(LifeSiteNews) — The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) has invoked “commercial confidentiality” to keep secret thousands of pages of data it collected from millions of Canadians without consent via cellphones during the COVID-19 so-called pandemic, according to Blacklock’s Reporter.
“We leveraged anonymized, population-aggregated, near real-time mobile device location data to estimate dynamic changes in population mobility patterns across the country,” the PHAC said in a weekly Canada Mobility Trends report.
“Data contain only a unique device ID and there is no information pertaining to users themselves,” the report stated, adding, “We have developed internal policies to limit access to these data and create guardrails to safeguard privacy.”
According to Blacklock’s Reporter, the PHAC “did not elaborate” on these “internal policies,” and “[a]ll figures in the 116-page weekly report were censored.”
The PHAC was collecting data from cellphone users as part of its COVID lockdown enforcement efforts and received reports for over a year until MPs voted to suspend the practice in February 2022.
Blacklock’s explained that the data is now being withheld from Canadians under the Access To Information Act section 20.1, which allows the government to redact “financial, commercial, scientific or technical information that is confidential.”
Some of the report is unredacted, however, and shows that the PHAC was tracking citizens’ travel habits, including their “most common day home locations,” how “time spent away from home changed” during lockdown, “trends in indoor gatherings” and “trends in non-residential mobility” such as “travel to airports.”
When the scandal of the cellphone data harvesting first broke in early 2022, MPs on the House of Commons ethics committee voted unanimously to investigate the matter.
Conservative Party of Canada MP John Brassard, one of the ethics committee members, blasted the federal government at the time, hammering on the fact that “no consent” was “given by users to allow the telecom companies to collect” the data, and as a result, Canadians are “increasingly concerned about the expansive overreach by the government.”
Even left-wing MPs joined in to voice their opposition to the data collection program, with New Democratic Party (NDP) MP Matthew Green remarking, “The fact many people learned about this program from news articles sets off alarm bells.”
In addition to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s federal government, the provincial government of Ontario under premier Doug Ford also engaged in clandestine data collection via cellphone towers during the so-called pandemic.
In 2021, Ford was rebuked by Ontarians after he appeared at a press conference to say that “through cell service we can see people are not quarantining.”
When contacted by LifeSiteNews as to how the Ford government obtained what many at the time assumed was confidential data, Ford’s director of media relations Ivana Yelich said that the data was provided to them from third-party vendors.