A Canadian legal advocacy group says the federal government’s proposed Digital Identity Program is prone to being used to access private information and increase control over people, drawing comparisons to Beijing’s social credit system.
Details of the program were revealed in a report titled Canada’s Digital Ambition 2022, published on the federal government website on Aug. 4. The report cited Canadians’ increased reliance on digital platforms during the COVID-19 pandemic and noted that the government established the digital ID program to deliver its services through “modernized and accessible tools.”
But in a recent report, titled Canada’s Road to Beijing, the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms warned that Canadians could be trading off their charter-protected rights and freedoms, drawing a parallel between the use of digital identity technologies in Canada and in China, which the constitutional rights group said “are uncomfortably close.”…