In October of 2003, Canada had the inconvenient fun of having to compare two competing indulgences.  On the one hand, there was the right of Parliamentary committees to summon and investigate all Federal organizations, whether they reported to Parliament directly or not.  And on the other, the right of the then Privacy Commissioner to keep his discretionary spending of public funds private.  Absurdity won.  But curiously, it was the Commissioner’s perverse spending that rankled Canadians.  His chicanery to deny the public the right to review the office of their own privacy ombudsman seemed overlooked. 

This reaction nicely typifies the confusion surrounding the concept of privacy, but it also damages the case that it ought to be esteemed as a fundamental freedom.  The scandal encourages the prejudice that privacy is something more synonymous with guile than personal freedom; namely, if there’s nothing to hide, why not provide?  Unfortunately, there seems to be few alternatives, since the dominant opposing argument can be found in the rebuttal of the ersatz Commissioner to Parliament; that is, there’s nothing to provide, since it’s the individual’s right to hide.