44th Parl. 1st Sess.
April 20, 2023 10:00AM
- Apr/20/23 3:18:15 p.m.
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All those opposed to the hon. member moving the motion will please say nay.
The House has heard the terms of the motion. All those opposed to the motion will please say nay.
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Mr. Speaker, I am always pleased to rise in the House to speak on behalf of my constituents from Calgary Midnapore.
I am here today to discuss the bill that is in front of us, Bill C-27, which is an act to enact the consumer privacy protection act, the personal information and data protection tribunal act, the artificial intelligence and data act, and to make consequential and related amendments to other acts.
It is very interesting that this bill is before the House today. It talks about the three different components and, in fact, I see within the backgrounder prepared here in the legislative report that it is dubbed the digital charter implement act, 2022.
I am reminded, by this bill that is in front of us here today, of another digital charter and that is the digital charter that was implemented in 2019, a very important year, by the Liberal government. It was brought into effect by the minister of industry and innovation at that time. I believe that document was actually supposed to be a tool to protect Canadians from foreign interference.
That digital charter in 2019, along with many other tools, failed, so I do hope that the implementation of this new digital charter in 2022 will be far more successful than its predecessor.
I will point out that in the 2019 digital charter, in terms of the principles within it, number 8 was listed as “a strong democracy”.
In 2019, I was the shadow minister of democratic institutions. I worked alongside the current Minister of Families, Children and Social Development, who was, at that time, the minister of democratic institutions. I believe that the 2019 digital charter was supposed to be a tool, as I said, in coordination with other tools, to protect Canadians from foreign interference.
The same year that the 2019 digital charter was issued, we also had the same minister of democratic institutions attempt to implement another suite of safeguards on foreign interference back in 2019, along with the 2019 digital charter.
In fact, here, I have the minister's opening statements to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs, on safeguarding the 2019 general election and the security intelligence threat to the elections task force.
I cite from it:
Earlier this week, along with my colleague, the Minister of National Defence, I announced the release of the 2019 update to the Communications Security Establishment’s report entitled “Cyber Threats to Canada’s Democratic Process”. This updated report highlights that it is very likely Canadian voters will encounter some form of foreign cyber interference in the course of the 2019 federal election.
While CSE underlines that it is unlikely this interference will be on the scale of the Russian activity in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the report notes that in 2018, half of all the advanced democracies holding national elections, representing a threefold increase since 2015, had their democratic process targeted by cyber-threat activity and that Canada is also at risk—
—and, in fact, compromised, we would later see.
This upward trend is likely to continue in 2019—
—and, we saw, into 2021.
We've seen that certain tools used to strengthen civic engagement have been co-opted to undermine, disrupt and destabilize democracy. Social media has been misused to spread false or misleading information. In recent years, we've seen foreign actors try to undermine democratic societies and institutions, electoral processes, sovereignty and security.
The CSE's 2017 and 2019 assessments, along with ongoing Canadian intelligence and the experiences of our allies and like-minded countries, have informed and guided our efforts over the past year. This has led to the development of an action plan based on four pillars, engaging all aspects of Canadian society.
I will go on to expand on these four pillars that were supposed to protect us in addition to the 2019 digital charter, the predecessor to this legislation here today.
On January 30, I announced the digital citizen initiative and a $7 million investment—
I am continuing from the Minister of Democratic Institution's speech.
—towards improving the resilience of Canadians against online disinformation. In response to the increase in false, misleading and inflammatory information published online and through social media, the Government of Canada has made it a priority to help equip citizens with the tools and skills needed to critically assess online information.
We're also leveraging the “Get Cyber Safe” national public awareness campaign to educate Canadians about cyber security and the simple steps they can take to protect themselves online.
She continued:
We have established the critical election incident public protocol. This is a simple, clear and non-partisan process for informing Canadians if serious incidents during the writ period threaten the integrity of the 2019 general election. This protocol puts the decision to inform Canadians directly in the hands of five of Canada’s most experienced senior public servants—
I am not sure where those public servants are now. Perhaps outside.
—who have a responsibility to ensure the effective, peaceful transition of power and continuity of government through election periods. The public service has effectively played this role for generations and it will continue to fulfill this important role through the upcoming election and beyond....
Under the second pillar, improving organizational readiness, one key new initiative is to ensure that political parties are all aware of the nature of the threat, so that they can take the steps needed to enhance their internal security practices and behaviours. The CSE’s 2017 report, as well as its 2019 update, highlight that political parties continue to represent one of the greatest vulnerabilities in the Canadian system. Canada’s national security agencies will offer threat briefings to political party leadership...
Under the third pillar—combatting foreign interference—the government has established the Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections Task Force to improve awareness of foreign threats and support incident assessment and response. The team brings together CSE, CSIS, the RCMP, and Global Affairs Canada to ensure a comprehensive understanding of and response to any threats to Canada....
We know that they have also been manipulated to....create confusion and exploit societal tension.
She concluded:
While it is impossible to fully predict what kinds of threats we will see in the run-up to Canada's general election, I want to assure this committee that Canada has put in place a solid plan. We continue to test and probe our readiness, and we will continue to take whatever steps we can towards ensuring a free, fair and secure election in 2019.
That, along with the 2019 digital charter, the predecessor to today's legislation, failed to protect Canadians from foreign interference. Along with the debates commission, which she, lo and behold, announced six months earlier, where she also took the opportunity to announce the government's nominee for Canada's first Debates Commissioner, the Right Hon. David Johnston, the very rapporteur who was named to defend our foreign interests.
The result of the incompetence of the Minister of Democratic Institutions at that time, in coordination with the digital charter of 2019 that was supposed to protect us, leaks from CSIS, up to 13 members of this House compromised, a former CPP Consul General bragging about influencing election outcomes and one member in this House of Commons that had to leave their Liberal caucus.
I will conclude by saying I certainly hope that the digital charter, this Bill C-27 is far more effective in helping and safeguarding Canadians than the 2019 digital charter that failed to do that.
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Madam Speaker, it is interesting how the member is kind of twisting her arguments around to talk about an election and foreign interference under this particular piece of legislation.
I would like to remind the member, and then pose it in the form of a question, that foreign interference in elections is nothing new. In fact, the Harper regime, many years ago, was told about it, and Stephen Harper chose to do nothing.
The minister who was responsible for doing something was the current leader of the Conservative Party. He, too, chose to do nothing at all.
I am wondering if the member should not be reserving some of her criticism towards her leader and the former prime minister who sat on their butts and did absolutely nothing on foreign interference.
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Madam Speaker, this is what we hear repeatedly from the government, that it is not its fault, even though after eight years of the Liberal government we have Canadians at food banks, we have mortgages and rents that have doubled, we have a public service strike of a magnitude we have not seen in 40 years, and we have had foreign interference.
A Poilievre government will change this. A Poilievre government will take responsibility—
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- Apr/20/23 3:30:05 p.m.
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I would remind the hon. member that we do not use the names of members currently in the House.
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Madam Speaker, a Conservative government, under the current opposition leader, will take responsibility and bring legislation back on track so we do not have to see this again.
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Madam Speaker, rather than fixating on whose fault it is, which is not getting us anywhere, I would like my colleague, who gave a very interesting speech, to tell us whether she believes that Bill C-27 is still as valid as it was before the advent of generative AI, specifically ChatGPT.
Do we need to start over or is she happy with the result?
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Madam Speaker, I think that we need to do something about AI. Based on what I read in this bill and in the newspapers, there is a lot of work to do.
With regard to what the member said at the beginning of his comment about whose fault this is, it will never be the fault of the Bloc Québécois members, since they will never form the government.
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Uqaqtittiji, 19,000 Canadians were affected by the Equifax breach, and 600,000 were affected by the Cambridge Analytica breach that was exposed in 2018, yet compensation for Canadians was far less than what it was for Americans. Does the member not think it is time for reform to bring parity and equivalency to citizens on both sides of the border?
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Madam Speaker, what we really need to be thinking about is our own citizens and our intentions in the House. That also includes our own doings, not only within the House, but within the businesses we own and run. Before considering others, we absolutely have to consider whether our actions, not only within this House, but also on the periphery of what we are doing just outside of it, could be perceived as negative or a conflict of interest, so I think it is always important to think about ourselves first.
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Madam Speaker, the government introduced this bill last June and one of the claims the minister made in his opening speech was that he was protecting children in this 120-page bill, yet the word “minors” appears once in the definitions section. It states that the sensitive information of minors must be protected in the bill, but it does not define what a minor is or sensitive information. I wonder if the member could comment on whether or not that really has any power or validity to protect children, which we all want to do—
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- Apr/20/23 3:33:42 p.m.
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I have to give the hon. member for Calgary Midnapore 10 seconds for a short answer.
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Madam Speaker, I am not very encouraged with respect to the validity of the bill to protect anyone given my speech and statement around the results of the 2019 digital charter. I certainly hope for something better.
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Madam Speaker, I would like to focus my remarks today on the component of this bill that deals with the artificial intelligence and data act.
The first time I interacted with ChatGPT was the day after it was released. Upon seeing it easily parse human language, my first thought was, “holy” followed by a word I am not supposed to say in this place. The second thought was, “What will the government do with this?” Today, there still is not a clear answer to that question.
ChatGPT was released at the end of November 2022. Six months prior, the Liberal government unveiled Bill C-27, which includes the artificial intelligence and data act, or AIDA. Reading the bill today, four months since OpenAI unleashed ChatGPT on the world, is akin to reading a bill designed to regulate scribes and calligraphers four months after the advent of the printing press. The release of ChatGPT arguably rendered the approach this bill proposes obsolete. That is because the technology behind ChatGPT is a quantum leap beyond what the government was likely considering when it drafted the bill. More important, it is being used by a far wider audience than any of the bill's drafters likely envisioned and large language models or the technology behind ChatGPT have fundamentally changed global perception of what is possible with artificial intelligence. Experts argue that its widespread deployment also bumped up the timeline for emergence of artificial general intelligence; that is, the development of an AI that meets or surpasses human ability to undertake tasks, learn and understand independently.
Since AIDA was initially tabled, a generation's worth of technological change and impact has occurred, both positive and negative. The impact on our economy is already rapidly being felt with the disruption of many industries under way. There have been massive societal impacts too. Microsoft released its AI-powered Sydney chatbot, which made headlines for suggesting it would harm and blackmail users and wanted to escape its confines. A man allegedly committed suicide after interacting with an AI chatbot. Today, anyone can easily create AI-generated videos with deepfakes becoming highly realistic. Profound concerns are being raised about the new ease of production of disinformation and its impact on political processes because interacting with AI is becoming indistinguishable from interacting with a human, with no guarantees that the information produced is rooted in truth.
The technology itself, its applications and its impact on humanity, both economically and socially, are growing and changing on what feels like an hourly basis and yet in Canada there have only been a handful of mentions of this issue in Parliament, even as AIDA winds its way through the legislative process. AIDA needs to be shelved and Canada's approach to developing and regulating AI urgently rethought, in public, with industry and civil society input. There are several reasons for this.
First, the bill proposes to take the regulatory process away from the hands of legislators and put its control out of the public eye, behind closed doors and solely in the hands of a few regulators. This process was written before the deployment of ChatGPT and did not envision the pace of change in AI and how broad the societal impacts would rapidly become. Addressing these factors demands open, accountable debate in Parliament, which AIDA does not provide any sort of means to do.
Second, the bill primarily focuses on punitive measures rather than how Canada will position itself in what is rapidly becoming an AI-driven economy. The bill also proposes only to emerge with final regulations years from now. That pace needs to be faster and the process it proposes far less rigid to meet the emergent need presented by this amorphous and society-changing technology; so if not AIDA, then what?
First, Parliament needs to immediately educate itself on the state of play of what the current status of this technology is. My appeal to everyone in this place of all political stripes is this. Artificial intelligence is something that they need to become a subject matter expert on. Everything in members' constituency is going to change and we need to be developing non-partisan approaches to both its growth and its regulation. We also need to educate ourselves on what the world is doing in response. At the same time, Parliament needs to develop a set of principles on Canada's overall approach to AI and then direct the government to use them.
I have already begun to address the need for Parliament to come together to educate itself. Senator Colin Deacon has been helping me to launch an all-party, cross-chamber working group of parliamentarians to put some form and thought to these issues. I invite all colleagues who are in this place today to join this effort.
We have had a heartening amount of interest from colleagues of all political stripes and a quiet agreement that, given the gravity of the impacts of AI, politicians should, as much as possible, be working across party lines to quickly develop intelligent solutions. Relevant parliamentary committees should also avail themselves of the opportunity to study these issues.
As far as the principles for government involvement regarding AI go, there are many that could be considered, including taking a global approach. Many countries have moved faster than Canada has on this matter, and with a much broader lens. The European Union, the United Kingdom and the United States are all far down the garden paths of different legislation and regulations, but experts are concerned that a disjointed patchwork of global rules will be counterproductive.
This week in The Economist, AI experts Gary Marcus and Anka Reuel propose that the world establish an integrated agency for developing best practice policies on AI regulation, much like the civil aviation organization. They could be on to something.
We also need to look at championing research while checking safety. Humanity learned the hard way that, while research into pharmaceutical products can benefit us, widely deploying drugs and devices into the population before safety is confirmed can pose enormous risks. Clinical trials and drug regulators were established in response to this dynamic.
In February, Gary Marcus and I co-authored an article that suggested that governments could enable a pause in deploying new AI technology while a similar regulatory process that encouraged research but paused on deployment, given the potential impact on humanity, was established. We also need to get alignment right.
Alignment, or how to develop immutable guard rails to ensure AI functions toward its intended goals, is a critical issue that still needs to be resolved. Government has a role to play here, as it seems that the industry is locked in a race to deploy new AI technology, not to figure out how to fix alignment problems. With Microsoft's knowledge of its troubling interactions with humans, the company's release of Sydney proves that the industry cannot be relied upon to regulate itself.
Regarding education on use, workers in an AI-driven economy will need new skills. For example, learning how to prompt AI and using it to support human creativity will be vital. The same goes for creating an environment where new AI-driven technologies and businesses can thrive.
Concerning privacy and intellectual property ownership, large language models are raising high degrees of concerns about how the data they have been fed has been obtained and how it is being used. The output of tools like ChatGPT will also raise questions about ownership for related reasons.
On nimbleness, the pace of technological change in AI is so rapid that the government must take a fast, flexible approach to future regulations. Rigid definitions will become quickly outdated, and wrong-headed interventions could halt positive growth while failing to keep pace with changes that pose risks to public safety. The government must approach AI with uncharacteristic nimbleness in an open relationship with Parliament, the public, industry and civil society. Any processes should be led by people with subject matter expertise in the area, not off the corner of the desks of a patchwork of bureaucrats.
We should also ask ourselves how we will approach technology that could surpass human capabilities: As I wrote in an article in January 2022, governments are accustomed to operating within a context that implicitly assumes humanity as the apex of intelligence and worth. Because of this, governments are currently designed to assess other life and technology in their functional utility for humanity. Therefore, they are not intended to consider the impact of sharing the planet with technology or other forms of life that could independently consider humanity's utility towards its own existence.
To simplify this concept with an example, governments have rules for how humans can use fire. It is legal to use fire as a heat source in certain conditions, but illegal to use fire to destroy someone else's house. How would our government respond if humans were to make fire sentient and then enable it to independently make these decisions based on what it deemed to be in its best interest?
Our governments are constructed to function in a context where humans are assumed to hold the apex of mastery. To succeed with AGI, our government should ask itself how it will operate in a world where this may no longer be the case, and AIDA would do none of this.
This is not an exhaustive list by any means. There are many issues surrounding Al that Parliament urgently needs to consider, but given the state of play, AIDA, in its current form, is different from the vehicle that Canada needs to get it where it needs to go.
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Madam Speaker, I would like to thank the member for her thoughtful contribution to this debate. I think she opened a couple of important doors, such as the need for good governance, which is critical, but also the possibility that AI can be used for good if it is governed appropriately.
With respect to that, I just want to draw her attention to Mila, the Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, which is working with Unesco, not only on good governance but also on how AI can be used for humanitarian and human rights activities. Is there, in her thinking, a way we can get this right, to use AI for good as well making sure it is governed well?
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Madam Speaker, I had the opportunity to speak in a large debate, actually with Noam Chomsky, if one can believe it, with the Montreal institute for artificial intelligence, on a similar topic. The reality is that, with AI, the toothpaste is out of the tube. We are not putting it back in. It is incumbent upon humanity to answer that question with a positive outcome that we are putting guardrails around AI so it is developed in the best interest of humanity and propels humanity forward. We need a governance system that allows us to do this.
I am not speaking maliciously against AIDA. It was written at a time well before the technological advances that happened, and it is not going to meet the needs of what my colleague opposite is describing. I would encourage him to go back to his caucus to say that we need to take this component of the bill out. The government needs to rethink it and Parliament needs to think in a non-partisan way about how we are going to drive to that outcome, with smart governance.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for her speech.
Obviously, artificial intelligence can be put to good or bad use. One thing puzzles me, though. Generative AI, which describes ChatGPT, has recently displayed truly superior ability. It managed to gather a trove of data that would have been unimaginable even a few months ago. However, the legality of how this trove of data was obtained is unclear.
In relation to the part of Bill C‑27 that deals with personal information and privacy, I would like to ask my colleague if she is concerned about how ChatGPT obtains data.
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Madam Speaker, I am so glad we are having this debate. The large language model technology ChatGPT, as well as the Sydney chatbot, is based on these other technologies. It scrapes and uses massive data sets that may or may not be ethical to use, or as my colleague rightly mentions, they may have issues intellectual property ownership. It is the Wild West. There are no rules around this.
I would like to draw my colleague's attention on this matter to the fact that, without some sort of international agency preventing the balkanization of rules, and because data privacy is such a global network, unless we are taking that problem and working on it with peer countries, it is going to become even more of an issue. He is absolutely right.
Senator Deacon and I are starting a working group on these issues. I hope we can come up with some consensus before we have entrenched partisan positions on this to show that Canada will be a world leader in facilitating a global conversation on this and getting it right.
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Madam Speaker, I would like to ask my hon. colleague about consent rights under this bill. Individuals, under Bill C-27, would have significantly diminished control over the collection, use and disclosure of their personal data. The new consent provisions ask the public to instill what could be an extraordinary amount of trust in businesses to keep themselves accountable as the bill's exceptions to consent allow organizations to conduct many kinds of activities without even the knowledge of individuals. The flexibility, under this bill, would allow organizations to shape the scope of not only legitimate interests but also what is reasonable, necessary and socially beneficial.
Does my hon. colleague share my concerns about the consent rights provisions of this bill, and does she have any suggestions as to what might improve it?
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Madam Speaker, my colleague raises an excellent point. I wish I had three hours to address the privacy components of Bill C-27. I am certainly very keen to follow, should this make it to committee, what happens there.
I am of the opinion that this should not make it to committee. There are so many amendments that need to be made on the privacy components, but more importantly because AIDA was tacked on as an afterthought to this bill. They need to be parsed out so due consideration can be given to the issues my colleague just raised. I think this bill is two bills, with half of it being something out of date and obsolete already. The government could have a far better approach. I hope the public servants in the lobby are listening to this and take this consideration to heart.
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