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Decentralized Democracy

Member of the panel of chairs for the legislative committees

Blaine Calkins

  • 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
Context: House Hansard - 174 - Mar/28/23
Mr. Blaine Calkins
  • Mar/28/23 3:58:56 p.m.
  • Watch
  • Re: Bill C-27 
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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Context: House Hansard - 174 - Mar/28/23
Mr. Blaine Calkins
  • Mar/28/23 3:57:23 p.m.
  • Watch
  • Re: Bill C-27 
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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