Over the past few months, the Carney government has been flooding the zone with digital policy bills, including Bill C-22, Bill C-34, and Bill C-36. Taken together, these three bills put Canada on a dangerous path towards an overactive regulatory state that surveils Canadians’ actions online, with insufficient safeguards to protect our privacy.
The government began this whole saga with Bill C-22, the so-called Lawful Access Act. The legislation would, among other things, force telecom providers to keep Canadians’ metadata for a period of six months.
Why is this so concerning? As University of Ottawa Law Professor Michael Geist put it, “Retained at scale, that data amounts to a comprehensive surveillance map of virtually every Canadian, including where they go, when they go there, and who they communicate with.”
And encrypted messaging platforms have made it very clear there is no way to give the government and law enforcement agencies a “back door” into Canadians’ metadata without also opening a similar back door for nefarious actors to try to access.
Bill C-22 would destroy encryption for everyone in Canada, which is why companies like Signal have said they could leave Canada altogether rather than comply with the Carney government’s domineering legislation.
Then the government introduced Bill C-34, the so-called Safe Social Media Act. The biggest thing this bill does is ban teenagers and youth under the age of 16 from accessing social media.
But in order to make sure teenagers aren’t accessing social media, there’s going to have to be a mechanism in place to verify everyone’s age, to ensure one is over the age of 16 in order to access these sites. This sets up the prospect of Canadians having to provide their IDs online, which is ripe for hacking and leaks.
Under this bill, the government is also creating a Digital Safety Commission, appointed by the government, that will write, police, and fine under rules that Parliament will never see. Many of the details of Bill C-36 aren’t actually contained in the bill. Rather, a lot of the regulations will be crafted by the Digital Safety Commission, appointed by the government rather than Parliament.
This bill employs a “trust me” approach to government, asking Canadians to trust an appointed commission to write new rules governing both a youth social media ban but also its enforcement, including the potential use of digital IDs. And the government is doing all of this despite the fact that youth social media bans simply don’t work.
Should Canadians really feel comfortable giving an appointed commission all of this power? The short answer is a definitive no.
Finally, the Carney government tabled Bill C-36, the Protecting Privacy and Consumer Data Act. Generally, the instinct to try to protect Canadians’ privacy online is a good thing. But one of the first things the bill does is strip Canada’s Privacy Commissioner of authority over the private sector and give it to the very same Digital Safety Commission that is to be created under Bill C-34. Instead of having Canadians’ privacy protected by an Agent of Parliament, vast new powers will be handed to a five-member commission hand-picked by Cabinet.
The legislation also contains provisions that will empower lawyers and lead to more class-action lawsuits and litigation, while allowing this new, all-powerful commission to impose massive administrative financial penalties. In addition, there are major questions about how this federal privacy measure will interact with provincial privacy laws.
There are some pro-consumer positive measures in Bill C-36, including promoting portability by allowing consumers to switch providers. But the bottom line is that the legislation creates even more new federal bureaucracy and will simply lead to an explosion of litigation, pleasing trial lawyers but few others.
Canadians deserve real control over their data. Unfortunately, Bill C-36 comes up short on that front, all the while expanding bureaucracy and the risk for class-action lawsuits.
The Carney government’s trio of digital policy bills are bad news for Canadian consumers. The bills create significant risks when it comes to the privacy rights of Canadians, massively expand federal bureaucracy, and won’t make Canadians safer online.
The government ought to scrap these three bills and instead focus on narrowly tailored legislation that genuinely protects Canadians’ privacy by focusing on priorities like empowering consumers with real control over their own data.
Jay Goldberg is the Canadian Affairs Manager at the Consumer Choice Center. He previously served as the Ontario Director at the Canadian Taxpayers Federation and a policy fellow at the Munk School of Public Policy and Global Affairs. Jay holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Toronto.
