44th Parl. 1st Sess.
March 7, 2023 10:00AM
Madam Speaker, it is an honour to rise once again in this place as we resume debate on Bill C-27, the digital charter implementation act.
During discussion of this bill and related issues, we are not going to get anywhere if we do not start to recognize that privacy is a fundamental right. This is what Conservatives believe and is where we are coming from when we talk about the positive or negative aspects of this piece of legislation. Not only is it true, but it has to be a priority. That is what Canadians expect from us and that is the message we are delivering to the current government. It is also what has been echoed by many of our constituents as we get emails or phone calls from people who are concerned about this bill and about this issue in general.
The world we live in is rapidly changing and the pace of change seems to be getting faster as we go. It is really amazing what people can achieve with digital technology, yet it has also left us in a more vulnerable and insecure position. There are many ways to intrude upon and violate our privacy that did not exist before, and it is safe to say that this trend will continue in the coming years.
If it was not clear already, it is easy to see now that we have to do more than respond to the changes simply as they come. Instead, we need to do our absolute best to think ahead and make sure that our efforts to protect privacy will not become outdated shortly after we pass any kind of bill into law. It is the least we can do if we are serious about preparing our country for the future, but it is true that, before we can do that, we first have some catching up to do.
Our current privacy legislation is long overdue for an update. It has been 22 years since Canada updated its privacy legislation. Twenty-two years ago, the Internet was basically a new phenomenon, and only about half of Canadians were online. Back then, I think Joe Sakic was the MVP of the NHL, and I was only 13 years old, so a lot has changed in that time.
Today, the Internet is a valuable tool used daily by the majority of Canadians. Generally speaking, people basically are living online. We use social media to connect with family, friends and professional networks. We use a GPS to get directions to move from place to place and navigate around our cities and towns. We have online banking to manage our finances. However, at the beginning of the new millennium, pretty much the majority of this was unheard of. In fact, I think we can all remember what we thought was going to potentially happen on Y2K and the implications it was possibly going to have on technology, which thankfully never came to fruition.
It has been years since the Liberals announced a new data strategy for Canada, which also has not become a reality. The promise also came four years after they formed government. It has now been about as long from then until now. After such a long time, Canadians are still waiting for someone to provide higher standards for the use and collection of their personal data.
So much of what we do these days involves an exchange of our data. Facial and fingerprint recognition are used for security, along with our passwords. Digital maps and search functions track our locations in real time. Many of us upload and share an overwhelming amount of personal information on social media accounts and platforms. We are constantly giving our data to different online companies in order to use their services. People feel comfortable enough to do all this because there is a voluntary loss of privacy for the sake of convenience, but this arrangement also requires a deep level of trust. It could not exist otherwise.
Whenever there has been a breach or loss of that trust, the problem of privacy becomes more obvious. There have been organizations exploiting the trust of people to sell their personal information without authorization. In some cases, the data has gone to places that are not working in their best interests.
I am sure, Madam Speaker, like many people in the House, when you go to a website it asks you if you accept the cookies, for example. Obviously, people just accept and go on there because they want to read the articles. What they do not realize is what they are agreeing to when it talks about what is going to happen with their search history or different aspects that might be invaded by those cookies. Therefore, we have to get serious about privacy. We have to mean it when we say that we recognize that privacy is a fundamental right.
The first draft of Bill C-27 says in the preamble, “the protection of the privacy interests of individuals with respect to their personal information is essential to individual autonomy and dignity and to the full enjoyment of fundamental rights and freedoms in Canada”.
Of course, I am not going to disagree with that. I believe it is good for a law to make a statement like this. However, it is also true that we can and should take it a step further in the same direction. Why not have this type of statement included in the text of the bill instead of only in the preamble? That way, it would more likely be stronger for enforcement and interpretation by the courts. With the situation we are in today, it is worth making our privacy law as strong as possible, and this would be a simple way for us to set the right tone. That is something we are calling for.
This is one example, among many, of how Bill C-27 could be improved with some amendments. Conservatives want to make sure we update our legislation in the right way. After all, in this area of privacy, we should not settle for less.
There is more that can be done to fill the gaps in our privacy law. If the government does not accept stronger legislation, it will simply be insufficient. The law must ensure that the privacy of our citizens would be respected by the activities of government and business. Canadians are the owners of their data, and corporations should ask for consent if ever they hope to collect, use or disclose a client's information.
Instead, the Liberal government still has loopholes with respect to privacy. Corporations can still operate with implied consent instead of express consent, which is freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous consent. What happened with Home Depot and Facebook shows how relying on implied consent can go wrong. In this case, a person could ask for email receipts from Home Depot. Their email address, as well as details of their purchase, were given to Meta, which then matched the person with a Facebook or Instagram account.
When brought to court, Home Depot claimed that it had the implied consent of customers to share their emails with whomever it pleased. When I shopped at Home Depot, I never gave my email address to it, but it never once asked me if I was okay with sharing that data with somebody other than for its own transactional purposes.
We have a lack of clarity, which is not protecting the consumer as much it should be. Implied consent has been losing relevance over time. In our context, it creates headaches for customers who are going about their regular business. They expect one thing and later find out that something much different is going on with their personal data. Even if they agreed or simply went along with something, they rightly feel misled by what happened. That is not informed consent. Our peer countries have been moving away from this. Europe's general data protection regulation has been heralded as the gold standard for privacy laws, and it has done away with implied consent.
Going back to discussing Home Depot, it also said that anything people bought there would be classified as “non-sensitive”, which is something this bill fails to define. Vague language will not favour our citizens in the end. With the Home Depot case, we can see that the law could be interpreted by larger organizations to allow them to do what the law actually intended to restrict. We should clearly define “sensitive information”, and it needs to apply to everyone.
Another vague part of this bill is the implementation of the right to disposal. Bill C-27 would allow the user to request that their data be destroyed, but clarification is needed regarding anonymization and the right to delete or the right to vanish.
At the end of the day, this bill is like many announcements the Liberal government likes to make. It sounds good, but the incompetence, the vague language and failure to close loopholes mean that it would not do what it says it would do. However, it should not surprise anybody if a Liberal bill has significant weaknesses and gaps on the issue of privacy. It is hard for Canadians to take the government seriously based on its own record. It has not shown respect for privacy.
We have seen a government agency use location data from cellphones for tracking purposes. We have seen law enforcement access Clearview AI's illegally created facial recognition database, and, of course, last year we saw the public doxing of online donors. While that was happening, the Liberals decided to mess with the bank accounts of Canadians, and some of those people had not even made donations themselves and certainly had not committed crimes.
It is easy for things to go wrong when there is government overreach, but today the federal government has an opportunity to modernize and protect our country for the problems we face in the 2lst century. If it does not listen to us and fails to make the right decisions, it would be truly shameful.
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Madam Speaker, I think a lot of it, too, falls on the vague language that we see throughout the bill. I alluded to that multiple times throughout my speech. Canadians want to see strong safeguards because right now the fact is that there are not as many protections currently in the law, but as this bill is currently written, it would not necessarily strengthen it either. It is good to see that the government has put legislation forward, but at this point it just feels like it is a virtue signal that the government is going to take this issue seriously, but it is not actually doing anything substantive to it.
Conservatives want the bill to have stronger language to make sure there would be real rules in place to protect people's data and make sure they would not be victimized either by big government or big business.
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Madam Speaker, I think anonymizing and aggregating data is extremely important. One example we saw where that was not necessarily taking place was with Tim Hortons. A couple of years ago, if someone had the app and was going to the store to buy a product, or if they just had it on their phone and went through there, Tim Hortons would track where people were going for a period of time after they had been at the store. It was very clear where that data was going and what it was going to be used for, because it was not anonymized or aggregated.
I do think there is something to be said for having a proper regime in place to make anonymization and aggregation take place. It does happen in some cases, but I think it needs to be utilized a lot more in cases where people's data is there. People need to know for sure, have absolute confidence, that it will be done and that the data cannot be unscrambled. We have heard many times in other committees that the unscrambling of data can happen and that it can happen quite quickly too, so we need to make sure people are protected, even if their data is being anonymized and aggregated.
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Madam Speaker, having the Privacy Commissioner is fantastic, and it is interesting to see provinces that have their own privacy commissioners as well. For a number of meetings, I substituted in on the ethics committee, and we heard from some of the provincial privacy commissioners who did fantastic and important work. I think, generally speaking, Canadians would like to see them continue to be able to do their work. They play an important role. I am only going to talk about what is happening here in Canada, but I would like to see their offices continue to function, and I appreciate the valuable work they do.
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