Life in Canada

12-month change:

1. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose 2.0% in the 12 months to April, following a 1.5% increase in March. The April 2014 rise was the largest since April 2012.
2. The larger year-over-year rise in the CPI in April compared with March was led by energy prices, which increased 8.4% in the 12 months to April, after rising 4.6% in March.
3. Prices increased in all major components in the 12 months to April. The increase in the CPI was led by higher prices for shelter, transportation and food.
4. Consumer prices rose at faster year-over-year rates in six provinces in April compared with March. The largest accelerations occurred in British Columbia and Ontario. Prince Edward Island and Alberta saw prices rise at slower year-over-year rates in April than in March.

Month-to-month change:

1. On a seasonally adjusted monthly basis, the CPI rose 0.2% in April, following a 0.3% rise in March.
2. On a monthly basis and before seasonal adjustment, the CPI rose 0.3% in April, after increasing 0.6% in March.

Bank of Canada’s Core Index:

1. The Bank of Canada’s core index rose 1.4% in the 12 months to April, after increasing 1.3% in March.

It means that all smartphones sold in the state from July 2015 must be fitted with anti-theft software.
Such software allows owners to remotely disable and wipe their stolen handsets.
Police departments across the US have lobbied for such legislation. According to the US telecoms regulator, an estimated one in three robberies involve smartphones.
In the bill Minnesota legislators lay out the requirements: "Any new smart phone manufactured on or after July 1, 2015, sold or purchased in Minnesota must be equipped with preloaded antitheft functionality or be capable of downloading that functionality."
California is close to introducing a similar bill, while Congress is mulling national legislation.
Global initiative Along with New York state attorney general Eric Schneiderman and San Francisco district attorney George Gascon, he joined the Secure Our Smartphones initiative last summer.
The campaign is designed to put pressure on the phone industry to help solve the issue of smartphone and tablet theft.

Sensitive data Many handset manufacturers already have kill switches installed on their phones. Samsung has such a function and Apple offers a facility to track its devices via a service called Find My iPhone.

As well as GPS tracking, it also allows users to remotely wipe their phones.
Microsoft and Google have similar functions for their handsets and there are a variety of apps to locate, lock and wipe stolen smartphones.

"A large majority of smartphone users already have these capabilities and don't know it," said mobile analyst Chris Green.
He thinks that such a feature is more important for the business world than the consumer market.
"Companies are keen to clamp down on data theft as more and more people are using their phones and tablets to store sensitive data," he said.
And while the mobile industry largely embraced the idea of making phones installed with kill switches, there needed to be a move to create "one single standard" for such software, he added.
In the US Apple, Samsung, Verizon, T-Mobile and others have agreed that from July 2015 all handsets in the US will be fitted with anti-theft software, although it will not be switched on by default.
Some have questioned how effective such technology is though.
"A kill switch signal could do more harm than good. It is open to abuse from hackers sending kill switch signals to phones," said Grant Roughley, a senior forensic analyst at Essential Forensics.
And thieves too might find ways to get around the problem.
"Some phones are worth more in parts, so a stripped-down phone could be sold on for the same value," he said.

OTTAWA - United Nations fact-finder James Anaya says Canada "faces a crisis" when it comes to the situation of aboriginal communities.
But Anaya still had praise for federal and provincial initiatives geared towards addressing some of the chronic issues facing Canada's indigenous population.
"But despite positive steps, daunting challenges remain," the UN special rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples said Tuesday after a nine-day, six-province whirlwind inspection.
The relationship is marred by the deep distrust many aboriginals hold with regards to government, Anaya said - something he believes both sides need to address.
"What the aboriginal people need is a genuine coming together with government in order to build trust," he said.
And he said many steps taken to address issues of poverty, housing, and land claims were insufficient.
Anaya's first-blush recommendations included a call to extend the five-year mandate of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to launch a national inquiry into murdered and missing aboriginal women, and to expand consultation on the First Nations Education Act being developed by Ottawa.
The Conservative government has balked at similar recommendation in the past.
Anaya said his advice is based on "sound human rights foundations" and that governments and First Nations, Metis and Inuit groups at least agree steps need to be taken to address the longstanding problems.
"That's the starting point - there's agreement on this," he said.
"What's being discussed is what is the best path forward. And I'm saying the path forward needs to be defined with the participation of aboriginal peoples concerned. If that doesn't happen, the path forward is going to be a rocky one."
He also urged governments, industry and aboriginal leadership to sit down together to tackle sticking points on natural resource development.
"There needs to be further dialogue with regard to the pipeline issue," he said.
The federal government is trying to get British Columbia First Nations on side for key energy infrastructure projects, including the Kinder Morgan and Northern Gateway pipelines, but is facing fierce opposition.
Aboriginal Affairs Minister Bernard Valcourt said in a statement Tuesday that Anaya's comments "encourage us to continue working hard to achieve results. We look forward to the Rapporteur's final report and recommendations and look forward to recommendations that will help us complete the goal of reconciliation."
His report will be presented to the UN Human Rights Council next fall.
Anaya's visit comes after a raucous few months last winter between aboriginal leaders and the feds, spurred by the Idle No More movement and Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence's liquid diet protest.

Federal government departments are collecting data on Canadian citizens via their social media accounts for no good reason, Canada's privacy watchdog says.

In a letter to Treasury Board president Tony Clement in February, interim privacy commissioner Chantal Bernier says "we are seeing evidence that personal information is being collected by government institutions from social media sites without regard for accuracy, currency and accountability."
The letter dated Feb. 13 also reads: "Should information culled from these sites be used to make administrative decisions about individuals, it is incumbent upon government institutions to ensure the accuracy of this information."
Clement replied to her letter, promising to ask Treasury Board officials to study the matter and report back to Bernier.

Government questioned

The issue came up in the House of Commons on Thursday. NDP MP Megan Leslie asked how the government sees fit to collect and stockpile more private information on citizens in a time when privacy issues are becoming more critical. "The government scrapped the long-form census because it was too intrusive, but they're fine with private companies intruding on the personal lives of millions of Canadians," she told Clement during question period.

Without explaining what, specifically, was being monitored and collected, Clement justified the practice by saying the government is merely finding new ways of communicating with citizens.
"Whether it's in a letter or a petition or written on the street, this government always wants to listen to Canadians who want to be heard," Clement said. "Of course we must and will operate within the law, within the confines of the Privacy Act, and of course we are always willing to engage with the privacy commissioner to ensure that our oversight and our laws, the oversight of government, is modern."
But "we will continue to communicate with Canadians who want to communicate with us," Clement said.
The letter is just the latest example of how Canada's chief privacy watchdog has raised a red flag about troubling gaps in the security of Canadians' personal information.

Other concerns

Last month, Bernier's office revealed that various government agencies have made almost 1.2 million requests for personal information about Canadians from Canada's major telecom companies, often without a warrant. Last year, the commissioner's office criticized two federal government departments for improperly collecting data of a personal nature on prominent First Nations activist Cindy Blackstock. Although it said collection of data about Blackstock's employer and human rights campaign were fair game, the data collection veered into information of a personal nature — an obvious violation of "the spirit, if not the letter, of the Privacy Act," the privacy commissioner said at the time.

Bernier sent CBC News her report on Blackstock's case, which states it is a "misconception that people surrender their right to privacy by posting on Facebook."
In an email statement today she also said the more recent intrusions into Canadians' privacy by two government departments underscore the need for guidance in this area.
"It is increasingly important to develop guidelines to clarify privacy protections with respect to the collection of publicly available personal information from social media sites," she wrote.
"In a recent investigation into the collection of information from a First Nations activist’s personal Facebook page, we took the position that this type of information can only be gathered in situations in which a direct connection exists to the institution’s operating programs or activities," she added.
The Privacy Act does allow for government to collect data from social media, but only when there's a direct relation to a specific program or activity — it's not just a blank cheque to collect data for no specific purpose.
"Even in cases where authority exists, institutions may not be ensuring the accuracy of such information," the letter says.
Privacy lawyer David Fraser agrees, saying he hopes decisions on government programs such as Employment Insurance aren't being made with inaccurate data. "It's not just that they're looking, they're collecting," he told CBC News in an interview. "Transparency is the way to deal with this head-on."
"People using social media [voluntarily] put their information out there … but if it's being collected on a database that really takes it completely out of that realm," he said. "We have doors and curtains in our lives for a reason."
For him, the issue isn't that public information is being stored, but rather why. "Is there a list of people who've shown negative opinions [of the government]? We're left with a lot of questions and no real answers," Fraser said.

Clarity needed

"The public availability of personal information on the internet [does not] render personal information non-personal," the privacy commissioner said in the annual report to Parliament last year. "For good or ill, research demonstrates that social media users have a certain expectation of privacy," the letter says.
Bernier calls on government to more clearly define what information from social media can be collected, under what circumstances and for what purpose.
"As there appears to be a lack of clarity around this issue, we would suggest that it would be timely to have the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat develop and issue clear, mandatory guidance to articulate what constitutes 'publically available' personal information, how and when such information can be collected and used [and] what responsibilities must be met to ensure its accuracy and currency," the letter reads.

Chantal Bernier, Canada's interim privacy commissioner, revealed Tuesday that nine telecommunication companies got a total average of 1,193,630 requests from federal enforcement bodies for private customer information every year. Big Brother is getting nearer

The breadth is difficult to swallow for Halifax privacy lawyer David Fraser.
"The scale of it is really quite shocking. And it raises a bunch of other questions," said Fraser, an attorney with McInnes Cooper.

Eastlink is reassuring customers it will only hand out their information if there's a warrant or under certain legislation, like the Income Tax Act. What do they really mean by certain information - does anyone know

Fraser said that's comforting.
"To put it very shortly, they should have a big sign, a big welcome mat that says, 'Come back with a warrant,'" he said.

What remains a mystery is why the government needs so much information in the first place.
It's also not clear how many of an estimated 35 million Canadians are swept up in the approximately 1.2 million requests.
"The number of times I decide to call my wife in the run of a day and where I am and what number I use, that sort of information is nobody's business but my own," said Fraser.

Canada's interim privacy commissioner wants to know a lot more about what telecoms are doing.
"I would like to know the scope of personal information that is disclosed to government authorities, with or without a warrant, and what type of information is disclosed," Chantal Bernier said.
Bernier said she wants privacy laws changed so service providers have to break out statistics to give Canadians an idea of how many requests they comply with.