Bill C-63

An Act to enact the Online Harms Act, to amend the Criminal Code, the Canadian Human Rights Act and An Act respecting the mandatory reporting of Internet child pornography by persons who provide an Internet service and to make consequential and related amendments to other Acts

Part 1 of this enactment enacts the Online Harms Act , whose purpose is to, among other things, promote the online safety of persons in Canada, reduce harms caused to persons in Canada as a result of harmful content online and ensure that the operators of social media services in respect of which that Act applies are transparent and accountable with respect to their duties under that Act.
That Act, among other things,
(a) establishes the Digital Safety Commission of Canada, whose mandate is to administer and enforce that Act, ensure that operators of social media services in respect of which that Act applies are transparent and accountable with respect to their duties under that Act and contribute to the development of standards with respect to online safety;
(b) creates the position of Digital Safety Ombudsperson of Canada, whose mandate is to provide support to users of social media services in respect of which that Act applies and advocate for the public interest in relation to online safety;
(c) establishes the Digital Safety Office of Canada, whose mandate is to support the Digital Safety Commission of Canada and the Digital Safety Ombudsperson of Canada in the fulfillment of their mandates;
(d) imposes on the operators of social media services in respect of which that Act applies
(i) a duty to act responsibly in respect of the services that they operate, including by implementing measures that are adequate to mitigate the risk that users will be exposed to harmful content on the services and submitting digital safety plans to the Digital Safety Commission of Canada,
(ii) a duty to protect children in respect of the services that they operate by integrating into the services design features that are provided for by regulations,
(iii) a duty to make content that sexually victimizes a child or revictimizes a survivor and intimate content communicated without consent inaccessible to persons in Canada in certain circumstances, and
(iv) a duty to keep all records that are necessary to determine whether they are complying with their duties under that Act;
(e) authorizes the Digital Safety Commission of Canada to accredit certain persons that conduct research or engage in education, advocacy or awareness activities that are related to that Act for the purposes of enabling those persons to have access to inventories of electronic data and to electronic data of the operators of social media services in respect of which that Act applies;
(f) provides that persons in Canada may make a complaint to the Digital Safety Commission of Canada that content on a social media service in respect of which that Act applies is content that sexually victimizes a child or revictimizes a survivor or intimate content communicated without consent and authorizes the Commission to make orders requiring the operators of those services to make that content inaccessible to persons in Canada;
(g) authorizes the Governor in Council to make regulations respecting the payment of charges by the operators of social media services in respect of which that Act applies, for the purpose of recovering costs incurred in relation to that Act.
Part 1 also makes consequential amendments to other Acts.
Part 2 amends the Criminal Code to, among other things,
(a) create a hate crime offence of committing an offence under that Act or any other Act of Parliament that is motivated by hatred based on certain factors;
(b) create a recognizance to keep the peace relating to hate propaganda and hate crime offences;
(c) define “hatred” for the purposes of the new offence and the hate propaganda offences; and
(d) increase the maximum sentences for the hate propaganda offences.
It also makes related amendments to other Acts.
Part 3 amends the Canadian Human Rights Act to provide that it is a discriminatory practice to communicate or cause to be communicated hate speech by means of the Internet or any other means of telecommunication in a context in which the hate speech is likely to foment detestation or vilification of an individual or group of individuals on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination. It authorizes the Canadian Human Rights Commission to deal with complaints alleging that discriminatory practice and authorizes the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal to inquire into such complaints and order remedies.
Part 4 amends An Act respecting the mandatory reporting of Internet child pornography by persons who provide an Internet service to, among other things,
(a) clarify the types of Internet services covered by that Act;
(b) simplify the mandatory notification process set out in section 3 by providing that all notifications be sent to a law enforcement body designated in the regulations;
(c) require that transmission data be provided with the mandatory notice in cases where the content is manifestly child pornography;
(d) extend the period of preservation of data related to an offence;
(e) extend the limitation period for the prosecution of an offence under that Act; and
(f) add certain regulation-making powers.
Part 5 contains a coordinating amendment.

[Michael Cooper, Conservative, St. Albert—Edmonton, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Fernández, the Trudeau government has introduced Bill C-63, known as the online harms act. It has been characterized as Orwellian by Margaret Atwood. The Atlantic has published an article in which it labelled the bill as “Canada's Extremist Attack on Free Speech”. The bill has been characterized this way: “The worst assault on free speech in modern Canadian history”.

Among other things, the bill will establish a so-called digital safety commission, a massive new bureaucracy of censors who will have the power to impose penalties on any person or social media service found to have permitted what Justin Trudeau deems to be “harmful content”, whatever that is. The penalties will be established by the Trudeau cabinet, not Parliament.

Do you have concerns about this so-called digital safety commission and the effect it will have on the free speech of Canadians online?

Business of the House

[Karina Gould, Liberal, Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Madam Speaker, as my colleague is well aware, we are complying with the ruling of the Speaker of the House, which indicated that this matter must be referred to committee. As the Speaker said, the Conservatives are obstructing their own obstruction. I cannot help but think that that is because they do not want to know the truth. Doing what they are asking would be an abuse of the House's power. We will always stand up for Canadians' rights and freedoms.

I also want to illustrate the fact that his question is totally fake, much like the tacky slogans Conservatives hide behind because they have no actual ideas or policies for the country. That is probably why they continue to filibuster their own motion: to distract Canadians from the fact that they are nothing more than an empty shell. It must be pretty embarrassing for Conservative MPs, having to filibuster their own motion day after day to protect their leader from any real accountability. It must also be kind of embarrassing for Conservative MPs to sit in a caucus with a leader who refuses to get a security clearance, because he clearly has something to hide. It is expected of a leader of a political party to do this, but beyond his little performances in the House, their leader does very little that comes close to leadership.

Despite the games being played by the Conservatives, on this side of the House, we are going to continue to work hard for Canadians. When the House does get back to debating legislation, the priorities will be Bill C-71 on citizenship, Bill C-66 on military justice, Bill C-63 on online harms and the ways and means motion related to capital gains.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Housefather.

Mr. Bardeesy, I'd like to draw on your experience, which you mentioned a little earlier.

You said that Bill C‑63 and Bill C‑70 were very useful measures for countering disinformation and foreign interference. However, as you know, Bill C‑63 hasn't been passed. Bill C‑70 is not yet in force.

A federal election is expected in less than 12 months. What can be done in terms of those measures since they may not be in effect by then?

[Karim Bardeesy]

I definitely endorse every single thing that Professor Bradshaw said. To create that fact base for policy-makers is really important.

I will maybe answer with two quick points.

First is a longer term project, which is to have an all-of-system education system response that brings in the media companies and those who are collectively responsible for creating a shared space for debate and factual presentation. That, I believe, is actually a shared responsibility between educators and the media sector.

Second, I think I'll come back to the passage of the online harms act. Bill C-63 would have a positive effect on some of these phenomena.

[Karim Bardeesy, Executive Director, The Dais at Toronto Metropolitan University]

Thank you, Chair, for the opportunity to appear before you and for doing this important work.

I'm Karim Bardeesy. I'm the executive director of The Dais, a policy and leadership think tank at Toronto Metropolitan University, working on the bold ideas and better leaders Canada needs for more shared prosperity and citizenship. We work in areas of economic, education and democracy policy.

I'll be drawing on my remarks from two studies we've done recently: one supported by the Privy Council Office's democratic institution secretariat as part of our annual DemocracyXChange summit, and another one supported by the Department of Canadian Heritage's digital citizen initiative, the "Survey of Online Harms".

I make three points.

First, the state of the threat of foreign or external misinformation and disinformation is real, ever-changing and points, as Professor Bradshaw said, at specific communities triggering specific identities. Canada's national cyber threat assessment describes online foreign influence activities as a “new normal”, and some of this is difficult to detect. For instance, disinfo and misinfo on private messaging platforms are more likely to reach specific cultural communities or identity groups, and they're harder, by their very nature, to study. The design of these platforms also makes it more difficult for the users, who are concerned that there may be misinfo or disinfo on those platforms...to be flagged for content concern.

There are also a number of new vectors, and some came to the public's attention only through judicial actions in other countries. Professor Bradshaw mentioned Russian disinfo, so you're probably aware that the U.S. justice department recently charged two employees of RT, a Russian state-controlled media outlet, not for its own content but in a U.S. $10-million scheme to create and distribute content with hidden Russian government messaging. Some of these payments, as you're probably aware, went to prominent Canadian YouTubers, but the extent of this deception was only revealed thanks to the discovery that accompanies criminal proceedings.

Prominent online actors can also play an important role in spreading foreign misinfo and disinfo. A recent study by Reset Tech shows that Elon Musk's personal engagement with content can amplify, 250 or morefold, the audience that a piece of foreign misinfo or disinfo receives out in the real world.

Another new vector are deepfakes, again, with some of the old techniques but now fuelled by powerful AI algorithms that are available to many at low or no cost. Our recent study of online harm showed that 60% of Canadian residents said they have seen a deepfake online, with 23% reporting seeing deepfakes more than a couple of times a week. That kind of exposure to deepfakes is correlated with the use of social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, X, TikTok as well as ChatGPT.

Second, how do we respond to the threat? It's real, it's coming in multiple forms and those forms are constantly evolving. On this, our report has a number of recommendations for policy-makers and institutions, civil society and individual citizens—and I'll be sure to table that report with you—although I caution this group, your committee, against expecting too much on behalf of citizens to equip them. They need to be equipped with media and digital literacy skills, but the power of these platforms and their ubiquity really require a policy response.

We at The Dais join dozens of other civil society and research organizations to urge timely passage of Bill C-63, the online harms act. Although misinfo and disinfo isn't an explicitly prescribed harm under the act, misinfo and disinfo helps fuel the harms that are identified in the act, and so we urge timely passage of that.

Third, I will address misinfo and disinfo, not foreign influence, as it relates to the Canadian media ecosystem generally. How Canadians consume media makes them more vulnerable to some of the...and those consumption trends make them more vulnerable to some of the phenomena that you are studying. We know that more Canadians are getting their news online, specifically from social media, and that fewer are participating in a shared space and consuming information produced by organizations that have strong or identifiable journalistic standards or standards of review, evidence, and context, to begin with. We also know that the effects of recent corporate decisions and policies can make the media ecosystem weaker. For instance, 25% of Canadians get news from Meta/Facebook—which is a source of news according to the Reuters digital study—and 29% get it from YouTube. Well, the recent decision by Meta news to throttle...on Facebook and Instagram, means that, in our study, 41% of respondents say that it has had a negative effect on their ability to stay current with the news.

Thank you for this opportunity to speak to you, and I look forward to your questions.

Online Harm

[Élisabeth Brière, Liberal, Sherbrooke, QC]

Mr. Speaker, online harm to children is a very important issue for our government. Today, I have the honour of presenting a petition signed by many people from the riding of Sherbrooke. Given the growing number of reports of Canadian children being exposed to online sextortion and other serious harm, the petitioners are calling on the House of Commons to continue working on Bill C-63 and to pass it as quickly as possible. I thank the people of Sherbrooke for their commitment to this important issue.

Reference to Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs

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

Mr. Speaker, on the Friday before Thanksgiving, I talked about the culture of secrecy and the corruption in the form of conflicts of interest that was obvious right from the very beginning of the Liberal government. In the time I have left, I will talk about the situation we are in right now.

Parliament is paralyzed because the government has refused an order for the production of documents, which was passed by the House some time ago. That is why we are here. The Conservatives are not interested in simply letting debate on this motion collapse so the House can fob this off to a parliamentary committee, where the government and its NDP partners can buy more time, maybe delay a final report or maybe avoid a further vote finding the government once again in contempt of Parliament. The Conservatives want the government to comply with the order. The Conservatives want the government to produce the documents that the House voted for.

The Liberals are stuck in the old debate, which the House has already settled. That debate was whether the House should order that documents be turned over to the RCMP, but that ship has sailed. That question is academic. The House has already voted on that question. The House voted to produce documents, so the government's refusal to do so now is a contempt of Parliament. You, Mr. Speaker, have ruled that this refusal is prima facie evidence of contempt of Parliament, which is why this question is being debated to the exclusion of all business of the House.

I would like to address the two main points the government House Leader and her parliamentary secretary keep making over and over again during debate in the House, to the media outside the House and during question period.

First, government members have repeatedly claimed that the government's contempt for Parliament is somehow justified because the order for the production of documents threatens the charter rights of accused persons and prosecutorial independence, while of course ignoring that it is violating section 3 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which is the guarantor of democracy. This argument is one of the dumbest things I have ever heard in the House of Commons, and in nine years in the House, I have heard some pretty dumb things come from the government. Before addressing that argument, it has to be pointed out that Vice-Admiral Mark Norman and Jody Wilson-Raybould might have something to say about the government's track record on prosecutorial independence, but I do not have time to go into the old scandals. I will deal with the argument that government members have made.

Ordering the production of documents that belong to the Crown in order to give them to another agency of the Crown, the RCMP, has nothing to do with directing prosecutions. Saying so is just plain dumb. Does the order the House has voted for say that the House instructs the RCMP to arrest a particular Liberal insider who took the public's money and gave it to themselves? No, the order does not say that. Does the order direct Crown prosecution services to prosecute somebody in particular, one of the Liberal insiders who, again, took the public's money and voted to give it to themselves? No, it does not direct anybody to do any such thing.

There is nothing in this production order that compels anyone to do anything besides release the documents and provide them to members of the RCMP so they can have evidence that may be potentially relevant to a case that they acknowledge they are already investigating. That is all this order does. It does not say anything about directing law enforcement or Crown prosecutors to do anything, so this bizarre charter argument is complete and total nonsense.

The vigour and enthusiasm with which the government House Leader and her parliamentary secretary advance this argument can only be explained by blind faith in insipid talking points or by functional civic illiteracy. The House of Commons is the embodiment of Canadian democracy, Canada's grand inquisitive body that, on behalf of the people of Canada, who elect members, holds the executive branch, the most powerful people in Canada, to account. It is the will of elected members of Parliament, the will of Canadians, that must be respected.

The second main argument that I have heard from the government, and I am now starting to hear it creep into the other opposition parties propping up the government, is that continuing debate on this motion when all parties have said they will support it is paralyzing the House and preventing it from moving on to other business. However, this argument is a bit too clever. It is victim blaming and it is gaslighting. The Liberals are trying to say of elected members of Parliament that it is their fault for debating the government's corruption, and not the government's fault for refusing an order of the House. When they say this, they are missing the point altogether. Instead of studying contempt of Parliament at a parliamentary committee, the government could end its contempt of Parliament by releasing the documents. It could solve the problem rather than study the problem, and that is why we will continue to debate this motion until the documents are released.

As for the other business of the House, I have no interest in moving on from dealing with this corruption just so the government can introduce more bills and laws that are going to harm Canadians. I am not interested in allowing the government to get over the debate so it can introduce the long-anticipated ways and means motions on a capital gains tax increase that will punish thousands of small business owners in my riding, with few companies receiving the exemption being carved out for other Canadians. I am not interested in that.

I do not want to give the Liberals a chance to increase taxes on Canadians, to further sap the productivity of Canada and to further decrease per capita GDP, as we have observed under the Liberals. I am not interested in the rest of their agenda either. For example, a bill they may want to debate, Bill C-63, would create a new, big bureaucracy without doing anything to address online harms, and would give them a new group of insiders they could appoint to that board.

The only reservation I have about the time that has gone into this debate is that there is another urgent matter. We need to address the other contempt problem we have with the government, wherein the minister from Edmonton was engaging in private business while a minister of the Crown. The evidence could not be more clear on that. His business associate, who was involved in, among other things, shady pandemic profiteering, claimed that there was some other guy named “Randy”, who we are supposed to believe is not the Minister of Employment. We need to get to the bottom of that as well.

There is another solution available: The government, if it thinks that Parliament is paralyzed, that we have other business we need to get to and that Parliament has become dysfunctional, has a remedy. The Liberals could call an election immediately. That is the solution. When Parliament is paralyzed, if they think Parliament is not functioning, they can call an election. That is the beauty of the parliamentary system. The government always has recourse directly to the voters of Canada.

If the Liberals really think the opposition is irresponsible, that other things are more important, that critical parliamentary business is being stymied and that Canadians are on their side with the refusal to comply with an order of elected members of Parliament, they can call an election and let the people of Canada decide.

Business of the House

[Karina Gould, Liberal, Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, here we are again. We will remember, at this time last week, I stood in this place and listed the following business for the upcoming week: Bill C-71, on citizenship; Bill C-66, on military justice; Bill C-63, on online harms; and the ways and means motion related to capital gains. I am sorry to say that all we saw this week was more Conservative procedural games. I can only imagine that this is because they do not want to debate this important legislation as they are opposed to it for Canadians. Again, for a second week in a row, they have offered nothing constructive and have instead focused on bringing dysfunction to the chamber.

As I have said many time, the government is supportive of the Speaker's ruling and of the Conservative motion, actually, to refer the privilege matter to the Standing Committee on Procedures and House Affairs. Why can they not take yes for an answer?

The Conservatives are effectively spinning their own obstruction because they do not want this matter to be referred to committee. The funniest part about it is that they not only amended their own motion, but also, today, amended their own amendment. They are trying really hard to avoid this going to committee for further study. Perhaps that is because they will hear expert after expert talking about the egregious abuse of power being displayed by the official opposition, their interference in police work, their obstruction of police investigation and the fact that this shows complete disregard for democracy and the rights of Canadian citizens.

They clearly do not want to debate government legislation. All they want to do is serve themselves and their own partisan interests. We will continue to be here to work for Canadians.

Let me take this opportunity, as I know this weekend Canadian families will be together giving thanks for what they have, to wish all members in the House, as well as all Canadians, a very happy Thanksgiving.

Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics

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

Madam Speaker, the government has failed on the fronts that my colleague mentioned in two ways: action and omission. On action, the government has censored Canadians through Bill C-11, which has had a massive effect on YouTube creators, censoring who gets seen and who does not. Bill C-18 has resulted in a news ban for online media platforms, so Canadians cannot get the news. It has also put many newsrooms out of work, so now the government cannot be held to account. Now the government is proposing Bill C-63, which will lead to a kangaroo court, wherein any Canadian could be dragged through with vexatious complaints based on their political opinions.

As well, through omission, by not putting limits on facial recognition software, the government can overreach and use Canadians' biometric data without any limitation. All of that leads to a police state, a censorship state, and something that every Canadian, regardless of political stripe, should be absolutely opposing with every fibre of their being.

[Corey Tochor, Conservative, Saskatoon—University, SK]

Madam Speaker, we need to get back to who is watching the watchers. What is going on with the instructional handbook of Nineteen Eighty-Four? It is bizarre what is happening with this regime, but we have seen this before. Failing regimes during their dying days always reach for the power of the state, the fist of the government to crush opposition. I think there are some similarities with what the government is doing right now with censorship in Bill C-63 and all the censorship bills the government is trying to use to control our society.

I would like to hear my colleague's comments on that. Is this a failure of the government to react to this report, which clearly spells out some recommendations?

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

Madam Speaker, it was former prime minister Harper's government that introduced legislation to stop revenge porn. That was the first law that passed in the House of Commons in response to many terrible incidents. That was a Conservative bill that was passed. Bill C-63 does not do that.

The bill that would do what the member opposite was talking about is a bill that I wrote, Bill C-412. My bill, Bill C-412, would protect people from the non-consensual distribution of intimate images created by artificial intelligence. It includes a digital restraining order for women who are being stalked by people online and a regulated duty of care for how online operators must treat children. We would do all of that without a $200-million bureaucracy, which C-63 proposes, and without a massive impingement on Canadian speech through the reiteration of section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act.

We in opposition did what the government should have done a long time ago. I am very proud of that. I am proud of my caucus colleagues. It is more of what Canadians can have, with the hope that they can look forward to when the Conservatives form government after the next election.

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

Madam Speaker, we have just seen a demonstration of what Stephen Harper did, which was absolutely nothing for modernization whatsoever. In fact, it is a continuation of that because the Conservatives still do not want anything to do with it. That is the reason why they do not even advance the legislation.

The member was just critical of Bill C-63. In essence, Bill C-63 says that, if someone's partner or ex puts inappropriate pictures onto the Internet without their consent, that is wrong. They should not be able to do that.

The Conservative Party says, “Who cares?” It is not even going to let Bill C-63 be debated to get it to the end of second reading. It will never make it to committee if it is left up to the Conservative Party. They are stonewalling it. They are taking a Stephen Harper approach to the issue, and that is to do nothing but complain.

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

Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup.

What we are doing here today is something called a concurrence debate. It relates to a report that was actually submitted to the House in October 2022, two years ago, on the topic of facial recognition software. This might seem like a very niche topic, but it is really not. Facial recognition software has become pervasive in use, especially here in Canada, and the report provided a set of recommendations on safeguards that could be used to protect Canadians' privacy and their data, as well as to prevent negative social impacts such as the use of facial recognition software to do things like racially profile people from marginalized groups.

The report had some pretty clear recommendations. It was issued in October 2022, and the government abjectly has failed. It has let two years go by without implementing a single one of the recommendations to protect the health, safety and privacy of Canadians. I want to talk about what the government is going to say that it did in response to the report, and then debunk it.

The government tabled a bill, Bill C-27, which has two components. It has some content with regard to privacy and some content with regard to artificial intelligence. The problem with the bill is that virtually every type of civil society group, as well as academics and businesses, has panned both components of the bill for a variety of reasons. Many members of the House have asked for the bill to be split so that the two very disparate topics could be studied separately. The government has refused to do that. Most importantly, the bill contains absolutely nothing on facial recognition, absolutely nothing that materially addresses the recommendations in the report.

That is why when the Liberals stand up and talk about this, they have to dance around the issue. My colleague from the NDP rightly asked how many of the recommendations had been put in place. The answer is zero.

I am going to outline what the key failures of the bill are and then what the impacts of that are on Canadians. This is not necessarily a front-burner issue, but I think it was really important that the report was brought forward today, because it is something Canadians should be concerned about.

There are problems with unregulated use of facial recognition. I know this can sound really technical for some people, but I have to explain how pervasive it is. If someone were to walk into a shopping centre today, there is absolutely nothing stopping that shopping centre from using high-definition cameras to capture their every move, capture their biometric data, attach it to other profiles that the person might have with other companies and then use that information to make a profile on them about what they can afford and how they could be targeted for advertising. In really bad cases, they could be targeted for negative security experiences.

This is a very pervasive technology. Basically, anywhere there is a camera, facial recognition software can be and is likely being used. It is being used not just by the private sector; it is also being used by governments, and there are almost no limits on what the Liberal government can do with facial recognition software in Canada today. That is highly problematic for several reasons.

First of all, it is a massive invasion of Canadians' privacy; many times, they do not even know it is happening. That is because of the lack of regulation. The failure of the government to address the recommendations and put regulations into Bill C-27 means that Canadians' privacy is at risk. They do not have the ability to consent to when and how facial recognition software can apply to them. The second thing is that this opens them up to big-time data misuse.

As I said in the shopping centre example, there is really nothing preventing a shopping centre from selling biometric data and putting together a broader profile on somebody to be used for any purpose, without that person's ability to reject it on moral grounds. Under the fundamentals of privacy in Canada, we should have the right to reject it. I would almost argue that it is a human right.

The other problem is that it can lead to discrimination and bias. Many studies have shown that facial recognition software actually treats people of colour differently, for a wide variety of reasons. Of course that is going to lead to discrimination and bias in how it is being used. There should be restrictions on that to maintain Canada's pluralism, to ensure equality of opportunity and to ensure that people of colour are not discriminated against because of a lack of regulation. To reiterate, none of these things are in Bill C-27.

The unregulated use of facial recognition software, because the government failed to regulate it in Bill C-27, can also lead to suppression of speech. Let us say that a government wanted to use facial recognition software to monitor people on the street. There would then be, within different government departments, some sort of profiles on who people are, what they do or what their political beliefs are. If government officials see them and maybe a few of their friends coming from different areas and walking to a gathering spot, that could, in theory, be used to disrupt somebody's right to protest. There are absolutely no restrictions on that type of use by government in Bill C-27.

We can also see how facial recognition could be used by the government for extensive overreach. Many members of this place will talk about wrongful convictions with respect to facial recognition software. There have been cases where facial recognition software was used to lead toward an arrest or a warrant. Because there are not clearly defined limits or burdens of proof for the use of the technology, it can lead to wrongful arrests and convictions as well.

It leads to a loss of anonymity. I think we have the right to be anonymous, certainly in this country, but that right has been breached without even any sort of debate in this place, because the government has failed to put the regulations into Bill C-27.

Frankly, the lack of regulations, particularly on government use of facial recognition technology, also means that there is a lack of our ability as legislators to hold the government to account on whether or not it is overreaching. Because we do not have the requirement in law for governments to be transparent about how they are using facial recognition software, we cannot in this place say whether there has been an overreach or not. It is very difficult to get that information.

To be clear, Bill C-27 has been panned at committee by civil liberties groups and civil society groups because of three things: It fails to define “biometric function” as sensitive data, fails to provide clear restrictions on when and how businesses and government can use facial recognition technology, and fails to provide adequate safeguards for individuals, especially regarding consent and the potential for discriminatory outcomes. The bill is a failure. It should have long been split, as has been the request of multiple parties of this place.

Furthermore, the reality is that we have not had the debate in the House of Commons on what the guidelines should be for facial recognition technology. What the government has proposed to do in Bill C-27 is to take that out of this place, this vital debate, and put it in the hands of some Liberal-controlled regulator to be determined behind closed doors, with big tech companies, not us, setting the boundaries on that. That is wrong.

I want to talk about what the government has done. First of all, it has put unfettered use of facial recognition software out into the public. It has failed to define it in Bill C-27. Then it went one step further. Bill C-63, the government's massive draconian censorship bill, would go one step further in putting a chill on Canadian speech. It is another layer of Canada's loss of privacy, Canada's loss of speech and Canadians' loss of rights.

When the government stands up and talks about Bill C-63, the draconian censorship bill, as somehow being a response to facial recognition technology, this is not only laughable; it should strike fear into the heart of every Canadian. All of these factors combine to really put a chill on Canadians' privacy, their right to assembly, their right to freedom of speech and their right to live their life without government intrusion or the intrusion of merchants who might be using their biometric data to sell it to other companies.

It is just insane that Canada has not acted on this. We know that the Liberal government has not acted on it because it is in chaos right now. It has so many scandals, spending crises and ethical breakdowns. However, the one thing it has been focused on is censorship. That is because it does not want Canadians to hold it to account.

I am very glad that the report is being concurred in in the House. I find it an abject failure of the Liberal government that it has not acted on the recommendations, which, frankly, are non-partisan and should have been put into law a long time ago.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Madam Speaker, I suspect there is no one in the chamber who has read all the reports. There are literally pages and pages of concurrence reports, hundreds of reports. There are actually more reports than there are sitting days left.

The issue is important, as are other issues raised through concurrence reports. There is no doubt they are important, but they are never important enough to raise on opposition days. The issues are raised only on government business days, which seems to be a way to prevent us from being able to talk about, for example, Bill C-63, the online harms act, which would advance something our constituents want.

My Conservative friends specifically, instead of playing party politics and trying to serve themselves, should be thinking about serving Canadians by dealing with the legislative agenda and allowing for it to move forward.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Madam Speaker, I appreciate the question and especially that it is coming from a Conservative member.

He is asking us what thoughts we have in regard to legislation. I made reference in my comments to Bill C-63, the online harms act. I made reference to Bill C-26, which deals with cybersecurity. I made reference to Bill C-27, which deals with updating a framework so that we have regulations that address many aspects of the report.

The biggest barrier is not a lack of ideas or legislation. The biggest barrier is, in fact, the Conservative Party of Canada, which continues to prevent legislation from ultimately becoming law. On the one hand, the Conservatives talk about the importance of privacy for Canadians and the importance of cyber-related issues, but when it comes time to advance legislation, they are found wanting. If my colleague believes that we should have legislation, I would encourage him to allow legislation to get through.