The statute is pointed somewhere else
Federal private-sector privacy law in this country applies to organizations that collect, use or disclose personal information in the course of commercial activity, and it carves out collection for purely personal purposes. A person walking through a mall wearing camera glasses is not an organization and is not engaged in commerce. The manufacturer is both, but it is not the one deciding where the camera points.
The commissioner can pursue the company over what it does with data once the data arrives. That is worth having. It leaves the encounter itself, which is the part that troubles people, outside the reach of the instrument.
Stronger powers over a party who is not there
Policy Options has hosted this debate for years, including the argument that enforcement powers are the key to meaningful reform rather than further refinement of consent language. We think that case is correct on its own terms.
It is also orthogonal to this problem. Order-making power, fines and audits all presuppose a regulated entity within reach. Increase them tenfold and the person recording strangers at a bus stop remains exactly as unregulated as before, because the question was never how hard the commissioner can hit. It was who is standing in front of them.
The lever is the space, not the statute
Our position is that the fastest available action in Canada is not federal reform. It is the institutions that already control spaces and already write rules for them. Transit authorities, hospital networks, school boards, courts, municipal recreation facilities. Each has authority over conduct on its premises, each has written a phone policy at some point, and none of them needs a new act of Parliament to write this one.
What is missing is guidance. No federal or provincial body has published anything a facility manager could adopt, so the rules that do appear are drafted by whoever felt the pressure first, in whatever language they could manage. That produces a patchwork nobody designed, and it is happening now regardless of what the reform timetable does.