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OTTAWA, Ontario (LifeSiteNews) – The government of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will now be scrutinized for secretly spying on 33 million cell phone users without one’s consent during the COVID crisis.

According to Blacklock’s Reporter as reported in the Western Standard, MPs from the House of Commons ethics committee voted 10-0 last Thursday to investigate the secret cell phone spying that the Trudeau government admitted to last week.

CPC MP John Brassard said the Trudeau government has been using the COVID crisis as a reason to spy on Canadians.

“It becomes increasingly concerning that government is seemingly using this pandemic as a means and a cause for massive overreach into the privacy rights of Canadians,” said Brassard, according to Blacklock’s Reporter. 

Brassard said that it is “incumbent upon us to make sure we protect those rights” to ensure that “there is proper scrutiny and oversight.”

The ethics committee is made up of MPs from the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) Liberal, NDP, and Bloc Québécois parties.

Brassard sponsored the ethics committee motion demanding that MP Jean-Yves Duclos, Canada’s current health minister; his predecessor, MP Patty Hajdu; and Canadian chief public health officer Dr. Theresa Tam be summoned for questioning for their roles in the scandal.

The news of the formal ethics committee investigation comes less than a month after Canada’s federal government admitted it covertly tracked the cell phones of 33 million Canadians throughout the COVID crisis, using cell tower data for months.

The secret tracking program was done under the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), which claimed the tracking was done to understand the “public’s responsiveness during lockdown measures.”

According to Mark Johnson, a spokesman for PHAC, the “urgency of the pandemic” justified the agency to collect and use “mobility data such as cell tower location data throughout the COVID-19 response.”

“It was to help understand possible links between the movement of populations within Canada and COVID,” said  Johnson, who also said the program has been made public to be “open and transparent.”

Surveillance was done throughout the pandemic to “analyze population movement data to better understand the public’s responsiveness during lockdown measures,” Johnson added.

Currently, the government of Canada has a federal contract notice tender out that indicates PHAC is looking to permanently use cell tower tracking for up to the next five years.

There have been indications over the past year and a half that the Trudeau government was planning to use cell phone data to determine travel patterns, done supposedly in the name of fighting COVID.

Just a few weeks into the COVID crisis in Canada, reports surfaced that the federal government was looking into using Canadians’ cell phone location data to track people’s movements.

In fact, in January 2021, Ontario Premier Doug Ford said that cellphone data his government is privy to indicated that many in his province were not following COVID quarantine restrictions. This raised many questions as to how the cell data was obtained.

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