Article published in The Ottawa Citizen, May 18, 2000, p. A-15
Worried about what Jane Stewart's database says about you? The federal government had your number a long time ago, writes Pierre Lemieux
HRDC's Original SIN
by
Pierre LemieuxWhy all the fuss about the large database on Canadian citizens maintained by Human Resources Development Canada?
For example, take my dog, Walden. She has a good master who provides her with a continuous supply of manna, a warm place to sleep, old-age security, and veterinarian services with no waiting list (compare that with human medicare). To take good care of her, I also control her behaviour: do this, don’t do that, come here, don’t eat that! Obviously, I need to know everything I can about her. She has no secret for me, and she trusts me blindly. Good girl!
Now, if you think that governments are not to citizens what masters are to their dogs – if you would rather believe that politicians and bureaucrats are the running dogs – matters are a bit more messy. So, let’s get serious and talk about the mess.
Bruce Phillips, the federal Privacy Commissioner must be commended for revealing what most people already suspected. For how can the Canadian state take care of us from the cradle to the grave, how can it regulate our lives for our own good, without proper information about us? Information is necessary to both the Welfare State and the Control State.
Not only is controlling individuals one of the main historical activities of states, but the democratic, egalitarian, Welfare State (whether of the European or of the American sort) has pushed this activity to unknown heights. Nineteenth-century French political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville vividly foresaw how our “administrative tyrannies,” although less arbitrary, would regulate individual lives much more minutely than did the Ancient régime.
Exaggerating? You need a government licence to drive motor vehicles – and they did not stop there. You now need licences to drive a motor boat, to engage in occupations like school teachings or house building, to own a radio or television station, to get a job, open a bank account or borrow money (this broad license is called “social insurance number”), to sell wine and spirits, to hunt or fish even on your own piece of land, to have a gun in your own bedroom (where the thing must be kept according to detailed regulations and may the object of warrantless searches), and so on, and so forth.
Whether to care for individuals or (more realistically) to keep them in their place, the state regulates their lives. Wide police powers and enormous amounts of information are required, even if these instruments are attenuated, or concealed, by the rule of law (or what remains of it). To finance these activities, the state levies outrageous taxes which, by themselves, force individuals to spit much information. Or else.
The very name of the federal bureaucracy that has the heaviest hand in the fichage of so-called citizens is itself revealing: “Human Resources.” If there is one book that should be read across this land, I would suggest Bertrand de Jouvenel’s On Power. A French political theorist with leftist leanings, de Jouvenel showed how the modern state has come to consider, and use, individuals as its human resources. Actually, this book should be required reading among those who govern us. And let’s do it their way: you read it, or five years in jail.
Why should we be concerned with “privacy” anyway? The bottom-line answer is, “Because we want individuals to be able to hide things in order that Power be unable to control everything.” Privacy is desirable because it is a built-in constraint on Power’s growth, not merely because gossip is annoying.
There is one tool that, in Canada like in the United States, has made possible the building of connected and intrusive databases. It was created by the federal Big Brother and it is called the social insurance number. Without this universal identifier, an HRDC type of database would be more costly to build, unreliable and, therefore, not very useful nor threatening. Without this universal identifier, the feds (and its provincial Little Brothers) could not levy outrageous taxes and sniff our traces from the cradle to the grave – not to talk about the dangerous weapon the SIN gives private companies. Without this universal identifier, we could perhaps hope to chain up the state as the watchdog it is supposed to be, and to prevent much suffering for our children.
But time is running short. Human resources of the world, unite!