44th Parl. 1st Sess.
March 28, 2023 10:00AM
Madam Speaker, after testing ChatGPT earlier, I continued my research with Bing and asked it whether the Liberal government deserved Parliament's confidence when it comes to its Bill C‑27. The search engine told me that the bill enacts the Consumer Privacy Protection Act and that the Liberal government had introduced it in 2021. It also told me that it was unable to tell me whether the Liberal government deserved Parliament's confidence regarding this bill, but I could read the details of the bill.
Fortunately, artificial intelligence still has its limits because we need to think for ourselves. I will ask my colleague from Provencher a question. Would the Liberal government deserve our confidence when it comes to Bill C‑27? The member talked in his speech about confidence in the government. Accordingly, should we not be urgently sending the bill to committee? I think that everyone agrees on the need to regulate artificial intelligence. There is urgent work to be done in committee. Will the member be able to quickly provide his support to influence the content of this bill?
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Madam Speaker, I find it interesting that the member inquired with ChatGPT to determine whether or not Canadians should have confidence in the Liberal government on Bill C-27.
I would be much more curious had the member asked whether Canadians should have confidence in the Liberal government, period. I believe its AI ChatGPT would have been crystal clear in saying that no, we do not have confidence in the Liberal government.
Having said that, we do think this legislation is important. I think we are going to listen to debate to make a decision whether or not to send it to committee for further study.
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Madam Speaker, my question for the member is about the balance between personal information, privacy and business interests. It is something that this bill focuses a lot on.
The government talks about balancing them rather than the personal privacy of an individual being paramount. In particular, in subclause 18(3) of this bill, the government says that it is okay if it is in the “legitimate interest” of the company, even if it harms an individual. They do not need express consent to use the information.
I wonder what the member's views are on that, and whether or not the government is actually putting the emphasis on the individual or the big tech giants from the U.S.
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Madam Speaker, if we read the bill, especially in section 18, where the government has carved out a little space for business, it would appear as though business interests trump those of the private individual. I believe that mistake has been made too often, where we have given personal data to businesses too flippantly. Personal private data, first and foremost, belongs to, and should be protected by, the individual.
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Madam Speaker, as I look around the chamber today, there are a few people who I think would remember my predecessor in my role as the member of Parliament, when I first was elected, for Wild Rose. His name was Myron Thompson. Myron was pretty well known. He was the guy with the cowboy hat and he was pretty outspoken.
One thing many people do not know about Myron Thompson is that back when he was a young guy he had a try-out with the New York Yankees. He was a pretty good baseball back catcher, but he did not make the team, and it was because there happened to be a future Hall of Famer at that position for the New York Yankees.
I wanted to reference that future Hall of Famer today because it is an amazing testimony to the impression he made on the culture. As an 1950s era baseball catcher, he is still famous not just for his play on the diamond but also for the gems he dropped in conversation off the diamond.
His observations have actually even found a place in English lexicon and are known as “Yogi-isms”. Of course I am talking about Yogi Berra. That is the fellow who beat out Myron Thompson for a spot on the New York Yankees way back then. He became a 1972 Hall of Fame inductee. He has 10 World Series victories to his credit, which is the most of any Major League Baseball player in history.
An hon. member: You've got to tie it in to the legislation somehow.
Mr. Blake Richards: Madam Speaker, he is certainly better known for the way his trademark mangling and misuse of words and phrases has resulted in strangely keen insights that are still widely quoted today by many. I have a few favourites. One of them is “I didn't really say everything that I said.” Another one is “We made too many wrong mistakes.” Another is “Swing at the strikes.”
When I thought about Bill C-27 and preparing to speak today, it brought to mind Yogi-isms, and not only because those examples I just cited reminded me of the Liberals' poor approach to governance but because the title of this bill is a real mouthful at 35 words long. This brought that to mind as well.
For now, I will call it the consumer privacy protection act, but it is really summed up best by what is probably the greatest Yogi-ism of all, which is “It's déjà vu all over again.” That really speaks to it. The member was looking for me to tie it back in, so there it is. There is the tie back in.
Here we are in 2023 and here I am speaking on yet another rehash of another Liberal bill from years previous. They have a real penchant for that, these Liberals. They kind of remind me of Hollywood Studios that no longer seems to be able to produce an original script so it just keeps churning out sequels. If Bill C-27 was a film, one could call it “Bill C-11, the redo”. Bill C-27 is essential a warmed-over version of previous Bill C-11, the digital charter implementation act the Liberals introduced back in 2020.
It is not to be confused with the current Bill C-11, which is also making its way through Parliament and is the online streaming act and which also poses another threat to Canadians' privacy and online freedoms.
It is really easy to see a bit of a pattern evolving here. In any case, in May 2021 the Privacy Commissioner said the digital charter act “represents a step back overall from our current law and needs significant changes if confidence in the digital economy is to be restored.” It of course died when the Prime Minister cynically called an expensive and unnecessary election nobody wanted and everybody paid for and that did not change the Prime Minister's political fortunes one iota.
Bill C-27 carries the stamp of that former digital charter proposal, which Conservatives had concerns about then, and which we still have concerns about in its new form now. Some of the text is in fact directly lifted from Bill C-11 and the text of that bill is available for all to review.
Let us talk more about the impact of the bill's content, rather than the wording itself.
The bill purports to modernize federal private sector privacy law, to create a new tribunal and new laws for AI, or artificial intelligence, systems. In doing so, it raises a number of red flags. Perhaps the most crimson of those flags, for me, is that the bill does not recognize privacy as a fundamental right. That is not actually all that surprising, because this is a Liberal bill. I hear daily from Canadians who are alarmed by how intrusive the Liberal government has become, and who are also fearful of how much more intrusive it still seems to hope to become.
It just seems just par for the course for the government that, in a bill dealing with privacy, it is failing to acknowledge that, 34 years ago, the Supreme Court said privacy is at the very heart of liberty in a modern state, individuals are worthy of it, and it is worthy of constitutional protection.
When we talk about privacy, we have to talk about consent. We have seen far too many examples of Canadians' private and mobility data being used without their consent. I think some of these examples have been cited previously, but I will cite them again.
We saw the Tim Hortons app tracking movements of people after their orders. We saw the RCMP's use of Clearview AI's illegally created facial recognition database. We saw Telus' “data for good” program giving location data to the Public Health Agency of Canada.
These were breaches of the privacy of Canadians. There needs to be a balance between use of data by businesses and that fundamental protection of Canadians' privacy. The balance in this bill is just wrong. It leans too heavily in one direction.
There are certainly issues with user content and use of collected information. For instance, there are too many exemptions from consent. Some exemptions are so broad that they can actually be interpreted as not requiring consent at all. The concept of legitimate interests has been added as an exception to consent, where a legitimate interest outweighs any potential adverse effect on the individual. Personal information would be able to be used and shared for internal research, analysis and development without consent, provided that the content is de-identified. These exemptions are too broad.
The bill's default would seek consent where reasonable, rather than exempt the requirement. In fact, there are several instances where the bill vaguely defines terms that leave too much wiggle room for interpretation, rather than for the protection of Canadians. For example, there is a new section regarding the sharing of minors' sensitive information, but no definition of what “sensitive” means is given, and there would be no protection at all for adults' sensitive information. These are both problematic. De-identification is mandated when data is used or transferred, but the term is poorly defined and the possibility of data being reidentified is certainly there.
Anonymization or pseudonymization are the better methods, and the government needs to sharpen the terms in this bill to be able to sharpen those protections. An even more vague wording in the bill is that individuals would have a right to disposal, the ability to request that their data be destroyed. Clarification is certainly needed regarding anonymization and the right to delete or the right to vanish.
There are many more examples. I know my colleagues will certainly expand on some of those questions as posed in the bill. I know my time is running short. I want to speak to the individual privacy rights of Canadians briefly.
Canadians value their privacy even as their government continually seeks ways to compromise it. The Public Health Agency of Canada secretly tracked 33 million mobile devices during the COVID lockdown. The government assured them their data would not be collected, but it was collecting it through different means all along.
Public confidence is not that high when the Liberals start to mess in issues involving privacy. The onus should be on the government to provide clarity around the use and collection of Canadians' private information because, to quote another Yogi-ism, “If you don't catch the ball, you catch the bus home.”
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Madam Speaker, I was mostly listening for the Yogi Berra quotes, but I think there is one the member missed that speaks to Bill C-27, which is, “The future ain't what it used to be”, and that is exactly why we need Bill C-27.
The former member for Timmins—James Bay, Peter Kent, and I worked together on the ethics committee and the privacy committee a number of years ago, and we all shared a sense of optimism around technology and the possibilities of the Internet.
What we have come to learn is that we need much stronger protections. I have two young kids. They are growing up with the Internet. We need our laws to reflect our shared reality. We need age-appropriate design codes. We need the right to be forgotten. We do need a much stronger bill, but we need to get the bill to committee.
What are the member's thoughts on getting the bill to committee and improving the bill? I hope we get it there as quickly as possible. We are at a fork in the road, and “[i]f you come to a fork in the road, take it”.
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Madam Speaker, maybe I have set a trend here with the Yogi-isms. He said, “The future ain't what it used to be”. It seems, though, that with this government, the future is what the past was.
That was the point of the remarks I made. It is, unfortunately, a pretty apt remark.
What it really boils down to is that we have a government that I think Canadians do not feel they can trust to get the balance right here. Those are the concerns that I am sharing and that I continue to have.
I know that both here in the House and in committee, if and when it arrives there, concerns will certainly be raised there as well. I look forward to hearing them.
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Madam Speaker, my colleague talked about freedom of expression and misinformation. I hope that this will be taken into consideration in this bill when we hear from the experts. This is crucial and essential.
I recently met with researchers at the Université de Sherbrooke who told me that Canada lags far behind Europe in all those areas. At the international level, much remains to be done in Canada with regard to privacy and cybercrime.
Although it is not perfect, this bill needs to be referred to committee. We need to hear from experts. Perhaps even the ones at the Université de Sherbrooke will testify before committee. I hope so.
We need to move forward on this fundamental issue. It is the next big threat for Canada and the world, and it will need to be taken into consideration.
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Madam Speaker, I appreciate the invitation to be heard from a committee. I am not sure that I would consider myself an expert in any way. I know that there will be many whom people need to hear from. However, one of the groups of experts that we need to hear from is Canadians themselves. Canadians are concerned about their privacy.
Beyond that, the member mentioned the fact that we need to look at what other countries are doing and things like that. I think that is important as well.
I did not get a chance to reference it in my remarks, although I had hoped to, but we know that what is being proposed here is much different from what the EU has in place under its General Data Protection Regulation and even what Quebec has in its GDPR-style regime.
I think we will have to consider that and what those implications are in terms of the adequacy of international—
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- Mar/28/23 3:51:38 p.m.
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Before we go to the next question, we ask that the people in the courtyard calm down. It is very difficult to hear.
The hon. member for Timmins—James Bay.
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Madam Speaker, I had the great honour of working across party lines in 2018 on issues of privacy. The idea that citizens somehow opt in through terms and conditions has to be debunked.
I never gave Gmail the right to read my mail. I never gave Google the right to listen in on my phone. The terms and conditions are a fundamental problem.
The question is whether we limit the power of surveillance capitalism to gather data. What data should they be allowed to gather and what should they not be? It really has to come down to dealing with very, very superpowerful corporations. It is not like my data is in the cloud in this little box. Their ability to take everything we do and track us needs to be limited.
To my colleague: Would the Conservatives support putting limits on the amount of data that is collected by the tech giants?
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Madam Speaker, I think that the member raises some important points. These are questions that need to be resolved. There is no question about the fact that this is a bigger and bigger issue, as more and more data on Canadians is out there.
I think that this has to be dealt with and there needs to be a balance found. However, I just do not think that Canadians trust the current Liberal government to find the right balance.
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Madam Speaker, given the interest that we had in this place about Yogi-isms and in honour of that, I hoped to ask my colleague, the previous speaker for Banff—Airdrie, about “It ain’t over till it’s over.” In this government's case, a piece of legislation is not over until it gets a do-over because the government never seems to get it right the first time. We seem to be revisiting issues when we warned the government in previous parliaments that it was headed down the wrong track. We have, of course, a do-over now with this piece of legislation, redoing some of the work that the government tried to achieve in previous parliaments. However, here I am today talking about Bill C-27, the digital charter implementation act.
Some members might be interested to know, although I highly doubt it, that when I was a tenured faculty member at Red Deer College, I taught systems analysis and design, programming and database administration. I know it is hard to believe that a guy who likes hunting and fishing as much as I do also sat in a cubicle where they slid pizzas under the door, where I just churned away and developed code and relational databases and did some data architecture work for a handful of years.
It does not seem all that long ago. I got that education just prior to Y2K, and members would remember the scare everyone was going to have with Y2K. I worked in the private sector for a while, but the college I graduated from liked me so much as a student that it invited me back to be a teacher. I taught until 2005 in the information technology field.
I gave a speech a while ago talking about how much and how rapidly technology has evolved and the laws pertaining to that technological advancement. It was 2005 when I left the college, because in January 2006, I was elected to this place. Therefore, I am now a 17-year obsolete data programmer. If I am ever frozen and brought back, it is because I can still program in COBOL and C++, and many of these program languages are still around today.
I am loath to talk about floppy disks at my age. We do not have those anymore. As a matter of fact, I am part of a generation, as are a number of my colleagues, that was probably the last generation on this planet that did not even have cellphones. We had to actually remember people's phone numbers in our heads. When our house phone rang, we actually made an effort to go get it. I do not know if that happens much anymore, but this is where I am at. Long gone are the days of floppy disks, although I do hear that C Sharp and other object-oriented programming languages are still in vogue. That is nice to know.
Today, our information is not stored on floppy disks or hard drives, at least not the same kind of hard drives there were when I was in the business. It is now stored in the cloud, and targeted ads come up on our phones. Every time I bring up Instagram, I do not know where these algorithms get the information from. They must be listening to everything I say because all I get are ads for fishing rods, brand new boats, fish hooks, and I will admit, the cure for plantar fasciitis. Therefore, my phone is clearly listening to everything I say and even the things that my doctor is saying to me in the privacy of a patient-doctor confidential room. However, I am digressing.
This obsolescence in both technology itself and its rapid advancement is something that most of us—
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- Mar/28/23 3:57:15 p.m.
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I will interrupt the hon. member.
I will ask for some order. There is a member making a speech, and I am having a lot of trouble hearing him.
The hon. member for Red Deer—Lacombe.
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Madam Speaker, I know that the speeches I give in this place generate a lot of interest. We cannot fault everybody else here for the excitement of today.
When I was a teacher in IT, I remember having conversations about ethics and the privacy of information in the basic introduction courses that I would teach to young aspiring IT professionals. That is why the notion of our personal information and protection of electronic documents legislation is so important.
For those who are not aware, the act has not been fully updated since its passage in 2000. Ironically, that was the same year that I started working full time as a tenured faculty member at Red Deer College, which is 23 years ago—
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- Mar/28/23 3:58:23 p.m.
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I just want to interrupt the hon. member. I have been listening, and I am not even sure if the noise is coming from inside the chamber or from around the surrounding area. I would ask the Sergeant-at-Arms to take a walk in the hall outside to ask everyone to keep it down, and I will ask everyone who is in the chamber to sit down to listen to the hon. member for Red Deer—Lacombe. I am sure we all want to hear what he has to say.
The hon. member for Red Deer—Lacombe has the floor.
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Mr. Speaker, I thank you for generating that much enthusiasm and excitement for what I have to say because it is riveting. It is going to save our privacy and information, if people would just listen to what I have to say here right now, but I digress.
In that 23 years since I started teaching at Red Deer college and since the passing of the original act, PIPEDA, as it is affectionately known, IT, our information systems and our networks have developed so rapidly that the legislation has not kept up. That lack of urgency is not only in the government in getting it wrong in the previous Bill C-10. I am not talking about the disastrous Bill C-11 we have been talking about recently. I am talking about the previous version of Bill C-11 back when the current Bill C-11 was Bill C-10. As I said earlier in my speech, there are so many pieces of legislation that the government has had to redo that it gets difficult to keep track of all the numbers over the years and over the Parliaments.
I would just urge my colleagues to stop to consider the very important nature of this legislation as it pertains to the protection of our personal information. Are there some things in this bill that I could support and that others in the House should be supporting? Of course there are. The bill presented in the House today allows us to have a conversation about the future of Canada's privacy protection and other technological advances, such as those found in artificial intelligence, which is the next great breakthrough. It will challenge us as lawmakers in this place to keep up with the technological advances, all of the good and bad that come from artificial intelligence.
As I understand it, the EU's 2016 General Data Protection Regulation, otherwise known as the GDPR, is the gold standard for this type of regulation and I hope that, despite some of our differences here, and there are many, we could at least agree to strengthen the privacy protections for Canadians.
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- Mar/28/23 4:00:59 p.m.
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I am going to interrupt the hon. member again.
Order. If I can have member's attention please. That is very good.
The hon. member for Red Deer—Lacombe may continue.
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Mr. Speaker, this is the last time I accept a speaking slot before the budget from the whip's office. Let me just say that.
All kidding aside, we need to trace back the history of this bill. Canada's original digital charter was mapped out in 2019. That is why I referenced that this is a redo of something we did just a few years ago. One of its primary principles was the control and consent of one's personal information, as well as transparency. These are the most salient parts of that charter. It also attempted to back them by a regime of enforcement—
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- Mar/28/23 4:01:53 p.m.
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The hon. member has been very patient and good. He has two minutes and 19 seconds left, but in all fairness, I am going to arbitrarily make a decision. The hon. member will have five minutes remaining when he comes back if he wants to continue.
It being 4 p.m., the House will now proceed to the consideration of Ways and Means Proceedings No. 10 concerning the budget presentation.
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