44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 21, 2024 10:00AM
- May/21/24 11:31:56 a.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, I wonder if my colleague could comment on the gross domestic product.
We sometimes take for granted that we are a well-developed country, yet we do not have a very good track record when it comes to the latest announcements about our gross domestic product, particularly in the G7, never mind the G20.
56 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- May/21/24 11:32:24 a.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, it really is quite sad where our GDP is per capita. The GDP per capita actually puts us dead last amongst G7 countries. Why is that important? Because it is not just a number. GDP per capita is a measure of what Canadians make and what they deliver in terms of services. The more products we make and the more services we deliver means the more goods, the more bounty, the more prosperity across this nation. The real nub of the issue is the fact that when prosperity shrinks, as it has over the last 10 years, which is Canada's very own lost decade here, it hurts the most vulnerable the most.
The folks who have big trust funds, like the Prime Minister, will be okay. It is the people who are going to the food banks in Otonabee, in Cobourg or in Port Hope who are suffering because of these socialist policies that are failing Canadians.
160 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- May/21/24 11:33:29 a.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, I suspect that if you were to canvass the House, you might find unanimous consent to allow for the debate to be adjourned so that we can continue on with Routine Proceedings.
34 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- May/21/24 11:33:41 a.m.
- Watch
Is it agreed?
Some hon. members: Agreed.
7 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- May/21/24 11:35:05 a.m.
- Watch
moved:
That it be an instruction to the Standing Committee on Industry and Technology that, during its consideration of Bill C-27, An Act to enact the Consumer Privacy Protection Act, the Personal Information and Data Protection Tribunal Act and the Artificial Intelligence and Data Act and to make consequential and related amendments to other Acts, the committee be granted the power to divide the bill into two pieces of legislation:
(a) Bill C-27A, An Act to enact the Consumer Privacy Protection Act, containing Part 1 and the schedule to section 2;
(b) Bill C-27B , An Act to enact Personal Information and Data Protection Tribunal Act, and an An Act to enact the Artificial Intelligence and Data Act, containing Part 2 and Part 3.
He said: Madam Speaker, I rise today on an important debate that is coming from the industry committee. Right now, we are studying what seems to be the unending study of Bill C-27, which is privacy legislation.
I have risen in this House before at least one other time on this matter, as have other members of the Conservative Party and other parties, including the NDP. We are rising today to request that this bill be split into two parts. One would be the privacy legislation replacing PIPEDA in the tribunal, and the second one would be AIDA, or the AI portion of this bill.
The reason for that is twofold. It is taking a long time to pass this bill mainly because of the government. The government produced a bill that was flawed, and because of this flawed bill, when it presented the bill, it presented 55 amendments to the bill. We have been going through them at committee, and we are now just getting through the definitions part of clause-by-clause on the first part, which is PIPEDA. We are finding there has been 16 table-drops to this bill for amendments.
This bill was not ready to come to the floor. We are looking at the need for privacy legislation, which we do agree with. Conservatives have stood in this House and said we believed that privacy should be considered a fundamental right for Canadians. When we look at that aspect of the bill, and it is very important, the second part of this bill, the AI, the AIDA, portion of this bill, is so flawed that it is holding up the first part of the bill.
The parts never should have been put together; they should have been separate. There were some fundamental reasons why the government wanted to put them together. With 55 amendments and 16 subamendments to the main part of the bill, this bill is so flawed we cannot even get through the first part. We are worried if the bill is not separated into two votes, and we do not have AIDA separated and perhaps have it come back as a whole new legislation, we are not going to get the first part of the bill through, which is privacy legislation that Canadians are desperately asking for.
After nine years, Canadians have never had less privacy. We look at the fact that we have Alexa, or AI of any form, and when our children are on their iPads, that data is being scraped off the Internet and collected. None of it is private. We do not have any privacy with our data.
This week, we are looking at privacy, and we are trying to discern the difference between normal privacy and sensitive data. Sensitive data would be looked at under the act, but would be a bit more heightened. It would be looked at with greater penalties for those who breach it. We are certainly looking at everyone's privacy in the coming years with AI and the advancement of computers.
The one that we are specifically looking at is financial data. All of the transactions that we do through Interac, our banking system as a whole, our bank accounts, and the interactions that we have online, like with Apple Pay or on our cellphones, are all held by the banks. Many Canadians would be surprised to know they do not own their financial data.
A bank has someone's data, and that can mean anything from their credit history, where they spend their money, how they get their income or where they are paying their taxes. All of that data right now is not held as sensitive, and more importantly, it is not held under that person's consent. Financial data across Canada needs to be regarded as sensitive.
Perhaps the biggest breach of that within the last two years was when the government enacted the Emergencies Act and bank accounts were frozen under the act. The government has the ability to freeze bank accounts because that data is not sensitive. Through the government, when it took away the rights of Canadians, that data was then held by those banks against consumers' will.
In this country, we want to be able to have open banking. The idea with open banking is to have Canadians control who owns their data, and, with their consent, who can have their data. That is really the crux of this bill. When we talk about sensitive financial data, it is the ability for someone, as a consumer, to control where their data is and where it goes.
Open banking, of course, brings competition to our banking sector, which allows not only the six big banks to have our business, but also hundreds of other financial tech organizations that want to have our business and right now are only able to get it through screen scraping. This is taking data off screens or having their clients take screenshots of their financial history in order to get it to a financial tech organization so it can compete for their business. However, financial data should be sensitive information, and when we look at how that relates to AI, well, it is a whole different component of the bill. Also, when we look at location data, and the ability for someone to know from a person's phone where that person is right now, that is also sensitive data. However, the advancement of AI has allowed all of that information to be out in the open and to be emulated.
When we look at the AI bill, the most important part that we are going to be standing up for, as Conservatives, is to ensure that computers cannot emulate human beings without their express consent. However, when we look at privacy as a fundamental right, AI allows the ability of one's image, likeness and voice to be replicated and used all over this planet, which, of course, is bad when we talk about fraud. We have all the heard stories of parents who thought that their children were calling them for help and to ask for money. It sounded like them, they laughed like they did, but at the end of the day, it was an AI program that emulated an individual to cause an act of fraud.
Right now, Scarlett Johansson is in the news. If anyone has used ChatGBT lately, version 4, which is the new version, they would find that Sky apparently uses Scarlett Johansson's voice without her permission. AI does this right now. It can scrape images and likenesses off the internet, and there is no recourse to ensure that it is taken care of. However, having this AI bill attached to Bill C-27, the privacy act, is slowing this process down and, because of that, Canada is falling further and further behind. It should be a separate bill, and we are asking that the bill before us, of course, be put into two separate votes, as we have before.
I am splitting my time today, because I have some knowledge, but we have greater expertise coming from the member from South Shore—St. Margarets.
I will end with where we are with AI in general. It was announced last week on the budget bill, Bill C-69, that the government is going to put money into AI, figuring that, finally, Canada should have been a leader and should be a leader on this. However, another article, just released yesterday, effectively said, “Ah, too late”, and that the money the government wants to put into AI and infrastructure, Meta Llama 3 has just made obsolete. Of course, Meta, Microsoft, Google and so many other companies have already put money and resources into AI, and Canada is falling further and further behind because, after nine years, Canada has lost almost all of its IP in AI to the rest of the world. China had 13,000 patents in AI just last year, which was more than all patents filed in all sectors in Canada. The U.S. had close to 20,000 patents. So, now, when we put money into IP for AI in Canada, it is not Canadian IP. Once again, we are just investing in American and international companies in Canada. Canada is becoming a branch-plant state. We take our taxpayers' hard-earned money and we put it into intellectual property and multinational corporations that do not provide the GDP that Canada needs but just jobs, which is what we are left with.
We have a bill that was not properly done. It has 55 amendments from the government side and 16 subamendments. I could not believe that, the other day, the government was filibustering its own bill. We were in committee, and the government was talking it out. It did not like that we were talking about financial data as sensitive information. I had never seen this before. However, the bill is flawed and it needs to be split in two. We are happy to make sure that happens and that we get the bill right. Do not worry, a Conservative government will get it right.
1667 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- May/21/24 11:44:51 a.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, it is interesting seeing a Conservative stand up and talk about AI. The only time I am aware of the Conservatives actually utilizing AI was when they came up with the idea of using AI to create amendments that they could bring to filibuster legislation. They came up with 20,000-plus amendments in order to prevent legislation from being able to pass the committee. Now, they have another idea, which is to try to divide the legislation into two pieces and, if they are successful, they will have two pieces of legislation they can filibuster instead of one.
The member talks about the government amendments. Is he not aware that governments do that, whether it is this government or even Stephen Harper's government, which made amendments at committee stage for bills? Because a government makes an amendment at committee stage does not mean that the legislation is flawed and should not be ultimately passing. Would the member not agree?
163 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- May/21/24 11:45:53 a.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, the government brought 55 amendments to its own legislation. When has that happened before? The member talks about Stephen Harper. I do not think Stephen Harper brought 55 amendments to his own bill, followed by 16 subamendments and then filibustered his own bill for four meetings in committee.
The government's role is to present a piece of legislation, ensure there is proper debate in the House and in committee and then ensure the bill passes in the House. One does not do that by bringing 55 amendments and 16 subamendments. The government has failed to present a proper bill. We have identified that it needs to be split, or it may never get passed.
117 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- May/21/24 11:46:38 a.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, one of the great things Canada had in terms of fighting for privacy rights was the role of the Privacy Commissioner. We know it was the Privacy Commissioner, following a letter of complaint I actually sent in, who identified that what Clearview AI was doing was illegal. The taking of people's images in public spaces and selling those images was such a breach of privacy rights, yet when the Liberals brought forward their privacy legislation, the Privacy Commissioner told us that his ability to take on bad actors like Clearview AI would actually be undermined.
Knowing the power AI has to scrape data and knowing how wide open our data, including facial images, personal information and geo-tracking, is being taken, I would like to ask the member about the importance of having fundamental principles in privacy, including the right not to be tracked, not to be followed and not to have our faces taken by corporate interests.
161 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- May/21/24 11:47:40 a.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, I cannot believe I am saying this, but we agree with the member. We are fighting for privacy as a fundamental right and ensuring that those things can happen. We are the only party, and actually the NDP is with us, fighting for that data to be deemed sensitive. This is data such as one's location, biometrics and gender. Even with driver's licences, massive fraud is going up. Violent crime is going up. All those things are extremely important.
I would hope the Privacy Commissioner gets more money and more funding. We are asking for more power to that commissioner. I hope this member does not go down the same road as what has happened with the Information Commissioner and the Ethics Commissioner, who are seeing their funding cut. I do not think that the funding of those two commissions needs to be cut or that the commissioners' wages need to be cut.
We need the Privacy Commissioner to probably see more autonomy, but also get the power they need to make sure they enforce those rules.
181 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- May/21/24 11:48:48 a.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, my hon. colleague mentions flawed legislation coming to committee. I was on a committee where the Liberals brought over 100 amendments to a piece of their legislation. This speaks to their having a problem writing legislation to begin with. Maybe this member would like to talk about how challenging it is to deal with legislation that is flawed to begin with and many amendments having come from the government.
71 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- May/21/24 11:49:15 a.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, yes, going to committee one expects to do the work. This is an important topic for every single Canadian, and the fact is that we have to deal with filibustering and amendments from a government that just cannot get it together or present good legislation to begin with. It would help all Canadians and all the government if it could just get its act together and present some good legislation in the first place
76 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- May/21/24 11:49:48 a.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise on this motion today. To remind everyone what it is about, we have a massive bill, as my colleague from Bay of Quinte said, that would, one, replace the entire Privacy Act with a brand new one for Canadians; two, create a new judicial tribunal to appeal decisions; and three, create something totally unrelated, the artificial intelligence and data act, the first such act.
Way back in October 2022, the House leader for the New Democratic Party moved a motion to split the vote, to have two separate votes on this bill, which we had at second reading: one vote on parts 1 and 2, the privacy and tribunal parts, and then a separate vote on the artificial intelligence part. In November, the Speaker ruled in favour of that and we were pleased to support that motion.
What we are asking for now is to go a step further and split the bill, because we had 21 meetings in committee with witnesses, we are in meeting nine or 10 of clause-by-clause, and we have had almost unanimous witness testimony asking for the bill to be split, and not only because it is a totally separate subject area. To remind everyone, the purpose section in part 1 of the bill, regarding the Privacy Act, says:
The purpose of this Act is to establish—in an era in which data is constantly flowing across borders and geographical boundaries and significant economic activity relies on the analysis, circulation and exchange of personal information—rules to govern the protection of personal information in a manner that recognizes the right of privacy of individuals with respect to their personal information and the need of organizations to collect, use or disclose personal information....
However, the purpose section of part 3, the artificial intelligence and data act, says the following:
(a) to regulate international and interprovincial trade and commerce in artificial intelligence systems by establishing common requirements, applicable across Canada, for the design, development and use of those systems; and
(b) to prohibit certain conduct in relation to artificial intelligence systems that may result in serious harm to individuals or harm to their interests.
It is a very different piece of legislation bolted onto privacy legislation. I think that is why the Speaker rightly ruled that they are separate pieces of legislation and, therefore, should have separate votes.
Conservatives are proposing, after all this study, that the bills should be separated, and we are not alone in that. I will quote what some members in this House have said about separating the bills. The New Democratic Party member for Windsor West, who has been very active and proposed many valuable amendments to this bill in committee, said, “this is really three pieces of legislation that have been bundled up into one.... The first two parts of the act, concerning the consumer privacy protection act and the personal information and data protection tribunal act, do have enough common themes”, but he still thinks they should be separated. He went on to say, as he has said on many occasions, that the New Democrats agree with having the bill in committee, but they want separate voting, as the AI act is the first time that topic has been debated in the House “and it should be done differently.”
The member from the Bloc Québécois who has spoken on this, the member for Laurentides—Labelle, said, “this bill is important, but I would like to know if we should refer it to a committee to study it properly because it is really two bills in one. The first is on artificial intelligence, and the second on privacy protection.” I could go on. For example, the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands said in response to the Speaker's ruling, “The Speaker has now given a ruling that says we will be able to vote separately on the AI piece of the bill, but I do not think that is good enough. I do not know if the committee will be able to set aside witnesses and only look at the AI piece”.
The minister claimed he has done all the consultation and the artificial intelligence bill is a great bill. It turns out he did not have a single meeting on it before he tabled it in June 2022. He did not have a single meeting with any group, but then he bragged afterwards, because he had to put the toothpaste back in the tube, that he had 300 meetings after the bill was tabled. Let me tell members whom he had meetings with.
He said he had 300 meetings. He had five meetings with the AI advisory council; four with the Alliance for Privacy and Innovation in Canada; eight with Amazon; four with the Business Council of Canada; 12 with the Canadian Bankers Association, and maybe that is why we are hearing a big lobby on the filibuster right now on behalf of the Canadian Bankers Association in committee, four meetings where the Liberals have been speaking on behalf of big banks; five with the Canadian Chamber of Commerce; and 12 with the Canadian Marketing Association, the people who send all that irritating stuff. I could go on. The list is here. There were 15 meetings with Microsoft. These are companies that are obviously very interested in protecting people's data and the use of artificial intelligence. It seems that for big businesses, after a bill is introduced, they can get time with the minister.
Now, not to be outdone, the committee has had a request that the bill be separated, signed by the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, Digital Public, the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group, Open Media, the Privacy and Access Council of Canada, Tech Reset Canada, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, the Freedom of Information and Privacy Association, the Centre for Digital Rights, the Centre for Free Expression, the Women's Legal Education & Action Fund, and then another 18 individuals.
The letter was sent to the chair of the industry committee, a very fine chair, by the way. It said:
This letter, submitted on behalf of the individuals and civil society organizations below, is a formal request for your Committee to recommend that AIDA be sent back to the drawing board for full public consultation prior to a substantial redrafting. Additionally, such consultation should not be led by ISED alone given that their stewardship to date has resulted in deeply-flawed legislation, flowing from a process biased heavily toward narrow industry interests.
We are also asking that your Committee split your hearings on AIDA—to have them exist distinctly and separately....
We have done this. It goes on to refer to the Speaker's ruling, saying:
As you know, the Speaker of the House of Commons, in his ruling of 28 November 2022, decided that the House would vote separately on Part 3 of Bill C-27 (AIDA). Subsequent to that ruling, the Committee Vice-Chair [referring to me] noted...that “we've chosen as a Committee to break up the witnesses,” and that “The details of AIDA will happen, and those witnesses will be at the back end of the witnesses.”
This was in the context of granting the Minister more time to produce his promised amendments on AIDA.
It goes on to ask for the bill to be split up. I do not have the time to read the whole letter, but it was interesting that when the minister led off the discussion in the committee, he said, essentially, that it is a flawed bill. He admitted it. His whole opening statement was about amending eight areas, or saying he was going to amend eight areas. It was very specific.
Then, when I and my other colleagues asked him to table those amendments, he refused. We actually had to fight, for four meetings, to get him to agree to table those amendments. We were about to embark on hearing from witnesses who were going to discuss a bill that was already out of date, and the minister was refusing to share what parts he thought were out of date and how he was going to amend it. He finally relented and put in eight draft amendments.
We held 21 meetings. Then, as my colleague from Bay of Quinte said, the Liberals proposed 55 amendments in clause-by-clause to their own bill. None of the witnesses in the 21 meetings that we had had a chance to comment on those 55 amendments. Thirty-eight of them are on artificial intelligence. The Liberals have made 38 amendments to the artificial intelligence bill that they introduced, when they said they were only going to make three or four. They hid all of those from the public, and now the public and the people in the industry have no ability to comment on them, because we are in clause-by-clause.
The minister's admission from the beginning that he had drafted a flawed bill, his admission that he had met with people only after the bill was tabled, his admission that he had basically met only with big business about the bill and his tabling of 55 amendments after we had heard from witnesses all speak to the fact that these are two separate bills on a flawed bill and need to be separated.
1588 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- May/21/24 11:59:56 a.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, I am somewhat disappointed. I came here believing that we would be debating budgetary measures on Bill C-69, something that Canadians are very much concerned about and would ultimately like to see passed.
I am wondering why it is that the Conservatives have now made the decision to try to have a discussion on an issue that we have already had a debate on. It is in the committee. Why not allow the committee to do the work and continue to do the work that it has been doing? There is nothing the member has said that previous governments have not done.
105 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- May/21/24 12:00:38 p.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, the simple answer is that the budget has been widely panned by just about everybody in the country. I am surprised that the government wants to get on to debating it, since it has not actually tabled parts of the budget that it has talked about.
This is perhaps even more important to what happens to Canadians in the future than this flawed budget. It is about what is going to happen, how we regulate artificial intelligence, how it uses people's data and how we interact with it in the future. It is probably one of the most fundamental things. That is why Canadians want the bill separated. That is why it is vitally important that we do that now.
123 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- May/21/24 12:01:26 p.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, I remember that in 2018-19 the ethics committee, working across party lines, was attempting to bring forward to the House language to protect privacy rights in light of the Cambridge Analytica breach. One of the key elements that we had was the right not to be tracked. When my daughter goes on the Internet, why are they tracking her? Why is that phone tracking us? The ability to say no, to limit the amount of information, did not happen.
Then we had Clearview AI stealing people's images and selling them. The Privacy Commissioner stepped into the breach at that point, and yet he said that the Liberal government's privacy legislation at the time would undermine his ability to hold companies like Clearview to account.
Now we have AI. What we were dealing with in 2018 is like dealing with stagecoach robberies, given the speed of the ability to take information, to take our lives and to move them in ways we could not even conceive of, yet the Liberals are still puttering along with legislation. They have put it into what should be two separate bills that are really thought through. We are trying to just deal with one single bill.
I want to ask my hon. colleague what he thinks the danger to Canadian privacy is, with regard to the failure of the government to address the privacy rights of citizens and the right to privacy as a fundamental right.
246 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- May/21/24 12:02:54 p.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, that is a question on which our side and the NDP have been in total agreement. We have worked hard in committee with the member for Windsor West to ensure that the bill has the fundamental right recognized up front. We have moved the preamble, which had no legal meaning, into the bill and changed it to make that part of it, as well as to define what a minor is and make the best interest of the child part of that. We have not gotten to the purpose section yet, where we will probably do that.
I know that the member spoke earlier about the Privacy Commissioner. In the committee, the Privacy Commissioner said that, to oversee this legislation, he would need a doubling of his budget. I see that, in this budget, there is not a penny more for the Privacy Commissioner. I guess the Liberals do not intend to have enforcement of the bill that they are trying to push through.
166 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- May/21/24 12:03:52 p.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, with the challenge of dealing with a piece of legislation that is too complicated, and with two purposes, how do we deal in committee with legislation written this wrong?
31 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- May/21/24 12:04:10 p.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, that is a great question. We struggled with it in committee. We took the privacy part first, the first part of the bill, and had it organized by subject areas, so some witnesses would come twice.
The problem we had was that by the time we got through that, the government decided that it wanted to limit the discussion on artificial intelligence, perhaps the most consequential part, and we ended up with only about eight meetings on artificial intelligence, which is wholly inadequate to deal with all the issues that have been raised. Of course, it makes it even more difficult when the minister does not share his amendments to that bill before we actually hear from those witnesses so that they can have input on the changes that the government wishes to make.
136 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- May/21/24 12:05:05 p.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, I move:
That the House do now proceed to the orders of the day.
16 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- May/21/24 12:05:33 p.m.
- Watch
If a member participating in person wishes that the motion be carried or carried on division, or if a member of a recognized party participating in person wishes to request a recorded division, I would invite them to rise and indicate it to the Chair.
45 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- menumenu
- notificationsnotifications
- home
- mailmail
- searchsearch
