Canada: World-Leading Pioneer of Self Sovereign Identity for Digital Government

The Trust Over IP Foundation are hosting their first webinar ‘Trust over IP and Government‘.

The purpose of this event is to highlight the many ways in which governments, at different jurisdictions, can benefit from a shift to decentralized verifiable credentials as part of digitizing public services and rolling out digital identities for citizens and businesses.

Canada boasts world-leading exemplar case studies for the role of Self Sovereign Identity for Digital Government scenarios, including the ACE and BC Orgbook projects.

The User-Centric Verifiable Digital Credentials Challenge is intended to accelerate this momentum, and grow adoption across many more use cases.

“The Treasury Board Secretariat of Canada (TBS) and Shared Services Canada (SSC) are seeking a standardized method to issue and rapidly verify portable digital credentials across many different contexts, thereby reducing human judgement error, increasing efficiency and ensuring digital credential veracity using cryptography.”

The Github repo provides a detailed knowledge base explaining the program, and is also further explained in this document.

Use Cases and Vendors

The winning vendors are documented here, which lists the use cases they intend to implement and demonstrate:

• Bluink – Demonstrate eID-Me interoperability with Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs), WC3 Verifiable Credentials, and JSON-LD specifications.
• Aviary Tech – Demonstrate how cannabis licensees can use their government issued verifiable credentials to coordinate directly with the federal supply chain, rather than relying on the many integrations currently required.
• SecureKey – Enable users to share verified data from trusted partners including banks, telcos, insurance, and credit agencies. Issuing organizations will be able to create official digital credentials.
• Terrahub – Independently, cryptographically and rapidly verify an individual’s ability to perform a job or enter a site without the need for 3rd party verification.
• TrustScience – Demonstrate how a set of credentials containing the information (e.g., time of hiring, time of termination, employer, employer id, citizen id) along with the metadata are managed in a wallet controlled by a citizen and also be stored by the employer to be transmitted to the Canadian government.
• 2Keys – Demonstrate how issuers of evidence of foundational identity (birth certificates or permanent resident cards) can issue a digital equivalent (verifiable credential) that supports enrolment and delegation processes using verifiable credentials and supports an omni-channel approach to allow a user to present verifiable credentials online or in-person with the ability to cryptographically verify the provenance of the credentials whether connected or offline.