Former Conservative MP Derek Sloan’s Ontario Party is circulating a new petition demanding Doug Ford’s government ban the implementation of digital IDs..The petition follows an announcement from the Ontario government last year that it would create digital IDs as part of the province’s COVID-19 response and goal to be the “most advanced digital jurisdiction in the world.” .The data aggregation involved in such a system would give the government power to turn someone “off” from it, creating an inability for them to engage in society — much like occurs with China’s social credit system, Sloan told the Western Standard..“That’s literally what happens to people in China, who do the wrong things,” he said on Tuesday. “We don’t want to see anything like that kind of architecture being built here.”.The petition demands that any government seeking to establish a system “akin to the ‘social credit’ system of communist China be condemned, halted and banned.” It also requests that principles of data minimization, decentralization, consent, and limited access be upheld in Ontario while the world becomes increasingly digitized..Sloan, who’s heading up the Ontario Party after leaving federal politics, pointed to the federal government’s response to the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa as an example of how the government could use digital ID to control human behavior. .After employing the federal Emergencies Act for the first time in Canadian history to stop freedom protesters, the government froze bank accounts and cryptocurrency wallets to force demonstrators to leave the capital. .“If you’re a persona non grata, (the government) could easily, in the future, have a situation where they just literally turn the switch, and you’re out of the system,” Sloan said. .According to an Ontario government news release, the first step to digital ID is to verify your identity, and then to save digital ID documents in a mobile device digital wallet “helping people and businesses verify their identity anywhere.”.The technology would provide “connections to both internal government and external private-sector data sources to validate identity facts.”.“Ontario’s Digital ID will be able to operate at “internet scale” (securely, reliably, at high volumes, globally) and give users a simple, frictionless experience,” reads the provinces’ digital ID vision..China’s social credit system began as a patchwork of voluntary systems, many of which are now mandatory, Sloan said. .He’s referring to China’s national credit rating and blacklist, developed by the People’s Republic of China. It was launched nationally in 2014, and calls for the establishment of a unified record system so that businesses, individuals and government institutions can be tracked and evaluated for trustworthiness to the state. .Sloan said he’s hoping to collect at least 20,000 signatures. Ontario Party MPP Rick Nicholls will submit the petition before the Ontario legislature breaks ahead of a provincial election in June. .The petition had nearly 3,000 signatures as of publication on Tuesday. Kaleed Rasheed, Ontario’s associate minister of Digital Government, did not respond to a request for comment..Rachel Emmanuel is the Edmonton Bureau Chief for the Western Standard
