It's disingenuous to say citizens are being forced through google/apple for identity, when all govt services are now partially online, and we need a way to do identity, and federation with identities people already use and leveraging their authentication - and then adding proofing on top of that, is the most privacy protecting way to approach it.

Have been an architect on citizen identity schemes, and the conversation in govt that happens is mainly about whether to design and impose a new card based system (or similar) that has every forseeable feature they might need for the next 15-20 years it will take to get them out of circulation, and then write a gateway for it that applications have to integrate with - or federate to peoples' existing IDP's like banks, social platforms, and mobile devices using open protocols for authentication (SAML, OIDC), and then kick the can down the road on identify proofing for those credentials.

There are obviously tons of other factors and moving parts, but resolving this conversation within institutional governance frameworks is pernicious. A great example is that the legislative mandates of different government agencies may prevent them from sharing information about a citizen between them - because from a privacy perspective, there is no reason one agency should be able to use others to collect intelligence about you, because their only job is to provide you a service, and that is strictly prescribed.

The way we did it for federal services was a SAML federation between online banking and the federal government login, using a proxied MBUN (meaningless, but unique number), which has been in operation for over a decade and has been an acceptable privacy solution for all involved.

We don't have universal domestic identity cards in Canada because, like Germany, and other countries post WWII, we have a memory of how internal passport systems get used. The internal vaccine passport scheme for covid is wildly out of line with privacy legislation and outside the remit of government to institute in many ways, and was pushed through using emergency powers, and you can see how it has lost some momentum, but be assured, it will be back, this isn't their first rodeo trying to get national identity cards imposed, and these people never seem to give up.

We have a public health care system with cards for every eligible citizen, but the legislation for the cards explicitly defined the ID cards as not legal to use as any other form of identification (which again, may have changed during the pandemic), because using healthcare to impose a national identity system has historically (80s, 90s and into 00s) been seen as totalitarian, literally, the gesunteitpass/ahnenpass of a former age. Canada was where people escaped to from those regimes in the 20th century, and memory of them is still part of the national culture.

Also, where do you think identity comes from? Your name is from your family, birth certificate is issued through a hospital, your baptismal certificate by a church, your childhood vaccination cert by a municipal public health unit, drivers license by a DMV, your tax id and passport through a federal govt service, etc.

Your "identity," is not a document or a real thing, but rather, attributes associated with relationships, and even if we use biometrics and tag a guid to that and put it on some stupid immutable blockchain, it is still an artifact of relationships that are not the same for everyone. Anyway, there are maybe 1000 people in the world with similiar knowledge on this topic as mine, so please, AMA.