How relevant.
First of all, just to put it in perspective, Europe does not have separate legislation for private and public sectors, and I have often questioned in my mind whether we should. But we do and we have an excellent system. The reason we do is easily justified by the difference in legal paradigms that are the subset of both. This, again, goes back to my answer to Ms. Rempel, meaning one is the state-to-citizen relationship Privacy Act and that is grounded strictly in necessity. The state cannot intrude upon your privacy unless it is demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.
The relationship you have with other data holders, say Google, Facebook, or any company you buy something from, is predicated on your relationship, your free relationship with them, and therefore is built on consent.
I think that the way we have it constructed is working very well. However, the bridge that you're pointing to is extremely important and increasing. We've seen it with what is often referred to as the deputization of the private sector. Obviously, the big showdown of Apple and the FBI is an example of that in the U.S., where you have this treasure trove of information in the private sector that the law enforcement agencies, therefore the public sector, wants to have access to. How do we regulate that connection?
There has been clarification in Canada. One clarification was, as I mentioned earlier on, R. v. Spencer. A more recent clarification that goes more directly to your question is in R. v. Rogers Communications Partnership. That was January 2016, where the issue at hand was a judicial warrant for a tower dump, a tower dump being giving to the police all of the exchanges, communications, within the vicinity of a specific cellphone tower, which would have resulted in providing the police with 43,000 people's exchanges between, say 3:00 and 5:00 on that day. Why? Because there had been a jewellery robbery at that time on that day. Rogers said, no, opposed the warrant, and the police stood down. However, Rogers still went to court and said that warrant was invalid because it was overly broad. The police replied via the Auditor General that Rogers had no standing in fighting this issue, whereas the court—and this is very important to your question—said not only was Rogers right in refusing to comply with a judicial warrant because a judicial warrant was too broad to be constitutional, but it had the obligation to oppose the warrant as its contractual duty to its customers.
That really illustrates, I believe, the link you're making between public and private.