Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to our witnesses. Through you, Mr. Chair, I'd like to start with Dr. Geist.
I've read a fair bit of your work. Like my colleague, Mr. Fergus, I appreciate your insights. They are thought-provoking.
I want to talk about transparency, because that's something that's come up for you many times in terms of your own writings with regard to the government on a multitude of issues to do with the Internet.
On March 23, 2020, the Prime Minister's website announced publicly, and he did a press conference about it, engaging PHAC with BlueDot in order to collect that information and use it for the purpose of the pandemic. Then, only on March 26 did PHAC actually enter the contract with BlueDot. Then regularly after that, Dr. Tam, through COVIDTrends, Twitter and other platforms aside from the hard-to-read government website pages that we all get kind of bleary-eyed from at times, regularly updated what was happening through COVIDTrends and made announcements on an almost weekly basis. Then, in addition to that, there were the subsequent announcements about interacting with third party privacy assessors on the process. Then finally there was another public engagement on the correspondence with the OPC, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner, on a contract. Let's be clear: The contract was from 2020 until March 18, 2022, so throughout that time, we've heard about regular biweekly engagements with the Privacy Commissioner. A briefing was submitted, I believe, on February 14, 2022, wherein PHAC gave a final briefing and concluded that, according to section 3 of the Privacy Act, the data did not contain personal information.
So there was regular engagement on this. You've talked about what we could have done better with respect to the transparency. We're clear about the de-identified, anonymized part of it. In terms of that public conversation that you've alluded to, could you say how we could have done it better in terms of the spaces we're working in?