The closing of ranks: The collusion of federal political parties and the resistance to privacy regulation
21 Pages Posted: 2 Aug 2024
Date Written: January 20, 2024
Abstract
Canadian political parties are not generally regulated under Canadian privacy legislation -- either at federal or provincial levels. Recent efforts to bring them under the umbrella of privacy law, and the oversight of Canada's Information and Privacy Commissioners have been met with stiff and unified resistance. All political parties operate within a highly competitive political environment, but they are also entrenched and prone to collectively defend their interests against regulators. indeed, there is some literature that suggests that they operate as a form of "cartel" and have colluded in the past to exclude new parties form obtaining official party status, to shape the provision of state financial subsidies to benefit their own interests and to regulate ballot access. Can the resistance to privacy regulation be explained by the same "political party cartel" theory? This paper reviews the multi-pronged strategy to bring political parties within the ambit of Canadian privacy law over the last decade: the parliamentary pressure; the litigation; the public and media advocacy; and the targeted use of complaints to different regulators. Yet, after ten years of pressure, political parties are the one category of organization in Canada over which Canadians have few, if any, privacy rights. A deeper understanding of this resistance is key to rendering data-driven elections more transparent, and to extending privacy rights to individuals when their personal data is processed within the election campaigning context.
Forthcoming: Cecilia Biancalana and Eric Montigny (eds.) Artificial Democracy: The impact of big data on democratic governance in the age of algorithms (Vancouver: UBC Press).
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