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The federal Privacy Commissioner is investigating a plan by Statistics Canada to secretly collect the personal financial transaction information of hundreds of thousands of Canadians without their permission. Not surprisingly, the commissioner received complaints after media reports revealed that StatsCan was demanding the private data from Canada’s nine largest financial institutions.

As with previous Statistics Canada controversies, the long-form census being a key one, this issue has split down party lines, with the federal Tories puffing with outrage about the alleged intrusion into Canadians’ privacy, while the Trudeau government somewhat arrogantly poo poos anyone with legitimate worries about their data and how it will be used.

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Neither is approaching the issue in a reasonable manner.

While the Conservatives are right to raise the issue so that the project receives public oversight and can be reviewed, it’s a bit paranoid of them to suggest that StatsCan would deviate from its well-earned reputation of protecting the private data it collects from and about individual citizens. While banking information, which can reveal debt loads and purchasing patterns, is clearly considered highly private by Canadians, such information isn’t particularly more sensitive than other personal information that Statistics Canada has collected for decades. As with other information collected by the agency, individual data is never shared with other federal government departments and only used to reveal demographic trends that can lead hopefully to good public policy.