Government once again fails to protect privacy in political campaigning

The Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) is disappointed with the federal government’s failure to live up to its commitment and adopt meaningful privacy protections for political parties.

Last month, the government pushed Bill C-4 through Parliament over objections from civil society and members of the Senate, resulting in legislative changes that would exempt federal political parties from provincial privacy laws while imposing no real privacy protections at the federal level.

In a move to overcome Senate resistance to the absence of privacy protections in Bill C-4, the government committed to introducing comprehensive privacy protections for data held by federal political parties, and as a result has recently introduced Bill C-25.

Bill C-25 would obligate federal political parties to adopt technical safeguards for personal information under their control and report cybersecurity breaches.

This would provide some protection against third parties who might maliciously access personal information held by political parties but fundamentally fails to impose any meaningful restrictions on what the parties themselves can do with the increasingly vast troves of personal information relied upon to target digital political messaging.

This latest failure to adopt meaningful safeguards means that Canada is falling further and further behind our international counterparts. Just last year, the EU expanded its already robust protections for voters’ privacy in recognition of the threat posed by data-driven political messaging.

“Bill C-25 is a failure of the government’s responsibility to act in the public interest and signals once again that our federal political parties are unwilling to abide by any meaningful restrictions on their handling of people’s sensitive personal data”, said Howard Sapers, CCLA’s Executive Director. “In the era of digital campaigning, political parties need to abide by internationally recognized privacy standards.”