Canada’s three main federal political parties are working together to fight voter privacy rights
Canada’s three main federal political parties are working together to fight voter privacy rights
Publish Date: 2026-03-11 07:59:00
Source Domain: theconversation.com
Federal political parties are in the process of exempting themselves, retroactively, from a law that would require them to be governed by the same privacy principles as other organizations.
Their efforts come in the wake of a 2024 British Columbia Supreme Court ruling that found the province’s Personal Information Protection Act — unlike federal privacy laws — applies to federal political parties.
The Liberal government’s Bill C-4, currently in the final stages of passing through Parliament, would change that.
Collecting voter data
Political parties and campaigns collect sensitive information about Canadian voters without their knowledge or consent — often working with a range of data and tech companies to do so.
Parties may make political inferences and use the data to decide who to target with ads, who to exclude, whose doors to knock on and which ones to walk by.
The B.C. ruling is critical because no federal law requires federal parties to comply with the privacy principles that businesses and governments must follow. Federal parties have been in a years-long court battle to keep it that way.
Jagmeet Singh, NDP leader at the time, knocks on doors during a federal election campaign stop in Edmonton in April 2025. Voter data collection by the three main federal political parties can even determine whose doors gets knocked on during election campaigns.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Christinne Muschi
B.C. Supreme Court Justice Gary Weatherill’s ruling that federal political parties are subject to the B.C. law was centred on three provincial residents who filed complaints in 2019. They accused three federal parties — the Liberals, New Democrats and Conservatives — of refusing to disclose or inadequately disclosing how they collected and used their personal data.
The parties argued the provincial law did not apply to federal political parties. They lost, and the…
