The House of Commons’ access to information, privacy and ethics committee will be recalled for emergency meetings after the Conservatives were “alarmed” to hear that the Public Health Agency used anonymised mobile data to see how Canadians were responding to public health measures. The point of the data collection is to get a sense of travel patterns during these kinds of measures, and to see whether people stay at home, or how far they go, and because its anonymised, nobody can see who is doing what individually—they’re looking at patterns.

But this kind of wailing and gnashing of teeth over anonymised data is nothing new for Conservatives, who have sounded this particular alarm before when Statistics Canada was hoping to use anonymised bank data to track Canadians’ purchasing habits in a more robust and accurate way than shopping diary surveys can, and lo, that project got iced. Of course, because irony is dead, the Conservatives’ election platform had their “carbon points” plan, which would require so much itemised consumer data that it puts this kind of anonymised data to shame, but why worry about consistency or logic?

Because this is a House of Commons committee, we are guaranteed that this is going to be nothing more than a dog and pony show. If they agree to hold a study on this—which it’s not yet guaranteed—it’s going to be hauling public health officials before committee and subjecting them to ridiculous questions that have little to do with this particular issue, in the hopes of catching them out on something, and attempts to build some kind of conspiracy theory that the government was trying to play Big Brother during the pandemic, and it will balloon from there until the point where the government has had enough and starts filibustering the increasingly unreasonable demands by opposition members, and the committee will grind to a halt. Because that’s how this kind of thing happens every time, because our MPs are more concerned with being partisan dicks on committees than actually doing their jobs of accountability. But maybe I’m just getting cynical about the current state of affairs in federal politics.

Good reads:

• Justin Trudeau held a call with premiers last night, and naturally, they were all demanding more health care funds without strings, which shouldn’t happen.
• Canada has offered its support to the US in whatever measures they are willing to take to deter a potential Russian invasion of Ukraine.
• Mary Ng says she is pursuing trade talks with Taiwan, which is a big shift in the relationship with China.
• The Federal Court of Appeal agreed to hear Major-General Dany Fortin’s case to demand reinstatement to the defunct position of head of vaccine distribution.
• Quebec’s chief public health officer has resigned, citing a public loss of confidence in his advice.
• An Alberta First Nation says that the province won’t allow it to take over its child welfare system, in spite of federal laws that allow it to do so.
• A BC court has denied a First Nations injunction to restore a river flow to restore fish habitats, but opened the door for federal and provincial cooperation to do so.
• Kathryn May parses last week’s massive deputy minister and senior bureaucrat shuffle, and gives some sense of why it happened the way that it did.
• Susan Delacourt sees value in Quebec expanding its vaccine mandate to cover liquor and cannabis stores, and why that will likely be an effective tool.

Odds and ends:

For the CBA’s National Magazine, I look at the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision to hear the appeal challenging the Safe Third Country Agreement.

Canadaland asked Tara Henley to be specific about her accusations about the CBC, and it’s been a while since I’ve seen someone prevaricate and flail this much.

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