- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Banff—Airdrie
- Alberta
- Voting Attendance: 68%
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Madam Speaker, I think that the member raises some important points. These are questions that need to be resolved. There is no question about the fact that this is a bigger and bigger issue, as more and more data on Canadians is out there.
I think that this has to be dealt with and there needs to be a balance found. However, I just do not think that Canadians trust the current Liberal government to find the right balance.
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Madam Speaker, I appreciate the invitation to be heard from a committee. I am not sure that I would consider myself an expert in any way. I know that there will be many whom people need to hear from. However, one of the groups of experts that we need to hear from is Canadians themselves. Canadians are concerned about their privacy.
Beyond that, the member mentioned the fact that we need to look at what other countries are doing and things like that. I think that is important as well.
I did not get a chance to reference it in my remarks, although I had hoped to, but we know that what is being proposed here is much different from what the EU has in place under its General Data Protection Regulation and even what Quebec has in its GDPR-style regime.
I think we will have to consider that and what those implications are in terms of the adequacy of international—
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Madam Speaker, maybe I have set a trend here with the Yogi-isms. He said, “The future ain't what it used to be”. It seems, though, that with this government, the future is what the past was.
That was the point of the remarks I made. It is, unfortunately, a pretty apt remark.
What it really boils down to is that we have a government that I think Canadians do not feel they can trust to get the balance right here. Those are the concerns that I am sharing and that I continue to have.
I know that both here in the House and in committee, if and when it arrives there, concerns will certainly be raised there as well. I look forward to hearing them.
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Madam Speaker, as I look around the chamber today, there are a few people who I think would remember my predecessor in my role as the member of Parliament, when I first was elected, for Wild Rose. His name was Myron Thompson. Myron was pretty well known. He was the guy with the cowboy hat and he was pretty outspoken.
One thing many people do not know about Myron Thompson is that back when he was a young guy he had a try-out with the New York Yankees. He was a pretty good baseball back catcher, but he did not make the team, and it was because there happened to be a future Hall of Famer at that position for the New York Yankees.
I wanted to reference that future Hall of Famer today because it is an amazing testimony to the impression he made on the culture. As an 1950s era baseball catcher, he is still famous not just for his play on the diamond but also for the gems he dropped in conversation off the diamond.
His observations have actually even found a place in English lexicon and are known as “Yogi-isms”. Of course I am talking about Yogi Berra. That is the fellow who beat out Myron Thompson for a spot on the New York Yankees way back then. He became a 1972 Hall of Fame inductee. He has 10 World Series victories to his credit, which is the most of any Major League Baseball player in history.
An hon. member: You've got to tie it in to the legislation somehow.
Mr. Blake Richards: Madam Speaker, he is certainly better known for the way his trademark mangling and misuse of words and phrases has resulted in strangely keen insights that are still widely quoted today by many. I have a few favourites. One of them is “I didn't really say everything that I said.” Another one is “We made too many wrong mistakes.” Another is “Swing at the strikes.”
When I thought about Bill C-27 and preparing to speak today, it brought to mind Yogi-isms, and not only because those examples I just cited reminded me of the Liberals' poor approach to governance but because the title of this bill is a real mouthful at 35 words long. This brought that to mind as well.
For now, I will call it the consumer privacy protection act, but it is really summed up best by what is probably the greatest Yogi-ism of all, which is “It's déjà vu all over again.” That really speaks to it. The member was looking for me to tie it back in, so there it is. There is the tie back in.
Here we are in 2023 and here I am speaking on yet another rehash of another Liberal bill from years previous. They have a real penchant for that, these Liberals. They kind of remind me of Hollywood Studios that no longer seems to be able to produce an original script so it just keeps churning out sequels. If Bill C-27 was a film, one could call it “Bill C-11, the redo”. Bill C-27 is essential a warmed-over version of previous Bill C-11, the digital charter implementation act the Liberals introduced back in 2020.
It is not to be confused with the current Bill C-11, which is also making its way through Parliament and is the online streaming act and which also poses another threat to Canadians' privacy and online freedoms.
It is really easy to see a bit of a pattern evolving here. In any case, in May 2021 the Privacy Commissioner said the digital charter act “represents a step back overall from our current law and needs significant changes if confidence in the digital economy is to be restored.” It of course died when the Prime Minister cynically called an expensive and unnecessary election nobody wanted and everybody paid for and that did not change the Prime Minister's political fortunes one iota.
Bill C-27 carries the stamp of that former digital charter proposal, which Conservatives had concerns about then, and which we still have concerns about in its new form now. Some of the text is in fact directly lifted from Bill C-11 and the text of that bill is available for all to review.
Let us talk more about the impact of the bill's content, rather than the wording itself.
The bill purports to modernize federal private sector privacy law, to create a new tribunal and new laws for AI, or artificial intelligence, systems. In doing so, it raises a number of red flags. Perhaps the most crimson of those flags, for me, is that the bill does not recognize privacy as a fundamental right. That is not actually all that surprising, because this is a Liberal bill. I hear daily from Canadians who are alarmed by how intrusive the Liberal government has become, and who are also fearful of how much more intrusive it still seems to hope to become.
It just seems just par for the course for the government that, in a bill dealing with privacy, it is failing to acknowledge that, 34 years ago, the Supreme Court said privacy is at the very heart of liberty in a modern state, individuals are worthy of it, and it is worthy of constitutional protection.
When we talk about privacy, we have to talk about consent. We have seen far too many examples of Canadians' private and mobility data being used without their consent. I think some of these examples have been cited previously, but I will cite them again.
We saw the Tim Hortons app tracking movements of people after their orders. We saw the RCMP's use of Clearview AI's illegally created facial recognition database. We saw Telus' “data for good” program giving location data to the Public Health Agency of Canada.
These were breaches of the privacy of Canadians. There needs to be a balance between use of data by businesses and that fundamental protection of Canadians' privacy. The balance in this bill is just wrong. It leans too heavily in one direction.
There are certainly issues with user content and use of collected information. For instance, there are too many exemptions from consent. Some exemptions are so broad that they can actually be interpreted as not requiring consent at all. The concept of legitimate interests has been added as an exception to consent, where a legitimate interest outweighs any potential adverse effect on the individual. Personal information would be able to be used and shared for internal research, analysis and development without consent, provided that the content is de-identified. These exemptions are too broad.
The bill's default would seek consent where reasonable, rather than exempt the requirement. In fact, there are several instances where the bill vaguely defines terms that leave too much wiggle room for interpretation, rather than for the protection of Canadians. For example, there is a new section regarding the sharing of minors' sensitive information, but no definition of what “sensitive” means is given, and there would be no protection at all for adults' sensitive information. These are both problematic. De-identification is mandated when data is used or transferred, but the term is poorly defined and the possibility of data being reidentified is certainly there.
Anonymization or pseudonymization are the better methods, and the government needs to sharpen the terms in this bill to be able to sharpen those protections. An even more vague wording in the bill is that individuals would have a right to disposal, the ability to request that their data be destroyed. Clarification is certainly needed regarding anonymization and the right to delete or the right to vanish.
There are many more examples. I know my colleagues will certainly expand on some of those questions as posed in the bill. I know my time is running short. I want to speak to the individual privacy rights of Canadians briefly.
Canadians value their privacy even as their government continually seeks ways to compromise it. The Public Health Agency of Canada secretly tracked 33 million mobile devices during the COVID lockdown. The government assured them their data would not be collected, but it was collecting it through different means all along.
Public confidence is not that high when the Liberals start to mess in issues involving privacy. The onus should be on the government to provide clarity around the use and collection of Canadians' private information because, to quote another Yogi-ism, “If you don't catch the ball, you catch the bus home.”
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