FYI - Article Out with Sharon and Joni both quoted
Begin forwarded message:
From: "Joni Brennan" <jbrennan@diacc.ca> Subject: [AEC] Canadian Affairs - Article on Auditor General's Report referencing DIACC
Date: 9 January 2025 at 12:21:10 GMT-5 To: "DIACC Adoption Expert Committee" <aec@diacc.ca>, "DIACC Policy & Industry Engagement" <aec-pie@diacc.ca> Reply-To: "Joni Brennan" <jbrennan@diacc.ca>
Dear AEC and AEC-PIE
At the close of 2024, a non-partisan Canadian (kitchen table) issues-focused news media organization, Canadian Affairs, contacted us to discuss the recent Auditor General's Report for a forthcoming article. It was an excellent opportunity to share our insight, and the nature of the reporter's questions further illustrated the public interest in the topic and the need for more accessible language education on the topics. The article is at the link below (registration is needed for access) and has been pasted for you to look at.
Best,
- Joni
Link: https://www.canadianaffairs.news/2025/01/07/ottawas-efforts-to-create-digita...
Ottawa’s efforts to create digital ID for citizens stalled: report
A recent auditor general’s report says Ottawa has made little progress implementing a digital ID for citizens, despite years trying to do so(4 min read) For years, Ottawa has been working to implement a national digital identification system that would offer citizens one secure key to unlock access to all its services.
But the federal government is virtually no closer to realizing this vision than it was five years ago.
That is the key finding of a recent report by Canada’s auditor general, whose audit revealed a government grappling with inadequate funding, bureaucratic impasses and privacy concerns.
“They’re definitely not progressing as quickly as they ought to be,” said Teresa Scassa, a professor of information law and policy at the University of Ottawa. “The private sector is moving towards digital ID applications, and people are embracing them and adopting them.
“And the government is just lagging behind.”
Funding hurdles
According to the auditor general’s report, the federal government has been working since 2019 to enable individuals to digitally validate their identity “to access services from all levels of government and elsewhere in the public and private sectors.”
Ottawa’s aim is to implement a digital ID system that would replace nearly 90 separate sign-in portals managed by individual federal departments. The Canada Revenue Agency’s sign-in portal is one example of such a portal.
The Treasury Board Secretariat — which in 2021 received a mandate to lead this work — has cited inadequate funding as the key reason for its slow progress.
The report does not reveal how much the government has spent on this work so far. Employment and Social Development Canada, the agency to which questions about the report were to be directed, did not respond to multiple requests for comment by press time.
Ottawa’s 2024 budget allocates $25 million over five years for Employment and Social Development Canada to establish a modern, single sign-in portal for federal government services. It is unclear whether this funding will be adequate. The report says the government does “not yet know what it will cost for departments to make that transition or how those costs will be funded.”
“ I think $25 million is a very low number for what is so much digital transformation,” says Joni Brennan, president of the Digital ID & Authentication Council of Canada, a non-profit that promotes digital identification technologies.
A 2018 study by the council pegged the potential value of implementing a “trusted digital identity” for Canadian citizens at one per cent of GDP, or $15 billion. The council’s study says its estimate is informed by evidence from other countries that have implemented a digital identity. These jurisdictions realized savings by reducing the cost of serving citizens, reducing fraud and reducing friction in the client experience.
“Whether that’s me having to call to reset my password, or losing my password, or a data breach, for Canadians to be competitive at home and on the global stage, there’s massive opportunity here,” said Brennan.
Scassa says there would be significant security benefits to adopting a standard digital identification.
“Anything that’s a more secure form of access to government services is a good thing — better than scribbling passwords down here or there, forgetting passwords, using the same password over and over. … I mean, there’s a lot of things that are not particularly secure about how we do things currently.”
Pushing back
Not everyone is convinced that following in the footsteps of other advanced countries is prudent policy.
“ Just because the other nations are doing it is no good reason for us to do it,” said Sharon Polsky, president of the Privacy and Access Council of Canada, a non-profit that promotes access to information, privacy and data protection.
“ What happens when things go wrong? … Look at the unintended consequences. That is something most people don’t look at.”
One of Polsky’s concerns is that digital identification protocols have the potential to undermine civil liberties.
“ Everything you do leaves a digital trail everywhere you present it,” she said. “Geolocation, precise time. They’re collecting that information. What assumptions will they make from it? Will those assumptions be correct?”
Polsky says it is possible for citizens to resist entirely transitioning away from analogue forms of identification, and notes that some people are already choosing to do so.
“How many people your age are dumping their smartphones and going back to stupid flip phones because they’re sick and tired of being monitored, tracked and surveilled and being online all the time,” she said.
Brennan says that the Digital ID & Authentication Council of Canada, which sets digital ID standards in Canada, takes seriously the issue of safeguarding Canadians’ personal information. The council includes representatives from government, financial institutions, payment networks and technology service providers.
“ We are dedicated to putting Canadians’ values and privacy and data control and respect at the centre of [standards] design,” Brennan said.
Lags behind The auditor general’s report says Canada now lags well behind peer nations on digital identification development.
In 2022, Canada ranked 32nd in the United Nations’ EGovernment Development Index, down from third place in 2010. The index ranks countries on their digital government capabilities, with a country’s score reflecting how well it leverages information technologies to improve public service delivery.
Canada’s federal structure is one reason a unified digital identification has been difficult to implement, the report says.
“ B.C. and Alberta are both further along in digital ID, and identity wallets in the case of B.C.,” said Scassa. “I think the risk that we run here is that we’re going to have … a fractured system like we often have in Canada.”
“ [T]here needs to be an ecosystem approach,” said Brennan. But collaborative data governance remains a big challenge, she says.
The provinces are the “data authorities” for most matters, she said, pointing to birth certificates and driver’s licenses as two examples. This leaves the federal government as the “consumer of identity from the provinces,” rather than the authority on data governance.
Senior federal officials believe implementing a single sign-in system prior to developing a national approach to digital identity could make it difficult to later achieve interoperability between systems, according to the auditor general’s report.
“They also acknowledged that the longer it takes, the more technically difficult and costly it will be,” the report says.
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