Canadian regulators plan to move ahead with introducing national digital ID without the parliament’s involvement.
Leaving the process out of the parliament in terms of approval and oversight is sure to add to the existing controversy around the issue of digital ID, which was in the past criticized and even rejected precisely by a number of Canadian MPs and parliamentary committees.
On the other hand, this might explain why the regulators might rather take a route bypassing the lawmakers, despite the risky – in terms of proper democratic process – nature of such maneuvering.
Critics are now calling this (another) example of Canada’s Liberal government’s overreach.
Reports about these goings-on are based on Shared Services Canada (SSC), a government IT agency, recently announcing how the work on setting up a digital ID system for the whole country was progressing, while presenting this as essentially no different than current forms of obligatory ID (for instance, Canada’s equivalent to the social security number in the US).
But opponents in the parliament, and beyond, have been consistently for years reiterating that the scheme is fraught with dangers that are not comparable to those affecting traditional ID systems, neither in depth nor breadth.
These dangers range from data security, and cost of implementation, to various ways centralized databases containing people’s most sensitive personal information can be abused.
And those, again, range from security – to the risk of digital IDs getting turned into effective tools for government mass surveillance and control of the entire population’s behavior.
But SSC and other digital ID backers address these issues almost in passing while selling the benefits to the public as more convenience via unified access to government services, and even as something “empowering” citizens.
However, what the most prominent individuals and organizations that push for global digital ID adoption (like Bill Gates, Tony Blair, the EU, and the WEF…) present as a way to usher in more equity and equality is seen as creating exactly the opposite effect.
“Segregation and discrimination” is how one report out of Canada put it, the context being recent: Covid vaccine “passports” and the treatment received by citizens who decided against taking the jab.
