Life in Canada

 Canadian mobiles tracked by Govt

Canadians' movements, including trips to the liquor store and pharmacy, were closely tracked via their mobile phones without their knowledge during the COVID-19 pandemic, a report sent to a parliamentary committee shows.

Outbreak intelligence analysts BlueDot prepared reports using anonymized data for the Public Health Agency of Canada to help it understand travel patterns during the pandemic.

The federal government provided one of these reports to the House of Commons ethics committee as it probed the collection and use of mobile phone data by the public health agency.

The report reveals the agency was able to view a detailed snapshot of people's behaviour, including visits to the grocery store, gatherings with family and friends, time spent at home and trips to other towns and provinces.

MPs on the ethics committee expressed surprise at how much detail the report contained, even as all identifying information was stripped out.

“Questions remain about the specifics of the data provided if Canadians' rights were violated, and what advice the Liberal government was given,” said Damien Kurek, Conservative MP for Battle River-Crowfoot.

The committee on Wednesday released a report on its overall probe into the agency's collection of phone data during the pandemic. It concluded the government should tell Canadians if it collects data about their movements and allow them to opt out.

The Public Health Agency said it took safeguarding Canadians' privacy very seriously and the analysis on Canadians' movements it received “is not about following individuals' trips to a specific location, but rather in understanding whether the number of visits to specific locations have increased or decreased over time.”

“For example, point-of-interest data from BlueDot identifies the number of visits to grocery stores, parks, liquor stores and hospitals,” a spokesman said. “All we receive is the location of the point of interest and the number of visits for a specific day.”

Adam van Koeverden, parliamentary secretary to the minister of health, sent the sample BlueDot report to the ethics committee on Jan. 31. It covers movements in September 2021.

The report provides information on how many people were moving between specific towns, such as the border community of Abbotsford, B.C., as well as provinces and territories. It shows movements across the Canada-U.S. border, comparing travel to previous weeks and years going back to 2019.

The phone locations allowed the agency to get a picture of gatherings occurring in people's houses, such as over the Labour Day weekend. The report included a graph recording hours spent away from home in each province between Christmas Day 2020 to the week of Sept. 19, 2021.

Kamran Khan, founder and CEO of BlueDot, said the company's role is to produce “infectious disease insights,” not to collect location data directly from mobile devices.

He said BlueDot has no interest in the movements or lifestyles of individuals.

“Our only goal is to help protect lives and livelihoods from infectious diseases, which requires intelligence about overall trends in populations,” he said.

The company procured anonymous and aggregated data from third-party vendors so there was no information about the specific device the data came from.

“None of the information ever includes demographic information or specific identifiers or anything like a name, telephone number, email or address,” he said.

“The data and analysis that we do provide are indicators: statistical summaries of anonymous device information, such as the total number of devices traveling between two cities.”

The public health agency gave The Canadian Press an example of the way the data is presented to them, showing addresses of beer and liquor stores, the number of visits and the date the visits occurred. It included no names or identifying personal information.

The US blamed Canada on Sunday for the disastrous ending to the G7 summit, saying Prime Minister Justin Trudeau "stabbed us in the back," while American allies held Washington responsible.

 Justin Trudeau deploys the politics of hype.

Last month, in a speech to France’s National Assembly, Justin Trudeau raised one of his favourite themes: inequality. This, he declared, was “eroding not only the standard of living of the middle class, but also the confidence of the population in world trade, international cooperation and liberal democracy”.
It wasn’t the first time Canada’s 23rd prime minister had raised these issues with an international audience. Last year Trudeau made similar remarks to a dinner for civic and business leaders in Hamburg. “When companies post record profits on the backs of workers consistently refused full-time work – and the job security that comes with it – people get defeated,” he said. “And when governments serve special interests instead of the citizens interests who elected them – people lose faith.”
While not exactly the stuff of Woody Guthrie songs, rhetorical maneuvers such as these have successfully convinced many observers that the Trudeau government is serious about reducing economic inequality from a leftwing, anti-austerity position.

“A lurch to the left” was how the Atlantic’s David Frum described Trudeau’s victory in 2015, going so far as to compare him to socialists Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn. This sentiment has largely been echoed within Canada, where commentators have variously gushed about the return of progressive government, or warned about the impending injection of “populism” into the Liberal agenda.
Despite such bluster, though, Trudeau’s carefully choreographed crusade against inequality has always been more affectation than reality. Consider the disjuncture between Trudeau’s rhetoric and his actions.
In 2015, the Liberals promised to raise taxes on “the wealthiest 1% while cutting them for the middle class”. The pledge sounds attractive enough in principle, but in practice amounted to a small tax increase for top earners and a corresponding tax cut, the major gains of which went to people making between $89,200 and $200,000 a year. With a median family income in 2015 of $70,336, the beneficiaries are not exactly Canada’s “middle class”, let alone its working poor.
Some of the country’s wealthiest corporate executives, meanwhile, got to keep a lucrative tax loophole allowing them to pay a 50% lower rate on compensation earned through stock options – despite the Liberal campaign pledge to cap it.
His embrace of Keynesian economics has been equally ethereal. In 2015, apparently rebelling against the prevailing economic orthodoxy of austerity, the Liberal leader pledged to stimulate the economy through modest, deficit-financed social investment.
Upon implementation, however, some $15bn was chanelled into an “infrastructure bank”, geared to attract private financing. The promises of “socially useful, non-commercial projects like childcare or affordable housing to cash-strapped cities” will take a back seat to those with “revenue-generating potential”. And while investors are likely to see big returns, it is the public who will shoulder much of the risk.


Trudeau has also remained ambivalent towards the kind of big programs that could actually redistribute wealth in a meaningful way. On childcare, for example, he favours a means-tested approach, rather than the universal, public provision of a desperately needed service. And in a 2016 conversation with a low-wage worker he dismissed the prospect of raising the minimum wage, echoing the talking points of the Canadian business lobby: “Maybe everything just gets more expensive or we have jobs leaving. We have to be very careful about that.” (A 2011 University of California, Berkeley study found the effects of raising the minimum wage on prices to be negligible at best. And the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has argued that service sector jobs that tend to pay the minimum wage are by their very nature immobile, which suggests the threat of mass job flight is a myth.)
Besides the obvious disjunctures between record and rhetoric, a closer scrutiny of Trudeau’s actual attitude towards economic inequality is perhaps even more instructive. In a 2013 article for the Globe and Mail, “Why it’s vital we support the middle class”, he issued a warning to Canadian elites:
“National business leaders and other wealthy Canadians should draw the following conclusion, and do so urgently. If we do not solve [the problems facing the middle class and low-income earners], Canadians will eventually withdraw their support for a growth agenda. We will all be worse off as a consequence.” Rising inequality, he said, could lead to “deepening divisions” such that Canadians might “begin to vote for leaders who offer comforting stories about who to blame for our problems, rather than how to solve them”.
This is plainly the language of technocratic management, not moral urgency; first and foremost an appeal to the self-interest of elites rather than a coherent political demand directed at the powerful. In Trudeau’s war, it seems, inequality is a faceless and abstract enemy – a puzzle to be solved rather than an injustice to be stamped out.
And while the prime minister calmly informs struggling workers that raising the minimum wage may have unintende
d consequences, the country’s wealthiest corporate executives get to keep their cushy tax advantages. The phony war rages on.

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