Bill C-27 (Historical)

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.

Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics

[René Villemure, Bloc, Trois-Rivières, QC]

Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague from Winnipeg North, who always has such relevant questions. I like to hear him talk about responsibility. Responsibility is a very important concept in society. For the record, it comes from two Latin words, res, meaning “things” and spondere, meaning “to promise”. The responsible person is the one who can promise things. In this case, we are talking about the government.

Privacy commissioners have been stressing out for many years recommending that our privacy legislation be modernized or updated. Yes, there are interesting AI developers out there and leaders in certain types of facial recognition, but they are delinquent when it comes to protecting personal information. Bill C‑27 sets out some interesting improvements. However, if the bill had been split the right way from the start, the privacy part would have already been accepted.

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

Madam Speaker, I think it is worth noting that Canada, among our peer nations and others, is doing exceptionally well with regard to the technological advancement of things like AI and facial recognition. Through that advancement there is a responsibility of the different stakeholders, in particular government, to look for ways in which we can actually ensure that our laws and regulations are of benefit and provide the type of assurances that Canadians want to see. It does not matter where one lives in Canada; it is just the general feeling, I believe, that a vast majority have.

I wonder whether my colleague could provide his thoughts on the importance of Bill C-27, which is unfortunately still at committee. I would have liked to have seen it taken out of committee months ago.

[René Villemure, Bloc, Trois-Rivières, QC]

Madam Speaker, as I was saying, there are many different uses. Did people consent to those uses? Did they consent to being in an ad when they were walking down the street? Did they consent to having their image captured as they were getting on a bus in Trois‑Rivières? Did they consent to their comings and goings being tracked? Did passengers arriving at Trudeau airport consent to being identified for their passport using facial recognition?

How is that data being used? Did people consent to that? Is that data protected? After the data leak at Desjardins, we have to wonder whether facial recognition data at risk too.

This is certainly something we need to work on. Unfortunately, the lack of regulations gives the bad guys a definite advantage. Those looking to sidestep regulations sometimes succeed, but it is complicated. However, if there are no regulations, then it is the wild west, really.

Let me give a few examples of the benefits that facial recognition technology has to offer. Daniel Therrien, the former privacy commissioner of Canada, said that facial recognition can be used to solve serious crimes, such as missing children cases. It can also be used for other compelling state purposes, such as in the border context to ensure that people of concern can be identified at the border while not impeding the flow of travellers to the country. Obviously, that is desirable. These kinds of uses are intended to protect us. I think we would all support them.

However, there are drawbacks, and they often concern mass surveillance. One thing is immediately obvious. Mass surveillance is definitely being done without a warrant. People are being surveilled at baseball games, on the bus and in the subway. Although the goal may be to identify a perpetrator, everyone is surveilled in the process. That is problematic.

As for the disadvantages, Patricia Kosseim, Ontario's information and privacy commissioner, told us that, with regard to facial recognition, the biggest concern of commissioners across Canada is mass surveillance, whether done by a third-party private sector company on behalf of the police or by the police service itself.

Assistant or deputy commissioners of the RCMP candidly told us that they were using facial recognition without a warrant and without letting the public know. Obviously, we can expect the RCMP to use facial recognition for legitimate, worthy reasons. However, the privacy commissioner also found that there had been serious and systemic failings to ensure compliance with the act before collecting personal information and before collecting information in general, for that matter.

I was talking about shopping malls a little earlier. I mentioned the buses in Trois‑Rivières because facial recognition is used on them too. I think we need to be careful, because on top of the inherent bias against Asian people and people of colour, for example, criminal bias exists as well. Poor-quality cameras can produce images that lead to a person being incorrectly identified. In short, facial recognition is not foolproof.

Now, our faces can be used for other purposes as well, including disinformation. We have started seeing videos on social media of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris kissing and partying together. They are public figures, but the same thing could happen to us. We could show up in a photo or video with someone who was never actually with us, doing something we never did.

We have to be careful. Disinformation is a serious problem today, one whose impact we often underestimate. All sorts of foreign actors can put information out there for all to see, thinking that they can convince people. Last week, I believe it was Tuesday, Communications Security Establishment Canada intercepted 6.6 billion attempts at disinformation in Canada. That is just another day at the office for the CSE.

The fact is that all of this information contributes to how we think. It may lead us to do things that we may not have done otherwise. That is a problem. Facial recognition is one many tools of disinformation.

There is another rather remarkable thing that is concerning. When it comes to the environment, we often hear talk of social licence. We need to be careful because social licence is a form of renunciation, for example, we would prefer A to B. Social licence does not necessarily equate to enthusiasm. However, there has never even been a debate about social licence or future social licence for facial recognition. It is assumed that, if we are in a public place, our face is part of the mosaic and that, if we did not want to be there, then we could just do nothing. In my previous career, people often told me that they had not done anything wrong and so it was no big deal if their image was being captured. I often answered those people by saying that, if they knew what could be done with those images, they might be more concerned. There are always malicious actors around, whether local or international.

The topic is not being discussed. We discussed it once with our colleagues on the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics. We discussed it with my hon. colleague from Barrie—Innisfil. However, these discussions have not necessarily filtered through to society as yet. Some groups have apprehensions, but no discussion is happening. Concerns are being raised, but that is not enough. Ultimately, we concluded that we should probably make a few recommendations. Given the total absence of any regulations, we had to at least come up with a few proposals that would make the use of facial recognition more transparent. I am going to quote a few of the 19 recommendations, including the first and foremost among them, which reads as follows:

That the Government of Canada amend...the Privacy Act to require a government institution to ensure that the practices [when using facial recognition]...are lawful.

We are talking about the Canada Border Services Agency, the passport office, a whole bunch of places like that. We figured that the Privacy Act had not been revised since before the Internet arrived on the scene, and that a little update would be in order. I am throwing this idea out to my colleagues on the other side of the House. All kinds of committee reports have been presented and, in its responses, the government often says that we have some good ideas. However, an intention without action is just an intention. It is worthless, even if it is a good one.

We also thought there should be clear sanctions for privacy violations committed by the police. After all, law enforcement agencies are among the biggest users of facial recognition. I am not blaming them; there are legitimate reasons for using it. However, when they do violate privacy, whether voluntarily or not, there should be clear sanctions. When an action has no consequences, people continue doing it because there is no cost, financial or otherwise. It becomes a habit.

The following is another one of our recommendations:

That the Government of Canada amend the Privacy Act to require that prior to the adoption, creation, or use of facial recognition technology, [the government] seek the advice...of the Privacy Commissioner...

The Privacy Commissioner needs to be consulted before a facial recognition tool is developed. This recommendation was made in 2022. In 2024, while Bill C‑27 is being studied in committee, people are still questioning whether Canadians need to be protected. It is right there, in black and white, in the report. We have to protect citizens because this data is not always used for legitimate reasons, and even if it is used legitimately, it is often used without a warrant. We have to be careful. I think this is a serious warning. To illustrate how important this is, the fact is that two years later, we are still talking about it. There have been no conclusions and, in fact, the situation has sometimes been trivialized.

I want to talk about another interesting recommendation. It is not often discussed. It is the right to be forgotten. Someone might want to be removed from the network. The European Union adopted a similar recommendation. The right to be forgotten is the possibility of contacting an agency that coordinates everything in order to allow an individual to not be automatically identified on social media or to be forgotten if they want to disappear. This may seem odd in a time of influencers who take selfies every four seconds, but a person may not want to be on the web for very legitimate reasons. We want the government to require “service providers, social media platforms and other online entities operating in Canada to delete all users’ personal information after a set period following users’ termination of use”. This could include responses to polls, text messages a person sends, or photos in which they are identified. We would like to make it possible for this to be deleted.

I will not quote the other 16 recommendations. By the very nature of the recommendations that were made following a lengthy consultation with the Privacy Commissioner, provincial commissioners and stakeholders who promote facial recognition, as well as those who criticize its use, there was unanimous agreement that something had to be done. As we know, nature abhors a vacuum, and where there is nothing, the nothing gets filled with something. It is frustrating.

Just before I close, I would like to quote a witness, Carole Piovesan, from INQ Law. She said that we need to be careful, that we need to increase transparency, but that, if we are going to do it, we need to do it “with a scalpel, not an axe”. The idea is to be aware of this relatively new technology, which, after two years, is no longer all that new. We can benefit from it, as I have just outlined, and we can guard against the harms, particularly the ones I mentioned.

Opposition Motion—Confidence in the Prime Minister and the Government

[Julie Dzerowicz, Liberal, Davenport, ON]

Madam Speaker, to the first hon. member who mentioned me, first of all, I am glad he listened so intently, but he missed the intentional indication that I made at the outset of my speech that I will not be supporting the opposition day motion. I believe we are talking about confidence in this government, and I would say that I have enormous confidence in our government. I am giving the member examples of why I have so much confidence in it and am talking about our AI strategy. I see all of this as very relevant and I am going to continue.

In 2018, the government launched the global innovation cluster program. This program is an ambitious coinvestment with industry that will create collaborations across the country to promote intellectual property creation and commercialization and to ensure that we have a very strong AI business ecosystem that will remain the most vibrant in the world. I believe we have a lot of work to do to create a culture of IP here in Canada, and we need to continue to invest very strongly in IP education and make sure we are patenting and trademarking the unbelievable ideas created here in Canada.

Going back to Canada's AI, to date, Scale AI has announced 151 projects representing a total coinvestment of $610 million. These projects have helped Canadian start-ups launch new products, find partners and grow. Scale AI has supported many Canadian AI successes, such as Routific in B.C. and AlayaCare in Montreal. With many more projects under way, Scale AI will continue to deliver on the promise of advancing AI innovation and driving economic growth across Canada.

As our domestic AI capacity has grown, Canada has leveraged this to shape global norms on AI. With France, we developed and launched the Global AI Partnership on AI in 2020, which is now the premier forum where countries can collaborate and advance the development of AI for good and for all. With allies in the Council of Europe, we developed the first binding treaty to ensure the respect of human rights, the rule of law and democracy in the use of AI. With G7 allies, Canada has developed cutting-edge principles and best practices for responsible AI.

This experience allowed Canada to be an early mover in developing clearer rules for developing and operating AI systems. In 2022, our Minister of Innovation tabled Bill C-27, which included a component entitled the artificial intelligence and data act. If passed, it will make a new law aimed at ensuring proper risk management and transparency for AI systems in order to promote trust. This act would ensure that firms developing or deploying AI systems play critical roles in the lives of Canadians, such as those determining access to credit or employment, and that they meet the minimum standards for transparency, assessment and mitigation of risk. This will ensure that Canadians can trust these systems to operate safely and fairly. The act would also create a new regulator, the artificial intelligence and data commissioner, to oversee compliance, with strong penalties for non-compliance. Canada was one of the first countries in the world to introduce comprehensive AI legislation, and many other countries are now going down the same path and following our leadership.

With the advances of generative AI that took place in 2022 and 2023, our federal government took action to ensure that businesses have the tools they need to adopt advanced AI in a trustworthy and responsible manner. Our government introduced a voluntary code of conduct on advanced generative AI. This code is voluntary, and those who sign on to it commit to set in place concrete measures, which include expectations for AI transparency, safety, accountability and testing. To date, 30 organizations have signed on to the code, and we expect more signatories in the future.

Most recently, our government continued its leadership in this space through budget 2024, which announced an ambitious package of measures totalling $2.4 billion over five years, starting in 2024-25, to secure Canada's AI advantage. This includes $2 billion in funding for a new AI compute access fund and an AI sovereign compute strategy, $200 million to support the adoption of AI across Canada's economy and $100 million to support small and medium-sized enterprises that are seeking to develop and scale their AI product offerings.

I want to finish off by saying that we have laid a strong foundation for future successes to come with the strategy and investment we have made in AI, and with the support we are putting into place for our world-class researchers. What we are doing now is doubling down on investments in compute and adoption and upscaling to make sure Canada remains at the forefront of the AI revolution. We are proud of the work we have done to support Canada's AI ecosystem and proud of the work we are doing to protect Canadians as we enter into the digital and AI-enabled age.

I am thankful for the opportunity to speak to this important motion today on behalf of the residents of my riding of Davenport.

Report Stage

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

Madam Speaker, I am honoured to rise to celebrate my colleague from Halifax's career in federal politics. I really enjoyed working with him, particularly on the Standing Committee on Industry and Technology. I believe it is possible to be friends with and trust the people with whom we work. I even believe that, together, we could have gotten Bill C-27 passed, if we still had similar responsibilities.

That being said, he talked about the many things that have been accomplished in Halifax, but he forgot one: Halifax hosted the Memorial Cup in 2019, which gave the Rouyn-Noranda Huskies the opportunity to win not one, but two cups, the President's Cup and the Memorial Cup, against the Mooseheads. Perhaps I should not mention that here. Perhaps now is not the time. I am sorry.

I really appreciate my colleague's ambition in running for mayor. I would like him to tell us what particular thing he is most proud of.

What is the greatest legacy he is leaving his city and this Parliament?

Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Atlantic Accord Implementation Act

[Rick Perkins, Conservative, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

Mr. Speaker, I think it obviously was that way. I attended some of the natural resource committee hearings and meetings on that, and it seemed that the government members there were totally opposed to considering any other additions that could fix, help or improve the bill. That is obviously not the experience I have had in some other committees. In particular, I am vice-chair of the industry committee, a very collegial committee on Bill C-34, which amended the Investment Canada Act, and the government agreed to many of the amendments the opposition made.

Right now there are many amendments to Bill C-27, perhaps one of the most consequential bills that Parliament has dealing with privacy and artificial intelligence, a complete replacement of our Privacy Act, and we have already passed six amendments to the bill from all parties. The government is operating in a very different way in very different committees, which surprises me, but maybe it should not surprise me that it does one thing in one place and says another thing in another place.

Industry and Technology

[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, containing Part 1 and the schedule to section 2;

(b) Bill C-27B, An Act to enact Personal Information and Data Protection Tribunal Act, and an An Act to enact the Artificial Intelligence and Data Act, containing Part 2 and Part 3.

Madam Speaker, I rise today on an important debate that is coming from the industry committee. Right now, we are studying what seems to be the unending study of Bill C-27, which is privacy legislation.

I have risen in this House before at least one other time on this matter, as have other members of the Conservative Party and other parties, including the NDP. We are rising today to request that this bill be split into two parts. One would be the privacy legislation replacing PIPEDA in the tribunal, and the second one would be AIDA, or the AI portion of this bill.

The reason for that is twofold. It is taking a long time to pass this bill mainly because of the government. The government produced a bill that was flawed, and because of this flawed bill, when it presented the bill, it presented 55 amendments to the bill. We have been going through them at committee, and we are now just getting through the definitions part of clause-by-clause on the first part, which is PIPEDA. We are finding there has been 16 table-drops to this bill for amendments.

This bill was not ready to come to the floor. We are looking at the need for privacy legislation, which we do agree with. Conservatives have stood in this House and said we believed that privacy should be considered a fundamental right for Canadians. When we look at that aspect of the bill, and it is very important, the second part of this bill, the AI, the AIDA, portion of this bill, is so flawed that it is holding up the first part of the bill.

The parts never should have been put together; they should have been separate. There were some fundamental reasons why the government wanted to put them together. With 55 amendments and 16 subamendments to the main part of the bill, this bill is so flawed we cannot even get through the first part. We are worried if the bill is not separated into two votes, and we do not have AIDA separated and perhaps have it come back as a whole new legislation, we are not going to get the first part of the bill through, which is privacy legislation that Canadians are desperately asking for.

After nine years, Canadians have never had less privacy. We look at the fact that we have Alexa, or AI of any form, and when our children are on their iPads, that data is being scraped off the Internet and collected. None of it is private. We do not have any privacy with our data.

This week, we are looking at privacy, and we are trying to discern the difference between normal privacy and sensitive data. Sensitive data would be looked at under the act but would be a bit more heightened. It would be looked at with greater penalties for those who breach it. We are certainly looking at everyone's privacy in the coming years with AI and the advancement of computers.

The one that we are specifically looking at is financial data. All of the transactions that we do through Interac, our banking system as a whole, our bank accounts, and the interactions that we have online, like with Apple Pay or on our cellphones, are all held by the banks. Many Canadians would be surprised to know they do not own their financial data.

A bank has someone's data, and that can mean anything from their credit history, where they spend their money, how they get their income or where they are paying their taxes. All of that data right now is not held as sensitive, and more importantly, it is not held under that person's consent. Financial data across Canada needs to be regarded as sensitive.

Perhaps the biggest breach of that within the last two years was when the government enacted the Emergencies Act and bank accounts were frozen under the act. The government has the ability to freeze bank accounts because that data is not sensitive. Through the government, when it took away the rights of Canadians, that data was then held by those banks against consumers' will.

In this country, we want to be able to have open banking. The idea with open banking is to have Canadians control who owns their data, and, with their consent, who can have their data. That is really the crux of this bill. When we talk about sensitive financial data, it is the ability for someone, as a consumer, to control where their data is and where it goes.

Open banking, of course, brings competition to our banking sector, which allows not only the six big banks to have our business, but also hundreds of other financial tech organizations that want to have our business and right now are only able to get it through screen scraping. This is taking data off screens or having their clients take screenshots of their financial history in order to get it to a financial tech organization so it can compete for their business. However, financial data should be sensitive information, and when we look at how that relates to AI, well, it is a whole different component of the bill. Also, when we look at location data, and the ability for someone to know from a person's phone where that person is right now, that is also sensitive data. However, the advancement of AI has allowed all of that information to be out in the open and to be emulated.

When we look at the AI bill, the most important part that we are going to be standing up for, as Conservatives, is to ensure that computers cannot emulate human beings without their express consent. However, when we look at privacy as a fundamental right, AI allows the ability of one's image, likeness and voice to be replicated and used all over this planet, which, of course, is bad when we talk about fraud. We have all the heard stories of parents who thought that their children were calling them for help and to ask for money. It sounded like them, they laughed like they did, but at the end of the day, it was an AI program that emulated an individual to cause an act of fraud.

Right now, Scarlett Johansson is in the news. If anyone has used ChatGPT lately, version 4, which is the new version, they would find that Sky apparently uses Scarlett Johansson's voice without her permission. AI does this right now. It can scrape images and likenesses off the internet, and there is no recourse to ensure that it is taken care of. However, having this AI bill attached to Bill C-27, the privacy act, is slowing this process down and, because of that, Canada is falling further and further behind. It should be a separate bill, and we are asking that the bill before us, of course, be put into two separate votes, as we have before.

I am splitting my time today, because I have some knowledge, but we have greater expertise coming from the member from South Shore—St. Margarets.

I will end with where we are with AI in general. It was announced last week on the budget bill, Bill C-69, that the government is going to put money into AI, figuring that, finally, Canada should have been a leader and should be a leader on this. However, another article, just released yesterday, effectively said, “Ah, too late”, and that the money the government wants to put into AI and infrastructure, Meta Llama 3 has just made obsolete. Of course, Meta, Microsoft, Google and so many other companies have already put money and resources into AI, and Canada is falling further and further behind because, after nine years, Canada has lost almost all of its IP in AI to the rest of the world. China had 13,000 patents in AI just last year, which was more than all patents filed in all sectors in Canada. The U.S. had close to 20,000 patents. So, now, when we put money into IP for AI in Canada, it is not Canadian IP. Once again, we are just investing in American and international companies in Canada. Canada is becoming a branch-plant state. We take our taxpayers' hard-earned money and we put it into intellectual property and multinational corporations that do not provide the GDP that Canada needs but just jobs, which is what we are left with.

We have a bill that was not properly done. It has 55 amendments from the government side and 16 subamendments. I could not believe that, the other day, the government was filibustering its own bill. We were in committee, and the government was talking it out. It did not like that we were talking about financial data as sensitive information. I had never seen this before. However, the bill is flawed and it needs to be split in two. We are happy to make sure that happens and that we get the bill right. Do not worry, a Conservative government will get it right.

Consumer-Led Banking Act

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

Madam Speaker, the member is a new addition to our industry committee; I look forward to working with him.

We see this across a lot of different spectra right now. This bill is asking for legislation. The legislation has to come forward. It is much the same as we are seeing with Bill C-27, and we have a much better privacy bill in Quebec, so I will agree with that. It is much the same as we saw today when we were talking about the problems with Manulife and Loblaw, and the fact that some of the legislation is provincial that is allowing Manulife to sole-source pharmaceuticals.

Yes, I agree with the member. We always need to look at the provinces, and we are looking at that with some of that legislation. However, let us get the legislation forward and passed, so we can all talk about it in the House of Commons and then get it passed for Quebec and all Canadians.

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.

[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.

Motion That Debate Be Not Further Adjourned

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

Mr. Speaker, the Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry is very proactive on many files.

However, as the saying goes, the longer we wait, the worse things get. That is what happened with the Competition Act. The government could have taken action years ago. If it had, we would not be stuck with these huge monopolies, especially in the grocery sector, that have pushed prices up with margins that benefit them, rather than producers or processors, and that have doubled prices for consumers.

The same goes for telecommunications, gasoline and banks. Costs have gone up because this government did not act in time. It waited too long to introduce Bill C-27. It also waited too long to introduce the bill to amend the Copyright Act.

When will the government take action? Can the minister assert his legislative power to ensure that these files actually get debated? Right now, it seems to me that there is no movement on his side.

National Security Review of Investments Modernization Act

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

Madam Speaker, I will agree with my colleague from Winnipeg North that our provinces have something in common. I dream of the day when I can go to a Nordiques game in Winnipeg. There is a lot of sharing that we could do.

The economy is changing. I think the member for Winnipeg North would be welcome on the committee because the points he has raised would be very useful around the table. I would like to see him get out of the House sometimes, get his hands dirty, and present these amendments in committee.

I feel that the government has indeed done a diligent job, but within the limits imposed on us by the shackles of Bill C‑34. The law needed to be modernized to meet the realities of a new economy.

Right now, the Standing Committee on Industry and Technology is examining Bill C-27. I think everyone agrees on the fundamental aspect of data protection for all Quebeckers and Canadians, and especially for children. However, when it comes to developing AI and protecting our cultural sovereignty—and here I am thinking in particular of Quebec's cultural sovereignty, our French language and our accent, which CBC values so much—we definitely need to modernize this law and go even further. This is also important for protecting our start-ups and emerging companies that have patents and those that are working on and developing AI. We have some very painstaking work to do. I thank the government for its collaboration on Bill C-34.