COVID Alert App — Part 6, Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED)
Industrial Enthusiasm Meets Governmental Pandemic Response
Please see the first five posts in this series, and my recent oped in the Toronto Star, for general context. This running series of posts are quick incremental working notes to document parts of this story so as to not get overwhelmed and to think together about it all.
The next post, #7, will focus on the idea of the COVID Alert app in terms of efficacy, data to understand efficacy, and the idea of technology as misinformation. If you skip down to the second-last photo in this post you’ll see where this is going. It’s important to understand where the government was in May of 2020 (date is approximate), about two months before the app’s launch, in prioritizing its understanding of efficacy for the app. This part of the history, and what can happen in a rush/under the guise of emergency measures (if only informally), is a major concern.
Power Without Responsibility
In posts to date, we’ve identified the party that is formally accountable for the COVID Alert app — the business owner— Health Canada. We’ve also identified three supposed sources of oversight for the app: the advisory council (now gone), the federal privacy commissioner, and the information and privacy commissioner of ontario.
If we circle back to the first group, the advisory council, we see the early and ongoing influence of Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED). From the advisory council’s terms of reference:
“The initial members of the Advisory Council, including the Co-Chairs, will be invited by the Deputy Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, on the advice of responsible Federal Deputy Ministers and senior officials.”
and also here:
“Health Canada is the business owner of the exposure notification service with responsibility for engagement with the provinces and territories, privacy and legal, and the communications strategy. The Secretariat support for the Advisory Council will be co-hosted by Health Canada and Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada.”
Industrial Enthusiasm, Influence, and the App’s Origin Story
In this realm, ISED is getting involved in the app, but it is not formally accountable for anything, I don’t think. Which is another way of saying it had influence and authority but no responsibility. Why? To properly answer this question about influence, we’ll need to zoom out further to consider and understand the global and domestic industrial and economic enthusiasm for applying a techno-solutionist approach to the idea of contact tracing. We’ll return to Apple, Google, and Shopify as key actors in this frame. In the reference diagram below, they sit below the government actors.
How these actors participated in and influenced the launch of this app, both in Canada and elsewhere, demands interrogation. It’s also worth noting that there appears to be an absence of any formal procurement measures triggered in the process in Canada. Shopify volunteers created open source code that the government could use for free. References to that code appear in government planning documents from May (est.) of 2020. Free and procurement and vendor accountability and app store and contracting questions all come into play here. Pinned for now. Moving on.
ISED and the App’s Advisory Council
The chief concern about the app upon launch should have been its efficacy — as in, how it was going to have a material impact on the government’s pandemic response. If this were the case, one could imagine that Health Canada would be in charge of the advisory council. And the reason for this is two-fold (at least).
- Health Canada has public health authority and responsibility. Health Canada has a fundamental relationship to public trust in public health policy.
- Health Canada, as part of being the app’s business owner, is/was in charge of coordinating with the provinces and territories (see clause f in the advisory council’s terms of reference). It’s at the provincial and territorial level that all the realities of how this app was supposed to work became real. To make the app “work”, there was going to need to be major coordination work with the provinces on health systems. This relates to testing capacity, lab processes, and one-time keys. This is not ISED’s realm. See the following from federal planning documents available through the access to information process. “Adoption by P/T healthcare providers will be a complicated, labour-intensive process unique to each P/T and is crucial to the app’s success.”
But Health Canada was not the sole organizer of the advisory council. ISED had a significant role. A bit more about ISED:
ISED’s mission: “Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada’s (ISED) mission is to foster a growing, competitive and knowledge-based Canadian economy.”
ISED’s mandate: “ISED helps Canadian businesses grow, innovate and expand so they can create good-quality jobs and wealth for Canadians. It also supports science research and the integration of scientific considerations into investment and policy choices. The Department helps small businesses grow through trade and innovation and promotes increased tourism in Canada. The Department also works to position Canada as a global centre for innovation where investments support clean and inclusive growth, the middle class prospers through more job opportunities and companies become global leaders.
ISED’s efforts focus on improving conditions for investment, supporting science, helping small and medium-sized businesses grow, building capacity for clean and sustainable technologies and processes, increasing Canada’s share of global trade, promoting tourism, and building an efficient and competitive marketplace.”
It feels necessary to put a pin in the need to understand and explore how these public oversight bodies, and how they are created, relate to any future technology initiatives.
Up Next in Post 7
See the starred text below from the federal planning documents as at May 2020 (exact date needs to be confirmed). “We do not yet have a plan for measuring whether, or how much, exposure notification is helping slow the spread of COVID-19.”
Exploring the reality of this statement, likely made in May 2020 (exact date to be confirmed) by the federal government will be the focus of the next post.
There is a lot to that statement. Including considerations of how public attention was organized to deflect from it. There are also public administrative questions here as to how something can launch with this kind of an issue sitting on the table both a) unanswered and b) not a priority.
Finally, there is an issue that is coming into clearer focus for me now, which relates to how privacy-preserving design can be leveraged to create a loop where what needs to be known for accountability (and efficacy) can’t be known because privacy. It’s a weaponization of privacy in relation to accountability, in simple terms. To put it in more neutral terms, perhaps, it’s a place where significant trade-offs have to be better understood and discussed. This loop has been pointed out by a few people, and it really hit home yesterday in a conversation with Paul-Olivier Dehaye who has been sharing insights and experiences from Switzerland’s app story, including this paper (have not read it yet). There is much to compare and some significant similarities of note in terms of jurisdiction problems related to implementation.
Process Notes
Waiting to hear back from various provincial institutions to better understand how the roll-out of the one-time keys was organized and led at the provincial level. Also continuing/beginning correspondence with the federal and provincial commissioners.
