44th Parl. 1st Sess.
November 28, 2022 11:00AM
- Nov/28/22 3:21:26 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise in the House and present a petition concerning many of my constituents and other Canadians from coast to coast to coast on the ongoing threat to pollinators, particularly honeybees.
The petitioners call on the Government to Canada to catch up with the European Union and follow its lead in adhering to the precautionary principle and banning the use of neonicotinoid pesticides in Canada to protect our pollinators and our food.
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Madam Speaker, I want to the thank the hon. member for Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman for a very thoughtful speech. As a member of Parliament grappling with Bill C-27, I have to say that I am grateful that his party assigned him to this area of work sometime in the past, because this is enormously complicated.
The bill is three acts in one, and I would ask the member what we should do at this point. 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 in a concentrated fashion.
I would support anything we could do as opposition members of Parliament to make sure the bill is not rushed and to make sure that the artificial intelligence pieces are treated as separately as possible so that we have a good amount of time for amendments and understanding while not rushing it through.
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Madam Speaker, I acknowledge that I am standing today, as any day that I am on Parliament Hill, on the Algonquin land of the Anishinabe peoples. I say a large meegwetch to them.
I am speaking today, as we all are, to Bill C-27, which is really three bills in one. My other parliamentary colleagues have already canvassed the bare outline of this, in that we are looking at three bills: an act to create a consumer privacy protection act; a personal information and data protection tribunal act, which largely replaces some of what there was already in PIPEDA in the past; and a brand new artificial intelligence and data act.
I want to start with the artificial intelligence and data act because it is the part with which all of us are least familiar. Much of what we see in this bill was previously before Parliament in last session's Bill C-11. There is a lot to dig into and understand here.
As I was reading through the whole concept of what kinds of harms are done by artificial intelligence, I found myself thinking back to a novel that came out in 1949. The kind of technology described in George Orwell's book, famously called 1984, was unthinkable then. The dystopian visions of great writers like George Orwell or Margaret Atwood are hard to imagine. I will never forget the scene in the opening of The Handmaid's Tale, where a woman goes into a store and her debit card is taken from her. At that moment, we did not have debit cards. Margaret Atwood had to describe this futuristic concept of a piece of plastic that gave us access to our banks without using cash. No one had heard of it then.
There are words from George Orwell, written in 1949, about the ways in which artificial intelligence and new technologies could really cause harm in a dystopian sense. In 1984, he writes, “It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away.”
More recently, there is the song by The Police and written by Sting and others. I will never forget that once I went to a session on rights to privacy being under assault and a British jurist brought with him for his opening of the speech, “Every breath you take, And every move you make, Every bond you break, Every step you take, I'll be watching you.”
We live in a time when artificial intelligence can be enormously invasive of our privacy with things like visual recognition systems, as the hon. member for Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman was just speaking to. These are things that, for someone like me born in 1954, are all rather new, but they are new for people born in 1990 too. It is very new technology and bringing in legislation to control it is equally new and challenging for us as parliamentarians. The whole notion that we are going to be able to spot the ways in which artificial intelligence can affect our democracy is something that will take time.
We talk about harms from this kind of technology, from capturing algorithms, from invading our spaces. We do not have to look any farther than the way Cambridge Analytica was used by the Brexit forces in the U.K. to harness a public outrage against something based on a pile of disinformation, by targeting individuals and collecting their data. That kind of Cambridge Analytica concern also gets into part 1 and part 2 of this bill. We really do need to figure out how to control the digital tech giants harvesting our information.
As an example used earlier today in debate, there is the idea that big digital giants and large corporations can profit from data without the consent of Canadians who may have put a family photo on social media, never knowing that their privacy has been invaded and their personal information and photos have been used for profit without their permission. In this sense, I am going to flag that in the context of the artificial intelligence and data act, I hope we will be taking the time necessary to hear witnesses specifically on this.
We have developed a pattern in recent years, which is to say the last decade or so, of having three or four witnesses appear on panels. All of us in this place know that committees are trying to hear from a lot of people and receive a lot of evidence. It will do us a disservice in our dive into the artificial intelligence and data act if we combine panels of people who are experts on PIPEDA and people who are experts on other aspects of this bill, with panels on artificial intelligence and data.
The committees that study this bill will control their own process. Committees are the masters of their own process, but I would urge the government, the Liberal legislative managers of this piece of legislation, Bill C-27, to follow the lead of the Speaker's ruling earlier today. If we are going to vote on the artificial intelligence act as a separate piece when we come to vote, we could at least make an effort to ensure that the concentrated effort of committee members and hearing witness testimony is not diluted through several different pieces of legislation and panels with three or four witnesses.
Members' questions will inevitably and invariably go to one or two. In this format of panels and pushing witnesses through quickly, we lose a lot of content. Compared with when I worked in government back in the 1980s, which I know seems like the dark ages and no one in this room was on committees in those days, committees would hear from a witness who could speak for 15 minutes and then we would have the rest of an hour to ask that one witness questions. Now that we are into something as complicated as this area, I would urge the committee to give it that kind of attention or to ask the government to send part 3, the artificial intelligence and data act, to a different committee, so that the study can be thorough and we can educate ourselves as to the unintended consequences that will inevitably occur if we go too fast.
Turning to the parts of the bill that deal with privacy, I want to put on the record again a question that was raised just moments ago about whether privacy legislation should apply to political parties in Canada. At the moment, it does not. Political parties are exempted from the kinds of privacy protections that other organizations, NGOs and corporations must use to protect the privacy information of their customers, consumers and citizens.
The Green Party of Canada believes it is essential that political parties be added to the list of organizations that have an obligation to protect the privacy of Canadians.
I will say quickly that I tend to agree with the first analysis of one of the NGOs that are very concerned with privacy information. OpenMedia, in an article by Brian Stewart, says very clearly that this legislation could actually make things worse for some privacy protections. They give the efforts of Bill C-27's consumer privacy protection act and its personal information and data protection tribunal act a grade of D. In other words, it passes but just barely. There will be many witnesses.
I can certainly confirm that, as a Green Party member of Parliament in this place, I will be bringing amendments forward, assuming this bill gets through second reading, which I think we can assume, and ends up at committee.
In the time remaining, I want to emphasize that Canada is aware that privacy is a fundamental human right. It is part of the UN declaration on the rights of individuals. I echo some of the sentiments from the hon. member for Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman in asking why we are looking at consumer privacy. Maybe we should change that word to Canadians' rights and privacy.
I also agree with many members who have spoken today about the problems of subclause 18(3) and the number of exemptions along with the question of what is a “legitimate” reason that people's privacy can be invaded. That should be further clarified. I find “a reasonable person would expect the collection or use for such an activity” to be fine, but the exemptions seem overly broad.
If I dive into anything else I will go over my allotted time.
This is important legislation. We must protect the privacy of Canadians. I think we will call on all parties in this place to set aside partisanship and make an honest effort to review it. That is not to delay it but to make an honest effort to review the bill before it leaves this place.
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Mr. Speaker, the hon. parliamentary secretary will not be the least bit surprised that I hope his government will not use time allocation again to reduce the time available for debate, and I likewise would urge all parties in this place to ensure everyone who speaks to the legislation has really studied it, knows it well and is prepared to speak to it without notes. I think that would speed along the process of second reading.
There are also concerns with the legislation that I have not referenced yet, but I see an hon. colleague in this place who is certainly as concerned as I am about the rights to children's privacy. We have to be very concerned with the invasive use of images and the right of individuals to be able to get what is now called either erasure or the right to be forgotten.
However, I agree with the hon. member. I would like to see the bill go to committee. I will vote for it, but I have a lot of concerns.
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Mr. Speaker, I know that my hon. colleague from Provencher and I disagree on some aspects of the facts around the Public Health Agency, but I know there certainly are concerns. I have agreed in this place before that, if an app is tracking personal information, whether it is a Tim Hortons or, worse, the government, we need to pay close attention to that. I think the legislation would make positive steps forward to prevent that, but I do not think we can say with confidence that the legislation absolutely would ensure it never happens again.
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Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his question. As he said so well, recent examples of fraud show that we must address these issues. We must protect the privacy rights of Canadians and Quebeckers. We must do more with this bill.
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Mr. Speaker, I think history will look back at the Googles and Facebooks of this world and put them in a category with evil flesh merchants of times gone by. They are appalling, and they get away with murder. They get away with stealing our privacy for their profit.
All of these so-called platforms should be treated as publishers so that common law could deal with them, and they could not be anonymously destroying people's lives. People would know who said what. The publisher would be held to account and could be sued for abuses, which are spread, and for disinformation.
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- Nov/28/22 6:40:33 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is my honour to rise to take up a point that I debated in this place when we first had the news from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in the spring of this year, that we have less time than we thought in responding to the urgency of the science. The panel reported that, if we did not reduce our emissions rapidly, we would lose any chance of holding to 1.5ºC global average temperature increase, and that we had to stay below 2ºC.
At that point, in my question to the government members, I quoted the United Nations Secretary General, António Guterres. He, when speaking recently of the promises made in Paris at COP21 in 2015 versus the delivery on climate action by governments around the world, said that some governments are promising to reduce emissions, but emissions are increasing. He said, “Simply put, they are lying.” I asked the hon. government members, when the UN Secretary General was speaking of governments that were doing one thing and saying another, whom did our government think António Guterres was referencing.
Since the time of my question, it has been clear that the government has provided additional support to the expansion of fossil fuel development. Now we have a very clear difference here, and I want to set out the problem because I want to be fair to all concerned. The government of the current Liberal minority, supported by the NDP in their confidence-supply agreement, appears to believe, or at least wants Canadians to believe, that reaching net zero by 2050 is a target that will ensure we can hold our increase in global average temperature to 1.5ºC, or at least as far below 2ºC as possible.
The Liberals put forward this notion, and they emphasized it again in the climate accountability act that was passed in the last Parliament, even though it is not true. It is not true that achieving net zero by 2050 assures us of a livable world. In fact, the science in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's sixth assessment report makes it very clear that the 2050 target of net zero is irrelevant if emissions continue to rise in the near term. In other words, again from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a 2050 target without emissions must peak globally and begin to fall dramatically at the latest before 2025 or any hope of 1.5ºC or 2ºC is gone.
A 2ºC world is unthinkable, yet we are on track to it. Again quoting António Guterres of the United Nations, when COP27 opened earlier this month in Sharm el-Sheikh, he said that the world is “on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator.”
Therefore, again, what government does the Canadian government believe the UN is referencing when it says that some governments are promising and doing the opposite? He said, “Simply put, they are lying.” As well, to whom does the government think it is referring to when it says “foot on the accelerator”, when we have a government that is insisting on building pipelines, expanding production and drilling off Newfoundland? Whom is the United Nations referencing?
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- Nov/28/22 6:48:04 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the exchange I just had with my friend and colleague, the parliamentary secretary, exactly explains our problem.
Canada's targets are currently out of sync with what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says we must do. Spending billions of dollars on good programs is excellent, but while this government gives with one hand, it takes with the other. For climate action, absolutely promote heat pumps and electric cars, but it is a drop in the bucket while bucketfuls of effort continue to go to increasing our production of oil and gas, which when burned in other countries puts us on the highway to climate hell.
Our foot in this country is on the accelerator. If I do nothing more before I die than to get this Prime Minister to get his heavy foot off the accelerator, I will die happy.
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