44th Parl. 1st Sess.
March 28, 2023 10:00AM
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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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 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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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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