By Xan Dagenais

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, we were all in shock. The news that the government was working on the COVID Alert app, an application that would track our infection status and who we had been in contact with, immediately triggered alarm bells among civil society. We are all too familiar with the government reacting too quickly to a crisis and adopting new laws or measures that infringe on people’s freedoms and human rights. And once those are in place, it’s much harder to backtrack, especially when those laws and measures give more power to the state and its agencies.

We therefore had to react quickly, especially since, to our knowledge, no other civil liberties organization was looking at the COVID app. After meeting with the Director of the Privacy Management Division of Health Canada to discuss our concerns, we were able to secure a commitment from the government that the COVID app would not collect personal information, and that national security agencies would not be involved in COVID surveillance or have access to COVID information.

We also co-wrote a statement listing seven principles to ensure that government efforts to combat COVID-19, particularly when considering any kind of enhanced digital surveillance or data collection, respected privacy, and we met with the Justice Minister to discuss them. We then created a video and launched a letter-writing campaign in support of the joint statement, and thanks to a subsequent joint open letter, the federal government delayed the release of the national contact tracing app until the Privacy Commissioner had examined and approved it. Finally, we joined 300 organizations and individuals to call on all levels of government to strengthen human rights oversight amid the pandemic.

Xan Dagenais is the Communications and Research Coordinator of the International Civil Liberties

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