—Air Miles card number, name, home phone numbers, e-mail addresses, business name and phone number—on hundreds of Air Miles cardholders was put on the Web for several months and possibly for as long as a year.
• The Michigan Commission on Genetic Privacy is reportedly proposing that the state permanently store blood samples of newborns it obtained to detect rare congenital diseases because the samples are a valuable resource for law enforcement authorities and scientific research.
• Removing names from personal information and combining it with other peoples' data does not necessarily protect it. "Reverse engineering" allows researchers to identify individuals in aggregate statistical information by combining it with public information. For example, if you know five per cent of people in a block of 20 people are over 65 and earn more than $100,000, you can find 67-year old Jane Doe in public records and infer her income.
• Several British companies are consulting scientists on implanting microchips in employees to monitor their whereabouts and timekeeping. One scientist has developed and had a chip implanted to demonstrate how well it works.
• Internet service provider America Online receives a steady stream of court orders for information about subscribers, during divorce and child custody cases.

[Annual Report Privacy Commissioner 1998-99]

The Intellectual Property Policy Directorate reviews and modernizes these federal laws, which are administered by the Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO):

Patent Act
Copyright Act
Trade-marks Act
Industrial Design Act

Integrated Circuit Topography Act   

[Strategis, Industry Canada's Information Source for Canadian Business.]

Canada is a world leader in the arena of intellectual property protection. Canada is an adherent to the major intellectual property treaties including the Paris Convention, the Berne Convention, and the Patent Cooperation Treaty. It is also a signatory to the World Trade Organization Agreement and the North American Free Trade Agreement.

In 1989, The Canadian Patent Act changed entitlement to patent protection from the "first to invent" system, which was borrowed from US law, to the more common "first to file" system. The first to file system has served to bring Canadian law into conformity with the laws in most of the world. In recent years, Canada has introduced moral rights protection for authors and clarified the application of copyright to computer programs and broadcasts. In the intellectual property arena in Canada is the release in early 1997 of the study of Internet content related liability by Industry Canada. There are issues, which arise in the enforcement of laws against Internet sites that are outside of Canada; within Canada, though, content providers are bound by the same laws as bind other Canadians. Those laws have proven flexible enough to apply even to the new technology of the Internet. There is; however, lagging reform process of copyright legislation in Canada.

Through the release of a White Paper in June 1998, the U.S. government has initiated a process to reform the international domain name system, including the granting of domain names by generic top-level domain name (gTLD) registries. As part of this reform process, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has convened an international process to address the intellectual property and related dispute resolution issues associated with Internet domain names.

Canada's country code top level domain (ccTLD) .CA is being reformed through a private-sector led process. In September 1998, the Canadian Domain Name Consultative Committee (CDNCC) which is responsible for the reform of the Canadian system, calling for the establishment of a non-profit corporation to run the new system. The primary objective of the initial Board will be to develop and implement a transition plan to transfer current .CA operations to the new registry. It is expected that the initial Board will establish a transition plan by the end of the first quarter of 1999. In addition to domain names, there may be other particular Internet/electronic commerce activities, such as meta-tagging, framing and hyper-linking, that give rise to trade-marks law considerations. These issues are being explored domestically and internationally.  [excerpts from Deeth Williams Wall, Toronto, Canada, Canada: Changes to Intellectual Property and Technology Law]

Principles in Summary

Principle 1

Consumers should be provided with clear and sufficient information to make an informed choice about whether and how to make a purchase.

Principle 2

"Vendors" should take reasonable steps to ensure that the consumer's agreement to contract is fully informed and intentional.

Principle 3

Vendors and "intermediaries" should respect the privacy principles set out in the CSA International's Model Code for the Protection of Personal Information.

Principle 4

Vendors and intermediaries should take reasonable steps to ensure that "transactions" in which they are involved are secure. Consumers should act prudently when undertaking transactions.

Principle 5

Consumers should have access to fair, timely, effective and affordable means for resolving problems with any transaction.

Principle 6

Consumers should be protected from unreasonable liability for payments in transactions.

Principle 7

Vendors should not transmit commercial E-mail without the consent of consumers, or unless a vendor has an existing relationship with a consumer.

Principle 8

Government, business and consumer groups should promote consumer awareness about the safe use of electronic commerce.  [Strategis, Industry Canada's Information Source for Canadian Business. - Working Group on Electronic Commerce and Consumers]