- Member of Parliament
- Member of the panel of chairs for the legislative committees
- Conservative
- Red Deer—Lacombe
- Alberta
- Voting Attendance: 67%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $146,499.79
- Government Page
Mr. Speaker, this is the last time I accept a speaking slot before the budget from the whip's office. Let me just say that.
All kidding aside, we need to trace back the history of this bill. Canada's original digital charter was mapped out in 2019. That is why I referenced that this is a redo of something we did just a few years ago. One of its primary principles was the control and consent of one's personal information, as well as transparency. These are the most salient parts of that charter. It also attempted to back them by a regime of enforcement—
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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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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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Madam Speaker, given the interest that we had in this place about Yogi-isms and in honour of that, I hoped to ask my colleague, the previous speaker for Banff—Airdrie, about “It ain’t over till it’s over.” In this government's case, a piece of legislation is not over until it gets a do-over because the government never seems to get it right the first time. We seem to be revisiting issues when we warned the government in previous parliaments that it was headed down the wrong track. We have, of course, a do-over now with this piece of legislation, redoing some of the work that the government tried to achieve in previous parliaments. However, here I am today talking about Bill C-27, the digital charter implementation act.
Some members might be interested to know, although I highly doubt it, that when I was a tenured faculty member at Red Deer College, I taught systems analysis and design, programming and database administration. I know it is hard to believe that a guy who likes hunting and fishing as much as I do also sat in a cubicle where they slid pizzas under the door, where I just churned away and developed code and relational databases and did some data architecture work for a handful of years.
It does not seem all that long ago. I got that education just prior to Y2K, and members would remember the scare everyone was going to have with Y2K. I worked in the private sector for a while, but the college I graduated from liked me so much as a student that it invited me back to be a teacher. I taught until 2005 in the information technology field.
I gave a speech a while ago talking about how much and how rapidly technology has evolved and the laws pertaining to that technological advancement. It was 2005 when I left the college, because in January 2006, I was elected to this place. Therefore, I am now a 17-year obsolete data programmer. If I am ever frozen and brought back, it is because I can still program in COBOL and C++, and many of these program languages are still around today.
I am loath to talk about floppy disks at my age. We do not have those anymore. As a matter of fact, I am part of a generation, as are a number of my colleagues, that was probably the last generation on this planet that did not even have cellphones. We had to actually remember people's phone numbers in our heads. When our house phone rang, we actually made an effort to go get it. I do not know if that happens much anymore, but this is where I am at. Long gone are the days of floppy disks, although I do hear that C Sharp and other object-oriented programming languages are still in vogue. That is nice to know.
Today, our information is not stored on floppy disks or hard drives, at least not the same kind of hard drives there were when I was in the business. It is now stored in the cloud, and targeted ads come up on our phones. Every time I bring up Instagram, I do not know where these algorithms get the information from. They must be listening to everything I say because all I get are ads for fishing rods, brand new boats, fish hooks, and I will admit, the cure for plantar fasciitis. Therefore, my phone is clearly listening to everything I say and even the things that my doctor is saying to me in the privacy of a patient-doctor confidential room. However, I am digressing.
This obsolescence in both technology itself and its rapid advancement is something that most of us—
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