Federal political parties are in the process of exempting themselves, retroactively, from a law that would require them to be governed by the same privacy principles as other organizations.
Their efforts come in the wake of a 2024 British Columbia Supreme Court ruling that found the province’s Personal Information Protection Act — unlike federal privacy laws — applies to federal political parties.
The Liberal government’s Bill C-4, currently in the final stages of passing through Parliament, would change that.
Collecting voter data
Political parties and campaigns collect sensitive information about Canadian voters without their knowledge or consent — often working with a range of data and tech companies to do so.
Parties may make political inferences and use the data to decide who to target with ads, who to exclude, whose doors to knock on and which ones to walk by.
The B.C. ruling is critical because no federal law requires federal parties to comply with the privacy principles that businesses and governments must follow. Federal parties have been in a years-long court battle to keep it that way.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Christinne Muschi
B.C. Supreme Court Justice Gary Weatherill’s ruling that federal political parties are subject to the B.C. law was centred on three provincial residents who filed complaints in 2019. They accused three federal parties — the Liberals, New Democrats and Conservatives — of refusing to disclose or inadequately disclosing how they collected and used their personal data.
The parties argued the provincial law did not apply to federal political parties. They lost, and the case is under appeal.
Citing the constitutional principle of co-operative federalism, Weatherill ruled that both federal and provincial privacy laws could apply to federal political parties. Federal law did not override provincial law, the decision said, and the parties’ privacy policies could comply with both regimes at the same time without undermining the purpose of either.
With the prospect of further losing this court battle on appeal, the federal parties have banded together in an effort to retroactively change the law.
Exempting themselves
Bill C-4 would prevent provincial and territorial privacy laws from applying to federal parties and would apply retroactively all the way back to the year 2000. If successful, federal political parties wouldn’t be subject to either the basic privacy principles or third-party oversight that governments and businesses, big and small, are subject to.
Under C-4, federal political parties would not “be required to comply” with provincial or territorial privacy laws. B.C. and Québec laws do, at the moment, apply to political parties. They provide some of the only privacy protections applying to political parties in all of Canada.
Imagine if all people and organizations had time machines that allowed them to go back in time to exempt themselves from laws that held them accountable? That’s essentially what the three federal parties are proposing.
If Canadians want privacy rights to apply to federal political parties, there is almost nobody to vote for who will support those rights. The federal parties and virtually all MPs are acting as a united front against Canadian voters’ privacy rights — fighting against those rights together in the courts and almost unanimously passing C-4 in third reading (with the exception of Green leader Elizabeth May).
If there has ever been a moment for the Senate to act as a check on political parties using their majority to legislate in their own self-interest — exempting themselves from laws that apply to everyone else — this was it.
To its credit, the Senate (unlike MPs) studied the bill carefully and heard from expert witnesses, including myself. It also added a sunset clause to the legislation.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick
Sunset clause provisions
The sunset clause would reverse C-4’s privacy exemption measures, potentially making federal parties once again subject to provincial privacy laws in three years.
Senators failed to go further to insist that the privacy exemptions for federal parties in Bill C-4 be entirely removed. Doing so would have allowed the provincial laws that provide virtually the only privacy protection Canadians currently have against federal political parties to continue to apply.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld
It would have also allowed the B.C. complainants’ court case to proceed — likely all the way to the Supreme Court, where Canadians’ privacy rights might have been upheld and the case might have shed light on the data federal parties collect.
It remains to be seen whether the House will retain the sunset clause amendment proposed by the Senate. Regardless, C-4 will likely undermine the 2024 B.C. decision and kill the appeal process since the laws at the root of that case would be deemed inapplicable to federal parties.
If the sunset clause is retained, it means at least three more years of political parties working with data companies, harvesting and using unknown troves of personal data with no real accountability.
Sen. Pierre Dalphond’s stated purpose regarding the sunset clause was to put the onus on the government and the three political parties to come up with a meaningful privacy regime for federal political parties within a fixed time frame.
Anyone who’s optimistic that will happen has not been watching the parties fight tooth and nail to collect, keep and hide our data.
