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.

[Jean-Denis Garon, Bloc, Mirabel, QC]

I understand.

I'd like to talk a bit about Bill C‑27. It was put on hold for two weeks so we could have a few meetings and conversations.

I've said many times, both publicly and privately, that the talks have stalled over the new tribunal. I reread the transcripts of the meetings that were held. Department officials came before the committee and said that the new tribunal was needed. One of the reasons they gave was that the Privacy Commissioner lost 70% of the cases that were heard by the Federal Court.

However, we learned things, somewhat informally, about the cases in question. The information the committee heard, which undermined the commissioner's credibility, was based on seven cases. In the four cases that the commissioner lost, the court's decisions had to do with jurisdiction, not merit.

Can you comment on that? Can you give us more information on the assertion that the commissioner isn't very successful in cases that go before the Federal Court, in other words, that the commissioner is not doing a good job?

Can you tell us exactly what calculations the department did to arrive at that assertion?

I'm having trouble understanding how come department officials, and sometimes the minister, indirectly, seem to want to undermine the credibility of an organization seen as important.

[François-Philippe Champagne, Liberal, Saint-Maurice—Champlain, QC]

I introduced Bill C‑27. All you have to do is look at the pace at which things are moving. Sometimes you have to put out a plea and mobilize civil society—

[Jean-Denis Garon, Bloc, Mirabel, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Minister, you said earlier you didn't regret your comments that the opposition parties were holding up Bill C‑27. You also said that the industry was getting frustrated, that it was even angrier than you are. I take it you care about what the industry and civil society have to say.

When it comes to AI, copyright is another issue, specifically reform of the Copyright Act, which is full of holes. No copyright reforms have been proposed in relation to AI. There are groups of stakeholders who want to sit down with you and have their voices heard on the issue of copyright enforcement for visual productions and the copyright exceptions for universities.

I realize that you don't regret your comments, but it's as though one of your ears is a bit more blocked, depending on who's doing the talking.

When will we see Copyright Act reforms?

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you for being here, Mr. Minister.

I fortunately have to stay here for the moment. I have a couple of obligations to take care of.

Real quick, on Bill C-27, you were prancing about the Montreal area, blaming the committee for holding the bill up. We've had to issue a letter to you. I hope you've seen the letter with regard to the concerns expressed.

Do you have anything to report back to us with regard to your position on the tribunal?

I thought that we actually worked fairly well together as a committee to come up with a plan to at least see if we can get over the hurdle of the tribunal.

My question, quite frankly, is, do you regret your public relations strategy of, basically, blaming the committee here for the bill and the problem right now?

Second of all, are you still open to splitting the bill, so we can get the issues related to the one section of the bill through? We may not get the second part, on artificial intelligence, through.

[François-Philippe Champagne, Liberal, Saint-Maurice—Champlain, QC]

I'm getting there, Mr. Garon. I can't speak any faster. You asked me not to speak too quickly in order to facilitate the interpreters' work.

In closing, I can tell you that I've been tracking the industry for a long time.

I took the liberty of talking about Bill C‑27, and I will continue to do so. You'll hear me do it again this afternoon. I'm going to talk about the work of the best researchers in the world, like Dr. Yoshua Benjio, because I think it's a cry from the heart. Commissioner Vestager even said that Bill C‑27 was an interesting and necessary framework. Canada is showing leadership at the international level.

I will now answer your specific question about the tribunal, Mr. Garon. I know you're eager to hear my answer.

[Jean-Denis Garon, Bloc, Mirabel, QC]

Minister, I'm going to move on to another topic, with all due respect to the wood pile next door.

These businesses obviously need an assistance program, but, as I understand it, it's not being considered.

I'd like to talk to you about Bill C‑27, Minister. You've spoken publicly on this one, so I think we can broach the topic.

You said that this was an important bill that was being blocked by the opposition parties. The committee reached out to you about this. The bill is very clumsy, but it is still an important bill. It has three parts. It's not an omnibus bill, but it has a lot of components.

Even though the government is a minority one, it would be possible to get the ball rolling again by resolving an issue that is contentious here, namely the creation of a tribunal that three opposition parties do not want. You could split the bill in two and replace the tribunal with another solution.

We hear that work is being done. You have spoken publicly on a proposed solution to replace the tribunal. What leadership are you personally taking on this issue?

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

We indeed have a legislative role here today. What can we do right now, in addition to Bill C‑27, so as to understand and meet these challenges of the future that are rushing towards us?

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

A little earlier, you mentioned Bill C‑27. We're very familiar with this bill.

When it comes to artificial intelligence, what best practices from other countries could be applied here to protect parliamentarians and Canadians?

[Yoshua Bengio, Founder and Scientific Director, Mila - Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute]

Thank you.

I am grateful for the opportunity today to share with the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics my thoughts on misinformation and disinformation based on artificial intelligence.

The past few years have seen impressive advances in the capabilities of generative artificial intelligence, starting with the generation of images, speech and video. More recently, these advances have extended to natural language processing, which the public witnessed with the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT model.

Since the end of 2022, nearly two years ago, this last element brought us into an unprecedented technological reality, one in which it is becoming increasingly complex for the average citizen to determine whether they are conversing with a human or a machine when they interact with these models. This state of affairs, by the way, is commonly known in computer science as “passing the Turing test”: We can't distinguish between AI and a machine through a text interaction, and so the boundaries between human and artificial conversations are getting more blurred as these systems become more powerful and advanced after each release.

All of this is controlled by a handful of companies—all foreign—that have the required financial and technical resources. We're talking about over $100 million to train the latest models—and growing—so it's going to be billions pretty soon.

When analyzing the progress and acceleration of AI trends, we see that AI capabilities don't seem to be about to plateau or slow down. Between 2018 and today, every year, on average, “training compute” required to train these systems has quadrupled; the efficiency by which they exploit the data has increased by 30%—in other words, they don't need as much data for achieving the same efficiency of answers; the algorithmic efficiency has tripled—in other words, they are able to do the same computation faster; and the investments in AI have also been rising exponentially, increasing by over 30% per year, and in the last few years were an average of $100 billion, growing quickly towards the trillion.

There was a recent study carried out in Switzerland that I think is very important to the discussion of this committee. It showed that GPT-4, the latest version you can find online, has superior persuasive skills to humans in written form. In other words, they can convince somebody to change their mind better than humans.

What's interesting, and maybe scary as well, is that this advantage of the machine over humans is particularly strong when the AI has access to the user's Facebook page, because that allows the AI to personalize the dialogue. That's just now, so you can expect future generations of models to become even stronger, potentially superhuman in their persuasive abilities, and in ways that can disrupt our democracies. They could be much stronger than what we've seen with deepfakes and static media, because now we're talking about personalized interactive connections between AI and people.

I trust that most large organizations that develop these models make some efforts to ensure that they are not used for malicious purposes, but there are currently no regulations forcing them to do so anywhere in the world—well, I guess China is leading on this—and models, especially when they are open-sourced, such as Meta/Facebook, can easily be modified by malicious individuals or groups to change those models.

For example, they would be stronger at persuasion, helping more to build bombs, perpetrating all kinds of nefarious actions and providing information that can help terrorists or other bad actors. In the absence of a regulatory framework and mitigation measures, the deployment of such malicious capabilities would certainly have many harmful consequences for our democracy.

To minimize these pitfalls, the government needs to do a few urgent things. We need to pass Bill C-27, in particular to label AI-generated content. We need privacy-preserving authentication of social media users so they can be brought to justice if they violate rules. We need to register the generative AI platforms so governments can track what they're doing and enforce labelling and watermarking.

We need to inform and educate Canadians about these dangers to inoculate them with examples of disinformation and deepfakes.

Thank you for this opportunity to share my perspectives. This is an important exercise. Artificial intelligence has the potential to generate considerable social and economic benefits, but only if we govern it wisely rather than endure it and hope for the best. I often ask myself: will we be up to the scale of this challenge?

Thank you.

[Ryan Turnbull, Liberal, Whitby, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

I'll say, briefly, that I've tried to operate in good faith in relation to Bill C-27. We've methodically worked through quite a number of debates, and I think that was productive. I believe the bill has been strengthened through our work together on many components as we moved up to the tribunal.

Certainly, we've reached an impasse. However, by no means would I consider my interactions with officials on this committee, the deep debate, the questions we asked them, the clarification they provided us or the differing perspectives we had on the tribunal.... I take issue with that being called a “filibuster”. It was not a filibuster. It was me, the Conservatives and all the other members of this committee asking the officials for clarity. Yes, we disagreed and had some vigorous debate. However, again, I take issue with that being characterized as a filibuster. I want to put that out there.

The other thing is this: I think the minister is saying publicly that he's advocating for us to continue our work on Bill C-27. We recently said, “Okay, we're at an impasse on the tribunal. Let's take a pause. Let's do another study in the interim and have productive negotiations and conversations behind the scenes to try to work out our differences and find a path forward on Bill C-27.” We all agree that this piece of legislation is paramount to Canada's interests. It's in the public interest for us to have new, reformed legislation on privacy and artificial intelligence.

I don't think this is productive. The committee writing a letter of this kind doesn't seem, to me, to be at all helpful in terms of moving us forward. I'm looking to help us move forward—all parties collaborating to try to work out a path forward on Bill C-27.

That's where I stand. I think this is something we should take up in a future meeting if members choose to do so.

I will move to adjourn debate on this.

[Jean-Denis Garon, Bloc, Mirabel, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I would like to thank my colleague for moving this motion. We're waiting for it in both official languages so that we can look at it in detail, because it was read quickly.

In Bill C‑27, it's hard to know who's blocking what. It's blocking on all sides for a variety of reasons. I listened to Mr. Perkins read his motion. It must be said that it contains nothing but facts. It's true that this bill was inadequate, that it was the subject of numerous government amendments, and that it complicated matters. It's also true that this bill dates back to 2022, that it's taking a long time to study, and so on.

At the same time, I think we need to work in a spirit of co‑operation. We don't know how much longer Parliament will last, but we do know that, among the elements addressed in Bill C‑27, the first part on personal information is important. I'm still hopeful that we'll find a way forward.

Since we're on CPC‑9, we can speak to it. There was the famous tribunal issue. As we said here in committee—it's no secret—we're more or less in agreement on the creation of the new tribunal, and we were prepared to find alternatives.

For the Conservatives, CPC‑9 is a good amendment. They did what they could. We understand that the Liberals don't want to give the commissioner all the powers, but there is a way forward without the tribunal. However, it seems possible to me that the minister or the department felt a kind of rigidity, which made the parliamentary secretary's task almost impossible. When you ask the parliamentary secretary to create a tribunal on which the three opposition parties in a minority Parliament disagree, you find yourself unable to do so.

I understand that there are filibusters on both sides. By the way, Mr. Chair, even though the topic at hand was electric vehicles, what we faced today is in many ways a filibuster against Bill C‑27. We still sent the witnesses home.

It's important to tell the truth. If CBC is reporting hockey scores, are we going to do a study on those scores? We've arrived at this type of argument to postpone the study, and the Conservatives seem to agree. I just want to confirm that I'm not moving a motion.

Obviously, there are facts. I think that the minister needs to keep a certain reserve, and he knows that when it comes to the first part and the way forward, everyone is talking to each other, everyone is being constructive. This is true in the case of my colleague Mr. Perkins and his cronies. It's also true in the case of the parliamentary secretary and Mr. Masse.

I also think that, if the minister wants to make things easier for us, he needs to keep a certain reserve in public. We no longer know where the blockage is coming from. It's everybody's fault and nobody's fault at the same time.

We'll look at the text of the motion to see if we adopt it. If the minister is listening, I ask him to appeal for calm, to trust the committee, his parliamentary secretary and the discussions that will lead us to find this path forward.

[The Chair, Liberal, Joël Lightbound]

Thank you.

Has the motion been sent to all committee members?

I'm not sure if it has been sent to members, and no notice was given, but technically we are on Bill C-27 in this meeting, so I will allow it.

Next up will be Mr. Garon and Mr. Masse.

Mr. Garon, the floor is yours.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I know there are people watching right now and probably tuning in to see what's going on with Bill C-27 as we're talking about this. There has been a bit of what I'll perhaps say is a confused characterization of the status of Bill C-27 by Minister Champagne, with comments in Montreal yesterday where he said the three opposition parties were filibustering Bill C-27. Somebody, perhaps MP Turnbull, should update the minister on the status of this bill.

We've had 10 meetings so far for clause-by-clause, and in the last five meetings, the Liberals have filibustered one amendment. If the minister wants to get up to speed about the status of his bill, he waited a year between introduction and second reading before we even got to second reading in the House, so he delayed it a year, or at least his House leader did.

The Liberals have been filibustering in the last five meetings. It was actually the Liberals who agreed and suggested we delay Bill C-27 and proceed with the credit card study while they sort out their problems with their broken bill and the bad elements of it, particularly the creation of a new Liberal bureaucracy with the tribunal.

In regard to that, the committee needs to send a message directly to the minister that we appreciate neither his lack of knowledge of what's going on at this meeting nor the misrepresentation he is making in the media about our work on Bill C-27.

With that, I will move the following motion:

That, with regard to the committee's ongoing study of Bill C-27, and given that Minister Champagne has accused opposition parties of slowing down consideration of the bill, but given that:

(i) the minister delayed consideration of the bill for a year by leaving it on the Order Paper, preventing its consideration in second reading; and

(ii) Liberal members of the industry committee have continually filibustered consideration of the bill for five out of the 10 meetings held on clause-by-clause, to prevent the passage of amendments recommended by the Privacy Commissioner;

the committee therefore express its disagreement with Minister Champagne's comments in Montreal yesterday and order the clerk of the committee to draft a letter to the minister requesting that his members stop their filibuster of Bill C-27.

[Ryan Turnbull, Liberal, Whitby, ON]

Excuse me. It's one hour.

You'll have your time with the minister to ask those questions. I think we brought that into the scope of the motion to ensure those questions are.... It's anything to do with his priorities and mandate. That was how we left it. I think that's good news.

I say we dispense with this motion by voting on it, and then we can revisit this later on down the road when we've finished Bill C-27. We can say, “What does this committee have as priorities?” We can all put our thoughts into what our next priorities are and have a mutually beneficial discussion on reaching some consensus around what else we would like to study. The EV industry is something I'm interested in. I would love to think about how we might do something later on down the road on that, but I don't think, again, that now is the time.

It's the framing of this particular motion that I take issue with. I've heard very clearly from colleagues that they see it in a somewhat similar light. Actually, they made better arguments than I did, quite frankly.

Thank you.

[Ryan Turnbull, Liberal, Whitby, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Based on the conversation that we've had on this particular motion, I don't have a lot of hope for the Conservatives salvaging this right now. That's the feeling that I'm getting from the other colleagues around the table. I think we've all spoken passionately to where we stand on this. It’s clear that the framing of this is the problem. I think there are some underlying assumptions in the whole frame of the motion, which, fundamentally, I disagree with.

Therefore, Ms. Rempel Garner's changing the slight timeline, to me, doesn't fix the motion. I just think that it would be easier for us to revisit this when we finish Bill C-27. I think that if you and the Conservatives have questions for the minister on the changes to some of these, you're going to have him for two hours sometime in the next two weeks, which we've committed to.