Bill C-27

Digital Charter Implementation Act, 2022

An Act to enact the Consumer Privacy Protection Act, the Personal Information and Data Protection Tribunal Act and the Artificial Intelligence and Data Act and to make consequential and related amendments to other Acts

Part 1 enacts the Consumer Privacy Protection Act to govern the protection of personal information of individuals while taking into account the need of organizations to collect, use or disclose personal information in the course of commercial activities. In consequence, it repeals Part 1 of the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act and changes the short title of that Act to the Electronic Documents Act . It also makes consequential and related amendments to other Acts.
Part 2 enacts the Personal Information and Data Protection Tribunal Act , which establishes an administrative tribunal to hear appeals of certain decisions made by the Privacy Commissioner under the Consumer Privacy Protection Act and to impose penalties for the contravention of certain provisions of that Act. It also makes a related amendment to the Administrative Tribunals Support Service of Canada Act .
Part 3 enacts the Artificial Intelligence and Data Act to regulate international and interprovincial trade and commerce in artificial intelligence systems by requiring that certain persons adopt measures to mitigate risks of harm and biased output related to high-impact artificial intelligence systems. That Act provides for public reporting and authorizes the Minister to order the production of records related to artificial intelligence systems. That Act also establishes prohibitions related to the possession or use of illegally obtained personal information for the purpose of designing, developing, using or making available for use an artificial intelligence system and to the making available for use of an artificial intelligence system if its use causes serious harm to individuals.

[Alexandre Plourde]

Consent is indeed one of the methods for protecting consumers. It's the method that has mainly been used in this bill. Something else could have been chosen, and other protection standards could have been added, but what we still have here is legislation that hinges on consent. Consent can be a method that operates to protect consumers in the digital environment and enables them to control their information, provided that consent is effective and can genuinely be useful to consumers.

Bill C-27 poses a problem with regard to related exceptions to the requirement of consent. We feel that those exceptions are too broad. The exception that concerns us most is the one provided under clause 18, for the purpose of business activities and legitimate interest. This is an exception that we consider too broad. We find it hard to understand how it can be consistent with the implicit consent that already exists. We therefore suggest deleting clause 18, which would allow businesses too much leeway to use consumers' information without their consent.

You also mentioned pop-up windows at the start of your question. It seems to me you're referring to the concept of consent fatigue, which occurs as a result of being constantly asked to give your consent. People are bombarded with demands and requests for consent, and we're aware of this concern about consent fatigue.

We think that businesses should show some creativity. The bill should also offer effective solutions enabling consumers to express a blanket refusal to be tracked online. When we go onto various websites, mobile apps and tech company platforms, our privacy and data are permanently captured for those businesses to use for commercial and other purposes. The current method is to have us consent singly to each business when pop-up windows appear.

The solution we suggest in our brief is that we instead create mechanisms enabling consumers to state a blanket refusal to allow their browsing data or other personal information to be transmitted to any companies with which they do business. This is what we call the "do not track" mechanism, which is already available in web browsers but isn't recognized by businesses. We propose that businesses be required to recognize this kind of signal or parameter that, with one click, enables people to send a blanket refusal to provide their personal information. This would put an end to the consent fatigue we all dislike.

[Philippe Letarte]

Absolutely. That's why we're very pleased that Bill C-27 was introduced. Our business currently operates in a system that lies in a kind of grey area and that hasn't been extensively legislated. We've been asking the federal government to intervene on behalf of consumers for a very long time now.

You mention pop-up windows. From our viewpoint, it's much more precise than that and more highly regulated. If you have an online app to do your accounting or manage your retirement or investments, you will have to give consent. We want that consent to be adequately protected and renewed as well.

Although our case is a bit different from anything involving cookie files and pop-up windows, we want regulations to be added that give consumers the power to consent to their data being shared and that guarantee them adequate protection. Let's be honest: there are two taboos in society, and they are our finances and our personal information. Here we're combining the two.

So, to sum up, it's important to have adequate protection, and, as far as we're concerned, just as important that consent have to be given. For all the systems and authorities I mentioned earlier, businesses should be responsible for getting consent.

We're very pleased with the content of the bill because it will create a legislative framework that's safe and therefore more effective for consumers. That will also enable our business to grow in an environment that's secure and stable.

[Philippe Letarte]

I think it's already a good start for businesses, and that, incidentally, is why I'm here.

I know that the sharing of bank information isn't necessarily the main subject matter of Bill C-27, but I think the bill lays the foundation for the legislative framework promised in the fall economic update. It's currently the closest thing to something that enables data sharing and portability.

I also think you should establish stricter terms and conditions and insert them in a regulatory division following from Bill C-27 or in a future bill directly concerning an open banking system.

[Sara Eve Levac, Lawyer, Option consommateurs]

Our second concern relates to flaws in relation to children's privacy. Those flaws are still present despite the amendments announced at the start of the consultations.

Although Bill C-27 recognizes the sensitive nature of minors' personal information, we believe it does not go far enough to really protect children's privacy. We propose that the protection provided by this bill be strengthened by incorporating the best practices recognized in international law.

First, the bill has to offer stronger protection for children in the digital universe, by protecting them from commercial exploitation of their personal information. The web applications that children use may collect countless pieces of data about them. That data may then be used for profiling or targeting the children for commercial purposes. There is nothing in Bill C-27 that prohibits those practices.

Second, the act should provide that decisions concerning a child's personal information must be made in the child's best interests. The concept of the best interests of the child provides for a more comprehensive vision of privacy than mere recognition of the sensitive nature of the child's personal information. For example, it allows for an assessment of whether the use of the child's personal information by a business promotes his or her overall development and whether the child's rights are being exercised for his or her benefit.

For example, it might not be in the child's interest to give the child's parents or guardians access to his or her personal information where the child is being abused by them. An analysis based solely on the sensitive nature of the personal information would not limit access of that kind.

We will be pleased to answer your questions.

[Alexandre Plourde, Lawyer and Analyst, Option consommateurs]

Hello, Mr. Chair and members of the committee.

Thank you for offering us the opportunity to present our comments.

My name is Alexandre Plourde. I am a lawyer with Option consommateurs. With me is my colleague Sara Eve Levac, who is also a lawyer with Option consommateurs.

Option consommateurs is a non-profit association whose mission is to help consumers and defend their rights. As a consumers' association, we are in regular contact with people who are having privacy-related problems. In recent years, we have often become involved in privacy issues, for example by publishing research reports and taking part in consultations on proposed legislation. We have also initiated large-scale class actions, including under the federal Privacy Act.

As you can read in the brief we have submitted to the committee, Bill C-27 contains a number of flaws, in our opinion, particularly regarding the exceptions to consent, the absence of a right to be forgotten, the limitations on the right of portability, and management of individuals' data after their death.

Since our time is limited, we will first address two aspects of Bill C-27 that are of particular concern to us.

First, I am going to talk about Bill C-27's lack of deterrent effect and the obstacles this may create for civil actions by consumers. Second, I am going to talk about the flaws in relation to children's privacy.

Our first concern relates to Bill C-27's lack of deterrent effect. We believe that the bill contains flaws that could make enforcing it problematic. First, although the bill contains high administrative monetary penalties, only certain violations of the act can result in such penalties being imposed.

Second, the Privacy Commissioner will not have the power to impose penalties directly; they will be able to do so only by recommending to the new personal information and data protection tribunal that penalties be imposed. That additional step suggests, at least, that there will be significant delays in applying the penalties imposed on businesses that commit offences.

In addition, the deterrent effect of legislation is also based on the public's ability to rely on it in the civil courts. However, we believe that the new private right of action provided in proposed section 107 in the bill seriously threatens consumers' ability to apply to the courts to exercise their rights. The problem arises from the fact that the new private right of action allows a company to be sued only if prerequisites are met, requiring, in particular, that the situation have first been dealt with by the Commissioner.

In our opinion, it is entirely possible that the big companies targeted by class actions will rely on these very stringent conditions in order to defeat the legal actions brought against them. There will then be interminable proceedings in the courts to determine the scope of the federal private right of action, given the provinces' constitutional jurisdiction over civil law.

We therefore invite the government to clarify that section 107 is in addition to the other civil remedies provided in provincial law, to ensure that it does not obstruct civil actions instituted under Quebec law.

I will now give my colleague, Ms. Levac, the floor.

[The Chair, Liberal, Joël Lightbound]

I call this meeting to order.

Welcome to meeting No. 100 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Industry and Technology. This is a bit of a special occasion.

I would also like to note that this is the birthday of our analyst, Alexandra Savoie. We wish her a happy birthday and thank her for her help with this important study.

Pursuant to the order of reference of Monday, April 24, 2023, the committee is resuming consideration of Bill C-27, An Act to enact the Consumer Privacy Protection Act, the Personal Information and Data Protection Tribunal Act and the Artificial Intelligence and Data Act and to make consequential and related amendments to other Acts.

I would like to welcome the witnesses and also apologize for this meeting starting late.

Our witnesses are Sébastien Gambs, Canada research chair in the privacy-preserving and ethical analysis of big data, who is participating by videoconference from the Université du Québec à Montréal, and Philippe Letarte, head of policy and public affairs at Flinks.

From Option consommateurs, we have lawyers Sara Eve Levac and Alexandre Plourde. And last, we have Sehl Mellouli, deputy vice-rector of education and lifelong learning at Université Laval, who is joining us by videoconference.

Welcome, everyone.

With that, I will not take up any more time. We will start with the opening remarks without further delay.

Mr. Gambs, you have the floor for five minutes.

Committees of the House

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, the games the Conservatives continue to play to stop debate on the important issues of the day for Canadians is no surprise. At the end of the day, the very same bill, Bill C-27, is the one on which they moved the concurrence motion. Let there be no doubt that the Conservatives oppose the legislation. This is yet another tactic being used to filibuster legislation, legislation that is important to Canadians in many different ways. In this situation, we are talking about the privacy of the digital charter, which is so very important. It also talks about AI, which impacts every Canadian.

My question for the member opposite is this. Why do Conservatives continue to play a destructive role on the floor of the House of Commons in an irresponsible fashion? We see this virtually on a daily basis. The best example that comes to my mind is when they filibustered and voted against the Canada-Ukraine agreement. Shame on them.

Industry and Technology

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I am so glad we are debating the motion today, because today is the one-year anniversary of the release of a generational, society-changing technology, and that, of course, is ChatGPT.

I think I was the first legislator in the world to stand up in a parliament and say “Hey guys, have a look at this.” Since that time, over 80% of Fortune 500 companies are now integrating ChatGPT technology. Legislators around the world are trying to deal with the vast societal implications of the release of the technology. Also, the world is trying to grapple with the fact that the technology was released into the world without any sort of comprehensive regulations around the development of large language models and the large-scale deployment of this type of technology, and then without a lot of thought to use.

The other thing is that, in the last year, we have had to build, internationally, parliamentary capacity for legislators both to understand the technical aspects of how artificial intelligence has the capacity to impact our society and to try to look at how our regulatory systems can meet the challenge. Our systems are notoriously non-nimble and slow, and this is why there should be no partisan divide on the fact that the motion should pass. The Artificial Intelligence and Data Act should be hived off. Without offence to the government, the Artificial Intelligence and Data Act was developed about a year or a year and a half prior to the deployment of ChatGPT. It is like developing regulations for scribes, putting them forward and debating regulations for scribes, after the printing press was deployed around the world. That is really the transformational change we are dealing with.

Taking a partisan hat off, civil society, academia and industry all need to be consulted, and we need to go back to the drawing board on a lot of places in the bill. As my colleague for Bay of Quinte talked about, this is something that the Standing Committee on Industry has heard over and over again from every witness it has had. However, it is also important to split the bill to give the government an opportunity to better coordinate with other jurisdictions around the world that are trading partners with Canada, are already well ahead of us and are close to passing their own artificial intelligence regulations. For example, the European Union is already well down the path, as is the United States. Frankly, we also need to include the global south in the conversation. We need to be working with the global south, as it impacts the global south.

I am pleased to announce that the Canadian Group of the Inter-Parliamentary Union successfully passed a motion at the IPU's last assembly in Rwanda a few week ago, and that Canada will be a co-rapporteur on the Standing Committee on Human Rights to develop a motion specifically to do this, to build capacity for parliamentarians around the world to learn about the impacts of artificial intelligence, to take that back to their respective political parties and legislatures and to ensure that all voices are being heard. This is one of the reasons we have to pass the motion before us today.

I want to echo what my colleague for Bay of Quinte said. I think there is one testimony that sums up why AIDA has to be hived off so the privacy components of Bill C-27 can proceed. I will read from Barry Sookman, senior counsel at McCarthy Tétrault, who argued that AIDA fails to adequately shield the public from potential risks associated with high-impact AI systems. He also said that the centralized power that was envisioned in this pre-ChatGPT legislation undermines the structure of parliamentary sovereignty, adding that “AIDA sets a dangerous precedent”.

These are Canadian legal experts who have made the argument that the implications of implementing under-considered legislation on an issue as impactful as artificial intelligence is extremely risky. Any flaw in AI regulation could affect millions of people, exposing companies to class action lawsuits of historic proportions. It could also expose the public, our constituents, to risks, because we have not thought this through. This issue is so huge. It has the capacity for so much societal transformation that the bill must be hived off. Members from all political parties need to be engaged in robust, fulsome debate with all aspects of Canadian society. They need to think about this in three silos.

The first is the way that artificial intelligence is developed. It has come to light over the last year that ChatGPT was developed using extremely low-paid labour in the global south. These low-paid labourers were exposed to violent child pornography imagery to help train the large language model. There are no global regulations or standards around this. That needs to change.

The other thing there is really no global standards for, certainly not in Canada, is the protection of intellectual property when it comes to training large language model systems. This is highly problematic. We are already seeing precedent-setting legal cases coming forward in other jurisdictions, which could have extreme impacts on Canadian businesses, the ownership of IP and also how we promulgate and respect our trade agreements with other partners. A lot of our trade agreements did not consider artificial intelligence.

The second is the development of artificial intelligence. The fact that ChatGPT was released on the public, where a hundred million users are using this on such a regular basis without thought to what that means, is like releasing a pharmaceutical onto the public with no clinical trials, with no data. As a country, we need to think about how we research these products, how we allow research and innovation, but also we need to ensure that the societal impacts are thought about in an ethical framework prior to deployment.

The last thing is that I want to encourage colleagues to join the parliamentary caucus on emerging technology. I have colleagues who are sitting here today who I know have such a heart for these issues. This debate has been in a non-partisan manner. It has been collaborative and it has been great.

Just briefly, there is the impact of AI on democracy with deepfakes, with the spread of information, and on labour and the disruption of labour. Will we see AI replacement workers? Is that being considered in any legislation? These things need to be considered in an AI regulatory framework: cross-jurisdictional issues, the issues of human rights, the issues of autonomous weapons.

I could go on and on, because the bill needs a separate vote. Probably, the government needs an opportunity to go back to the drawing board to internalize the situation. This needs to happen now, though. I think that this is a no-brainer. I think there is a lot of consensus in the House of Commons for that. I would like to see agreement in the House on this matter and it be put to a vote.

With that, I move:

That the debate be now adjourned.

[Ryan Williams, Conservative, Bay of Quinte, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for his hard work and for contributing to the debate.

Bill C-27 has a lot of different aspects, but here are the worst parts of them.

There is a provision called “legitimate interests”, which allows businesses to collect data, but there is no real definition as to what they can use that data for. It is so obscure that, right now, without a clear definition, we are not going to be able to get it through. There is no instance in the purpose clause or in the bill of privacy being a fundamental right, and that is something Conservatives have been fighting for. We are the only party, really, fighting to have that in.

When it comes to AIDA, the third part we are trying to split off, when I asked witnesses at committee about three weeks ago to rate it from one to 10, one being bad and 10 being the best, six out of seven rated it a one out of 10. That piece, without public consultation, which did not happen, needs to go. It needs to be split off, and that is why we are asking for the motion.

[Pat Kelly, Conservative, Calgary Rocky Ridge, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I want to refocus the discussion back on the matter at hand, which is splitting Bill C-27. I would like the member to comment on the inadequacy of the bill, the weakness that he has found in it and why it is so important that we get it split into proper components such we can debate them and have them voted on separately.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you for a couple of minutes of grace there. The House had some activity on Bill C-27, so I was just getting a quick briefing on that. Thank you for a couple of extra minutes to get here. I appreciate it.

I want to respond to something Mr. Jowhari said. He is actually a friend, so when he made that joke about not listening, other members should not be offended. He did that yesterday. It was related to a filibuster that I was doing at the time. The Liberals were trying to reduce my time at the industry committee, so I spoke for over two and a half hours, I think it was, on the bridge in Windsor.

Mr. Jowhari did actually listen when I'm not sure sometimes whether others did or not. It was a kind pun that he was making yesterday, not a negative thing in any respect. He's always reminded me that I've briefed him well on the border between Windsor and Detroit.

I do appreciate that, but he also asked about this issue affecting my riding, and this is one of the reasons for the motion as it is. It is important for me to clarify that, in many ways, it restricts my capability to do my job in terms of the interest that I have in the sector and also these investments, and I will say that there are investments. There are a lot of questions out there about the number of jobs that are going to be created. There are also a lot of questions about how they will play out in the community. The lack of planning that's been done is scary, quite frankly.

A lot of people at this table will understand the shortage of housing across Canada that we now have to deal with, and there has been very little federal or provincial support provided to the municipality or the citizens as to where some of these workers will come from and whether they are going to be permanent or temporary or maybe cycled in and out. There has been engagement with the private sector to some degree, and there have been city resources spent for that, but it's one thing that's going to create angst and anxiety and it is something we need to get out there in public to continue to make sure the numbers are correct for proper social planning.

Maybe with these opportunities, if we are going to have to live with any possible contracts in whatever way they are going to be written, there will also be a way of making sure that, when these housing elements are done and the workers are gone, the housing can maybe be turned into social housing. There is work that can be done in that vein, which is important to maybe cover some of the concerns that are being expressed about the amount of capital investment that's taking place and the fact that we are going to have to have some workers come in regardless, because the contracts are signed.

These are some of the reasons why I think shedding light on this issue is tremendously important. I also want to have confidence that proper training is going to be provided. We've had all this time between then and now to work on getting more training done, and we haven't seen that take place. However, perhaps with more light on this there can be training opportunities for the future, whether they are for the plant in Windsor, which is coming online first, or perhaps for some of the other communities, which might send some of their members to our area temporarily or have some of the Windsor members go to different places to actually contribute and lessen the burden on foreign workers and their necessity in the future.

We don't have any of those things in place right now, and we don't know the answers to those important questions. That's one of the reasons I can't agree with the amendment.

I come from an auto family and I know that it is critically important that the jobs be worth it, but we still don't have a national auto strategy. That is something I have been after for a long time. We have one-off deals that leave us vulnerable to these situations, because we end up doing Hail Mary passes. For those who aren't familiar with the football jargon, this refers to the last play of the half or the quarter, in which you throw the ball as far as you can and hope that somebody catches it and you can win or tie the game. That's kind of our approach to some of these—

[Ryan Williams, Conservative, Bay of Quinte, ON]

moved:

That it be an instruction to the Standing Committee on Industry and Technology that, during its consideration of Bill C-27, An Act to enact the Consumer Privacy Protection Act, the Personal Information and Data Protection Tribunal Act and the Artificial Intelligence and Data Act and to make consequential and related amendments to other Acts, the committee be granted the power to divide the bill into two pieces of legislation:

(a) Bill C-27A, an Act to enact the Consumer Privacy Protection Act, and an Act to enact the Personal Information and Data Protection Tribunal Act, containing Part 1, Part 2, and the schedule, to section 2; and

(b) Bill C-27B, an Act to enact the Artificial Intelligence and Data Act, containing Part 3.

Mr. Speaker, I am very disappointed that we are not talking about housing, and about RBC and HSBC, in the House today. After eight years, this country is in the worst housing crisis we have ever had. We just have to talk to any constituent to see exactly what is happening.

Before I get into that, I want to mention that I will be splitting my time today with the hon. member for Calgary Nose Hill.

When we talk about housing, it is absolute ludicrous that there are families right now that cannot afford the mortgage they do have, if they are so lucky to have a home, and also that those who are renting are finding that rents have doubled. We are hearing, across all of our communities, that homelessness has doubled. I met with the police chief and the mayor from my city last week, and we talked about detox centres. It is not only a housing crisis that has put people on the street; it is also a major drug, mental health and addictions crisis that is putting people into precarious situations. Oftentimes things are out of control and they cannot handle it. We had 66 overdoses in one week in Belleville, Ontario. It is just out of hand.

Housing should be announced as a crisis in this country. At the end of the day, after four years of talking, and after eight years, housing is in such dire straits. Of course, we look to competition to be the answer for that. Every single government has brought that forward and talked about competition. However, it has really been just drip, drip, drip. There has been one little policy or one little change, but no major competition. For the most part, it would bring in consumer-led banking, which would mean that many companies, fintech companies, could provide different options for consumers. The second part of that would be to ensure that we really look at stopping major bad deals that have happened under the existing Competition Act.

The speed of competition is really bad right now. There are major oligopolies in the banking sector. Six companies have 93% of all of the banking and 87% of all of the mortgages in Canada. The HSBC rates right now are 81 basis points lower than the RBC rates. This morning, HSBC is at 6.14% for a five-year variable mortgage rate, versus RBC at 6.95%. We can see what that means for competition.

The Competition Bureau is really a policing agency that is not supposed to prosecute but is supposed to look at competition in terms of a law enforcement society. We have all watched Law and Order. I don't remember their names, but the two detectives are supposed to bring the culprits in, and then, of course, there is the judicial system to tackle that.

The speed for competition law is about 100 kilometres an hour, when competition in housing should be a school zone; the speed should be 15 to 20 kilometres an hour so we look at slowing things down, blocking mergers such as HSBC's being bought by RBC, which would become the biggest bank in Canada by buying the seventh-biggest bank.

My bill, the consumer-led banking bill, if it were to push the government to bring legislation to the House, would ensure that we change one thing in the Banking Act: to ensure that people's personal data, which should be theirs, could be shared, with their consent, with other banking institutions. Doing so would create real, meaningful competition in the banking sector.

That is exactly what we are looking at with Bill C-27. Bill C-27 is about protecting data. It is looking at personal data for Canadians. I have spoken extensively about that in the House, about how our children's data is not protected right now. All of our children, at one point, have an iPad or an Amazon firestick, or they are on personal phones. Right now, data protection is so bad in Canada that all of that data can be scraped, and it is owned by companies, not by the children. It is sold to other companies.

Of course, we have not talked about the Privacy Act in Canada's not having been updated since 1987, way before the iPod. It was way before the time when we had technology and the Internet, as explosive as it is, which puts our children's data at risk.

However, the government, in its speed, in not adhering to speed signs, has sometimes been talking and making announcements as quickly as it can, and certainly not bringing action forward as quickly as it can. It has taken a year for the government to put Bill C-27, after its introduction in the House, into committee where it is now. The biggest problem with the legislation and the out-of-control speed of the government on announcements and on talking, not speed of action, was that the Liberals combined an AI bill with Bill C-27. The minister at the time said that this was because it was what the Liberals needed to do and that we would be the first jurisdiction across the world to do it. However, they were so speedy in announcing that they were doing it instead of doing it. They did not even do public consultation. We had no chance for public consultation when the AIDA was thrown into the act as the third section of Bill C-27.

So far, we have had about nine or 10 committee meetings about Bill C-27. Every witness so far has basically said that the AIDA, the third section of the act, is terrible and it is weak. The bill would not do the things we need to do, because we did not have public consultation and did not look really prudently at legislation that should have had public consultation and public input that would have listened to the industry.

AI in Canada is pretty scary because it is evolving quicker than we can look at it. It is not scary enough to say that we need to put in placeholder legislation and do something that is above that and different. No, it is scary enough that we have to do it right, which means that we slow it down. Just through testimony so far and because of the importance of the issue and how bad AIDA is, combined with the bill, we see that it will delay the better part of the bill, the first two parts of Bill C-27. The first two parts deal with updating privacy and the digital charter, but also with the tribunal.

The tribunal, which is still up for discussion, is taking from the Competition Act a process by which, if a privacy commissioner made a ruling or recommendation against an individual or against a corporation, at the end of the day, that tribunal would allow the option for an individual to have a second reading. The problem is that the tribunal in the Competition Act is not all that great either, which we saw with the Rogers and Shaw merger. The Competition Tribunal was utilized to review a merger of Rogers and Shaw, which was rejected by the Competition Bureau. The make-up of the Competition Tribunal is supposed to be three experts in privacy law, only three, so there is a lot of debate on that.

The first two parts of the bill are so complex. The third part throws the whole bill into a spin. The recommendation we are making is one we have made before. However, after hearing testimony in committee, we have recommended to separate the third part of the bill, which really needs to be scrapped because it is so weak. The recommendation about the bill would be to make it a separate vote. Probably the biggest argument for this is that it could save the first two parts of the bill, because we do need to update privacy legislation.

With respect to the most important part, which is owning one's data, I am going to go back to why that is so important with competition in banking. Right now, the only way to get people's credit-card and banking-statement data, which is theirs, is a method called “screen scraping”, which means that people give their safe word to another institution so they can go into their bank account and see their information. This is wrong. The U.K. and Australia have outlawed that because it is absolutely wrong, but it is a practice we allow in Canada. Consumer-led banking would ensure that people own their data, and, on their consent, they move that data to new competitors. New competitors could then bank them and provide better service, lower cost and more competition in Canada.

We have to separate the third part of the bill. AI is extremely scary. It is extremely important. I know that the next speaker is going to speak very profoundly on that. She is an expert on it.

[The Chair, Liberal, Joël Lightbound]

Before I turn to Monsieur Lemire, I'd like to say thank you to our witnesses. I think, given the time and the nature of the discussion, we're not necessarily near a vote on this motion.

I want to thank you for your testimony today and for sharing your insights with this committee on Bill C-27. Feel free, if you want to listen to this debate.

Otherwise, you are free to leave the meeting. Thank you once again for making yourselves available to the committee today.

I now turn the floor over to Mr. Lemire.

[Sébastien Lemire, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Sookman, at the ALL IN summit on AI, you hosted a panel entitled Creating tomorrow today: AI, copyright, and the wisdom of experience. I'd be very curious to hear what you have to say about it.

What are the concerns regarding copyright protection, particularly in the cultural sector, but also in a research context.

What are the weak points of Bill C‑27 when it comes to protecting artificial intelligence?

We know that Canada's Copyright Act is now out of date and that it generally provides little copyright protection.

Will Bill C‑27 push us down into an even deeper hole?

[Tony Van Bynen, Liberal, Newmarket—Aurora, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'd like to go back to Ms. Denham and take advantage of her international experience.

Bill C-27 creates a new artificial intelligence and data act, which appears to be based on at least part of the European Union's artificial intelligence act, which also proposes a risk-based framework for artificial intelligence systems.

How do you compare those two pieces of legislation?