The Office of the Privacy Commissioner (OPC) is currently looking into three files pertaining to the Trudeau government invoking the Emergencies Act last winter, including the order telling financial institutions to send information on “designated persons” to security agencies.
The Office provided this information in a Jan. 24 brief submitted to the Special Joint Committee on the Declaration of Emergency (DEDC), a body of MPs and senators established according to legislation to examine the government’s invocation of the Emergencies Act.
The act was invoked on Feb. 14 last year to deal with cross-country protests and border blockades demanding the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions.
The OPC says it engaged with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), and the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre (FINTRAC) after concerns were raised about privacy implications related to use of the act.
“The goal of this engagement was to better understand and assess against the Privacy Act how the institutions handled personal information within the context of the Emergencies Act and the temporary powers granted as a result of the Emergency Economic Measures Order,” says the OPC.
The freezing of financial accounts of Freedom Convoy protesters without a court order is the better known financial measure implemented by the Liberal government through use of the act.
While it was more widely known that the RCMP provided a list of Convoy supporters to banks and credit unions to take action against, less has been said about the flow of information from financial institutions to the RCMP and CSIS.
The Emergency Economic Measures Order stipulated that financial institutions “must disclose without delay” to CSIS and the RCMP the “existence of property in their possession or control that they have reason to believe is owned, held or controlled by or on behalf of a designated person,” as well as information on their transactions.
A “designated person” refers to a protester participating in activities deemed illegal as per the Emergency Measures Regulations.
The OPC says it’s examining key issues regarding this measure, including the scope and nature of the personal information that was received and disclosed, whether reasonable steps were taken to limit the sharing of personal information, and if the information was used or disclosed for other purposes beyond the purpose of collection.
The Office says its report on the matter would be published in the spring of 2023.
The OPC is also studying the use of an Internet monitoring tool by a law enforcement agency during cross-country protests and border blockades of January and February 2022.
The unspecified law enforcement agency used the tool “due to concerns about officer and public safety,” says the OPC.
The Epoch Times asked the office about the entities involved but didn’t hear back before publication time.
The third file the commissioner is looking into according to the brief is the breaches of an unspecified crowdfunding platform used by the Freedom Convoy.
The platform GiveSendGo was hacked in February 2022, with some media outlets then releasing details and going after donors.
The OPC didn’t mention investigating the release of information by media, but rather whether the website had adequate safeguards in place and if the hack had been reported according to requirements.
The privacy commissioner says it will also be releasing its findings on those topics in the coming months.
The OPC submitted a brief to the DEDC committee given that there was no chance to testify.
At the last committee meeting on Dec. 8, Sen. Peter Harder—an appointee of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau who served as the government representative in the Senate from 2016 to 2020—moved that the committee not hear anymore witnesses and present its final report to Parliament no later than March 31.
Conservative Party MP Larry Motz passed an amendment that would require witnesses appearing in the committee’s work plan of May 2022 who did not testify at the committee to submit a brief.
Others submitting a brief include law professor Ryan Alford and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA).
In his brief filed on Feb. 3, Alford told the committee it “should conclude that there was no lawful basis” for the declaration of a public order emergency.
He noted that no law enforcement and intelligence official saw the event as a national security threat and that the government “reformulated the standards” to establish the test for meeting the threshold, including “economic harm as a basis for an emergency.”
Alford also raised the issue of the government asserting solicitor-client privilege to not reveal the attorney general’s legal opinion on the invocation of the act.
“The Government withheld the evidence the public inquiry required to determine whether the Cabinet lacked a reasonable basis for concluding an emergency existed,” he wrote.
The CCLA took a similar position in its brief filed on Feb. 3, saying the legal threshold wasn’t met and that the related orders declared were unlawful and unconstitutional.
“Neither the evidence that was before the POEC [Public Order Emergency Commission], nor the testimony heard by this committee, indicated events or acts that seriously endangered the lives, health or safety of Canadians,” wrote the CCLA.
The CCLA also took part in the public hearings phase of the POEC which took place last fall.
The POEC, reviewing the use of the act along with the DEDC, is mandated by law to submit its final report to Parliament by Feb. 20.
The Trudeau government had initially ordered the commission to receive the report by Feb. 6, while giving the Feb. 20 deadline for the tabling in Parliament.