OTTAWA—Federal political parties may soon face a challenge over the near-total lack of rules governing how they collect and use Canadian voters’ personal information.

The Star has learned that British Columbia’s privacy commissioner, Michael McEvoy, is studying whether provincial privacy law could apply to federal parties operating in B.C.

There are currently no rules that govern how federal parties collect and use data about Canadians. While parties are now required to publish privacy policies, there is no independent oversight or review to determine if they’re actually following those policies.

There are also no rules requiring parties to tell individual Canadians what information parties have on them, the sources of that information, or if the parties are combining multiple sources of data to create more detailed voter profiles.

B.C. is the only jurisdiction in Canada where political parties are subject to privacy laws. In February, McEvoy told Star Metro that provincial parties were illegally collecting data on voters without consent.

McEvoy declined the Star’s interview request Tuesday. The office of federal privacy watchdog Daniel Therrien declined to comment Wednesday.

But McEvoy’s office confirmed they are currently reviewing the legal issues around applying provincial laws to federal parties’ operations in B.C. — a process that could lead to McEvoy issuing a binding order to comply with B.C. law. That order is reviewable by the B.C. Supreme Court.

“The commissioner is currently considering whether PIPA (Personal Information Protection Act) applies to federal political parties in B.C. in an ongoing …inquiry,” a spokesperson for McEvoy’s office said in a statement to the Star.

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Last May, McEvoy urged members of the Commons’ ethics committee to bring political parties under privacy laws.

“Democracy requires the citizenry to have trust and confidence in the political process — and a significant element of that process concerns how political parties collect and use the personal information that belongs to Canadians,” McEvoy’s submission to the committee read.

“Political parties in B.C. can and do collect personal information about voters, but they do so under the same reasonable, legal responsibilities and obligations that apply to other organizations.”

While the federal Liberals have repeatedly demanded social media and internet companies take the privacy of their users seriously, they have also repeatedly refused to move forward with applying privacy laws to their own party and the opposition.

In October, federal Democratic Institutions Minister Karina Gould agreed that federal parties need to be brought under a privacy “regime,” but said she wanted to see the issue studied further by a parliamentary committee.

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Four months earlier, the Commons’ privacy and ethics committee unanimously recommended that privacy rules should be applied to political parties after studying Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, where 87 million users had their data harvested without their consent and used for political analysis.

Last month Navdeep Bains, the federal innovation minister, published a discussion paper to strengthen Canada’s private sector privacy law, PIPEDA, which included a number of the ethics committee’s recommendations. The recommendations — which will not be taken up until after the election, if at all — do not include bringing political parties under privacy law.