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Member of Parliament

Matthew Green

  • Member of Parliament
  • Member of Parliament
  • NDP
  • Hamilton Centre
  • Ontario
  • Voting Attendance: 66%
  • Expenses Last Quarter: $131,250.15

  • Government Page
Context: House Hansard - 137 - Nov/29/22
Mr. Matthew Green (Hamilton Centre, NDP)
  • Nov/29/22 2:51:14 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, while Telus has celebrated its highest ever second-quarter profits, shareholders are getting richer at the expense of Canadian workers by outsourcing 11,000 of its jobs overseas, and this is grotesque. Canadian workers are fed up. USW Local 1944 has reached a 97% strike mandate, and the current government is giving Telus millions of dollars in federal procurement contracts. Will the current Liberal government stand up for workers by ending lucrative contracts with companies like Telus that use taxpayer dollars to ship our Canadian jobs overseas?
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Context: House Hansard - 25 - Feb/7/22
Mr. Matthew Green (Hamilton Centre, NDP)
  • Feb/7/22 4:50:04 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I join the debate this afternoon in support of the concurrence motion moved by my hon. Bloc colleague from Trois-Rivières. Our Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics unanimously adopted this motion: That the committee call upon the government to suspend the Public Health Agency of Canada's cellular data tender upon adoption of this motion, and that the tender shall not be re-offered until the committee reports to the House that it is satisfied that the privacy of Canadians will not be affected, and that the committee report the adoption of this motion to the House at the earliest opportunity. When we are dealing with issues of privacy, I believe it is critical that parliamentarians have the opportunity to be clear on what is being collected, how it is being utilized and what safeguards are in place. Not doing this would be an abdication of our responsibilities as legislators. I believe the government members of our committee were acting in good faith with our committee's request to suspend the procurement under this contract. With the news that the government had tendered a contract for the collection of mobility data as a part of its COVID-19 response, many Canadians were rightly concerned about the protections in place to protect their privacy. The fact that many people learned about this program from news articles sets off alarm bells, and even if the process was unintentional, it demonstrates a lack of government transparency. To make matters worse, a PHAC spokesperson stated that the agency had consulted with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner before starting to collect mobility data, but the Office of the Privacy Commissioner stated that it was not consulted and had only been informed of the program in 2020. This discrepancy between “consulted” and “informed” is stark, and I believe it is prudent of the ethics committee to ask the government to press “pause” on any future requests for proposals for mobility data projects until parliamentarians have an opportunity to provide oversight. Our committee has had an opportunity to hear from PHAC, departmental officials and the Privacy Commissioner, but it is very important that we have telecom industry representatives, and Telus in particular, appear before our committee to discuss how they are going to use our personal information and what steps they have taken to protect our privacy. I look forward to these representatives appearing before our committee in the near future to explain how they obtain meaningful consent for the collection, use and disclosure of this mobility data; how the data is de-identified; and what the risk is of reidentification. I think the study is also an opportunity to educate the public about the pervasiveness of the mobility data economy and, by updating our Canadian privacy laws, make meaningful progress towards reforming the actors that operate in this sector. I can only hope that this opportunity to bring Canada's law into the digital era and restore trust to Canadian citizens and consumers alike is not lost. There has also been little discussion of PHAC's collection and use of data from these kinds of third parties, which tend to be advertising and data surveillance companies that consumers have no idea are collecting, repackaging and monetizing their personal information. The repurposing of Canadian cellular networks for things like pandemic mobility tracking without the knowledge of subscribers, though ostensibly with their consent vis-à-vis the largely unread terms of service, is a big deal. The data that was provided to PHAC lacks demographic information and, as we have heard, provides crude assessments of population mobility. While the data might be of some value, there is still a question about whether or not Canadians are comfortable with their cellphone data being used in this way. I know many of my residents in Hamilton Centre have shared their deep concerns about the overall commodification of the tracking and sale of their personal information. This is not the only example of cellphone data being used for purposes that are wholly unrelated to the provision or management of cellular services. Cellphone companies themselves have developed surveillance tools, selling them on the basis that cellphones are trackable devices and warning customers who use their service that they should not expect cellphone privacy. In fact, I believe we heard that clearly from the government members of this debate this evening. Given the massive amounts of cellphone data that are available through our cell towers, our cellphones and our cell service providers, the ability to track cellphones across time and space is completely unchecked. Cellphone companies' refusal to encrypt important information about subscribers' locations has made it easier for cell sites and their owners to provide law enforcement authorities with cellphone data. Cellphone companies have made it possible for cellphones to be tracked even when they are turned off by means of cell-tower logs that track the cell numbers and locations of subscribers without their knowledge. By triangulating a cellphone user's geographical location, cell towers can enable the construction of a kind of cellphone user profile. I think of the use by police of technologies such as stingrays and I cannot help but recall the revelations this past summer about major government overreach utilizing the private Israeli Pegasus spyware used to hack cellphones of journalists, activists and worldwide agencies through the NSO Group's spyware, which has been licensed by governments. However, cellphone tracking capabilities are not the domain of only law enforcement or intelligence agencies; they can also be tracked by the cell tower owners, as we have discussed. This access could be used to determine where these phones go in the evening and leave cellphone providers with an ongoing level of pervasive tracking. This is problematic, because users are charged by cellphone providers based on their location data and where these phones spend their time. This is how they generate large amounts of their ad revenue. Within the Canadian context, as is the case in the study for our Standing Committee on Ethics for which this concurrence debate has been called, cellphones are used to track cellphone users' and potentially citizens' mobilities for reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with their cellphone service provision. The Privacy Commissioner was at the ethics committee earlier today. His brief stated that “this data sharing initiative is an example of the movement of data between the private and public sectors and demonstrates the need for both to be governed by common principles and rules. With these two sectors interacting ever more frequently it is imperative that they be held to similar standards. Ideally, our two federal privacy laws should also be updated concurrently.” I agree, and I believe that Canadians all expect a certain level of privacy, especially when it comes to their cellphones. We need to take a closer look to see if our current laws and regulations are sufficient in our current age of big data. I plan to continue this work at the ethics committee to ensure that Canada has the gold standard for protecting people's data and their privacy.
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