How Canadians’ private information is gathered and used to design election campaigns

A person has their hand on the open door, about to enter a building marked as a polling location.

In the absence of better protection for voters, political parties can design election campaigns around personal information they have gathered and used without transparency, consent or accountability, expert Sara Bannerman explains. (Elections Canada photo)


With a federal election expected this year, professor Sara Bannerman is raising questions about the potential for political parties to gather and use Canadians’ personal information in data-driven election campaigns. 

Headshot of Sara Bannerman, who has short-cropped dark hair, dark-framed glasses whose shirt and blazer are black.Specializing in the intersection of technology, society and governance, Bannerman is a professor in the department of communication studies and media arts, and the Canada Research Chair in Communication Policy and Governance.

She frequently contributes to public discussion on privacy and platform regulation, most recently discussing potential privacy violations in proposed amendments to Bill C-65 in an op-ed for The Conversation Canada, and sharing her expertise at a parliamentary session in the House of Commons in Ottawa.  

While the specific amendments to C-65 are no longer on the table with the recent prorogation of parliament, Bannerman’s concerns remain relevant to future legislation.  

We asked her to share her insights on political parties, privacy and the reality of datafied elections. 


Can you start by explaining what Bill C-65 was? 

It was an act to amend the election, and it proposed doing a few things. One was changing the election date. Second, it would make it easier to vote in a number of ways. And third, it was adding some elements of privacy standards for political parties. 


What was the controversy surrounding Bill C-65? 

The item that caught a lot of news is that delaying the fixed date of elections would allow a number of MPs to collect a pension, so the Conservatives and some of the other parties were criticizing the Liberals for that aspect — even though the Conservatives actually had the most MPs who would benefit.   

A more important item, though, was the new privacy standards being introduced. This came about because of a court decision in British Columbia this past summer, where three B.C. residents complained about their personal information being collected by political parties.  

The residents requested the personal information that was held by the four major parties — the Liberals, the Conservatives, the Greens, and the NDP. The province’s information and privacy commissioner started an investigation, and all four political parties went to court to stop that — obviously they’re not interested in oversight of all the data that they collect in the era of datafied campaigning. 

British Columbia has its own privacy law, as do many provinces. And most privacy laws follow 10 principles, including the right to consent to the collection of personal information, the right to access their personal information, the right that personal information be accurate, and to be informed about their personal information being collected.  

But federal privacy law — whether it’s the one that applies to government, meaning the Privacy Act, or the one that applies to the private sector — doesn’t apply to political parties. It applies to private businesses or the federal government, but not to political parties.  

The case in the summer went through the B.C. Supreme Court and the court decided that the provincial privacy law does apply to federal political parties. The four parties have appealed that decision. 

As well, they also proposed privacy amendments to Bill C-65, but those changes didn’t actually adhere to the 10 privacy principles, meaning the bill could be seen as an effort to undermine stricter provincial privacy legislation, like the privacy law in B.C.  


 What kind of data do political parties collect? 

They can collect information about people, and it’s not just demographic information. One of the reports of the British Columbia Information Privacy Commissioner showed that the four provincial political parties were collecting much more information than people might think or realize, including, in some cases, information about income, race and ethnicity, and religion.  

Some of the parties, when they’re coming to your door, might observe how many cars are in the driveway, how many kids and what size of family is living there, and so on. They might make guesses about race and ethnicity.  

Thinking back to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which involved information collected from personality tests on Facebook — they collected social media profiles and personal information and so on, which allowed for all kinds of potential manipulation.  

Political parties have all this information about your political views. They do know how and when you vote. So they’re making a plan — they know who’s voting, who’s not voting, who’s leaning one way or another way, and so they can make decisions about where to canvas and where to get donations. 

A lot of people would want the ability to consent even to that, and there could be valid debates about whether parties need that information. Of course, they argue that they do, to be able to access Canadians and help ensure that Canadians are informed. But some of the more personal information, like race, ethnicity, gender, phone number, political views — there isn’t any transparency about that.  

There are constitutional issues there, so there’s a lot at stake with this. And it’s largely about the ability to do datafied election campaigning, which is really fundamental to politics and how democracy happens.  


What can people do about these privacy concerns? 

People could write their MP — in particular, the MPs that are on the Procedure in House Affairs Committee — and tell them that they think that full privacy law should be applied to political parties, and that whatever was proposed for C-65 was not sufficient. 


What should people keep in mind when interacting with political parties? 

I would hesitate to advise Canadians not to interact with political parties, or not provide their personal information, but I think it might be worth contemplating what it means for a political campaign to be conducted, based not on open discussion and conversation, but on information that parties are gathering by means that are not transparent, and gathering information that people would not voluntarily share, and would not consent to parties collecting.  

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