Canadians don’t trust the government with their data, and they told us why

Over 4,600 Canadians told OpenMedia what they want from a modernized Privacy Act. The community has a clear ask on data sharing, transparency, and AI.

Canada's Privacy Act has governed how federal institutions handle our personal information since 1983. More than four decades, dozens of new technologies, and one AI boom later, the federal government is finally reviewing it in 2026. So we asked our community what they wanted to see change.

4,688 community members responded. The results are clear, consistent, and not particularly subtle: Canadians do not trust their government to handle their data responsibly, and they have specific, structural reasons why.

The trust issues

Only 7% of respondents say they mostly or fully trust the government with their data. Seventy percent say they have little to no trust at all. When we asked people to explain why, the answers weren't vague. They pointed to specific, addressable failures:

• 85.6% said data gets shared without their knowledge
• 85.4% cited a lack of transparency about what's collected and how it's used
• 80.5% pointed to AI being used to make decisions about people
• 79.9% cited data breaches and security incidents

Notably, bad personal service experiences ranked far lower, at just 37%. This isn't about a frustrating call with a government call centre. It's a systemic, structural distrust. Structural problems have structural solutions: better transparency, real consent, meaningful limits on AI, and stronger security practices. None of that is out of reach.

What Canadians actually want

The survey didn't just surface Canadians’ concerns about governments’ practices. It surfaced a fairly detailed policy wish list.

On data sharing between departments

Canadians want meaningful consent before their data moves (88.8%), strict limits on what's shared and why (88.7%), data minimization so only what's necessary gets shared (84.6%), and real technical safeguards during transfer (86.2%). Whether you're comfortable with the government sharing your data between institutions split our respondents almost evenly, but the conditions under which they'd become comfortable were consistent across the board.

On staying in control of their own data

People want more than a public registry. They want a personal portal where they can see exactly what's happening with their information (84.6%), the right to be notified when their data is shared (roughly 4 in 5 respondents), and independent audits proving the system works as promised (81.7%). The right to access your own data was the single highest-rated ask in the entire survey, at 96.9%.

On AI decision-making

This is where the numbers get the most lopsided. When an AI system makes a decision about someone’s eligibility, screening, and service access, 90.5% want a full explanation of how that decision was reached — and 87.7% want a universal right to have a human review it. 86.5% want judicial recourse if it goes wrong. And only 23.6%, the lowest result anywhere in the survey, think a system-level AI certification alone is sufficient oversight. Canadians are not interested in taking an AI system's word for it.

Our finding sits in direct tension with the government's own direction. Ottawa has been pursuing an aggressive AI adoption strategy, while a segment of our community, speaking in their own words in open comments, called for AI to be kept out of government decision-making entirely.

The government's ambitions and Canadians' wishes are on a collision course. The strongest path to bridging that gap, especially for those who want no AI and those willing to accept it under strict conditions, runs through the very things our survey majority demanded: full transparency about when and how AI is used, and a guaranteed human in the loop for every consequential decision.

On accountability

92.4% want a mandatory, independently monitored correction plan. 88.6% want criminal liability for willful violations. 85% want personal consequences for the senior officials responsible, not just a line item in a department's budget. Departmental fines were the least popular accountability measure, at just 58.9%, with many respondents pointing out, correctly, that fining a department is really just fining taxpayers twice.

When it comes to who should be enforcing all of this: 83.4% want oversight vested in a body that's genuinely independent of government, whether that's a strengthened Privacy Commissioner or an entirely new tribunal. Only 6.8% trust parliamentary oversight to do the job, and a mere 3.2% want review kept inside the Treasury Board.

What our community said: Media Riff-Raff

We didn't just want survey data, we wanted to hear people think out loud. On June 29, 2026, we hosted the second edition of our live community conversation series, Media Riff-Raff, where we walked through the Privacy Act and its 2026 review, and our Executive Director, Matt Hatfield, presented these survey findings to close to 30 attendees.

What came out of that townhall lined up mirrored with what the survey told us, but a few themes came through with even more intensity once people were talking to each other in real time rather than filling out a form.

• Government data-sharing without consent was, unsurprisingly, a flashpoint. Attendees pushed hard on what "consent" should actually mean in a context where using a government service is often not optional. Several pointed out that consent buried in fine print, or treated as a precondition for accessing a benefit, isn't really consent at all.
• AI making decisions without human review generated some of the most pointed comments of the evening. The room was largely unified on this point in a way the survey's open comments also reflected: people don't want AI making consequential decisions about their lives without a human who can be held accountable for the outcome, and a court they can appeal to if it goes wrong.

There are two concerns that surfaced in the conversation and comments we received from the survey that the structured survey questions didn't fully capture, and they're worth calling out on their own.

Digital sovereignty

Our community members raised, repeatedly and without prompting, the question of where Canadians' data actually lives and who can access it. Concerns centred on Canadian government data being hosted on servers owned by foreign companies, exposure to laws like the US CLOUD Act, and the broader geopolitical risk of having sensitive information about Canadians sit outside Canadian jurisdiction. The ask was specific: data about Canadians, including data held by crown corporations, should be hosted and governed by Canada.

This theme echoed a smaller signal already present in the survey, where 86.2% supported technical safeguards like encryption during data transfer, but the townhall made clear that for many, encryption alone doesn't answer the sovereignty question. The infrastructure itself matters.

Government reliance on US digital services

Closely related, several community members raised concerns about government digital services depending on platforms from Microsoft, and other US companies. The argument made was that essential government interfaces shouldn't require a Canadian to use an American company's services to access them, and ideally should be usable on open platforms, including Linux, without relying on proprietary ecosystems; or even being accessible in analog format on paper.

This wasn't a structured survey question this year, but given how consistently it came up unprompted in the townhall, it's a strong candidate for direct inclusion in how we frame our recommendations going forward.

What this means for the 2026 review

Taken together, the survey and the community live conversation tell a consistent story. Canadians don't distrust their government in the abstract. They distrust specific, nameable practices: data moving without consent, decisions made by systems no one can question, and a government accountability model where consequences fall on taxpayers rather than the people responsible.

The fixes Canadians are asking for aren't radical: meaningful consent, real transparency, a human in the loop, independent oversight with teeth, and ecosystems that keep Canadian data in Canadian hands.

The 2026 Privacy Act review is the chance to build that. We'll be taking these findings and the voices from Media Riff-Raff directly into a full submission to the government, with the community input attached and concrete policy recommendations built on it. We'll be posting that submission on our site when it's ready. If you want to stay involved as this fight continues, sign up for updates.

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