Information & Ethics Committee on Oct. 18th, 2018

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

We've heard of a lot of these social media platforms like Facebook being called data-opolies—I think Mr. Santor said “superstar platforms”. The fact is that people don't really have a choice. If they're on Facebook, and all their data is on Facebook—their photos, all their family, all their connections, their networks—to go off Facebook and go to another platform, as long as that data is kept by Facebook, it's very difficult for people because it's become a very important part of our social norm. They essentially have become monopolies.

My question is whether or not the current tools that we have in the legislation are sufficient to be able to deal with that new kind of monopoly, which is these large data platforms.

[Anthony Durocher]

Canada's current competition framework is not meant to penalize monopolies per se. The competitive process ensures that firms that are innovating and investing and giving consumers a desirable product should not be punished for that. Our job is to ensure that these markets remain contestable through competition on the merits, and that small or existing or nascent firms are afforded the opportunity to compete on the merits of their products and services that they're providing to users.

Certainly, we're mindful of what's going on internationally on this front too, and we did note the GDPR has a data portability provision in it, which is noteworthy from a competition perspective as well. Our focus remains on ensuring that we have the cutting-edge tools to work with this. In our very broad consultation with our data paper, we consulted with the business, legal and academic communities.

There are no answers to this. There is no silver bullet. But we are confident that we have the tools to deal with it. We're going to keep them up to date.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Nathaniel Erskine-Smith]

Thanks very much.

The next five minutes will be shared by Mr. Van Kesteren and Mr. Gourde, but Mr. Van Kesteren is first.

[Dave Van Kesteren, Chatham-Kent—Leamington, CPC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you all for being here.

I'm not normally a member of this committee, but I did serve on this committee, as a matter of fact, when I was first elected 12 years ago, so it's kind of a homecoming for me.

I think the assumption of most Canadians would be that the Communications Security Establishment is well trusted. We believe in our Canadian institutions, and I would go along with that. I think you're doing a great job.

I'm curious. How many people work for your agency?

[Dan Rogers]

I think at this point it's somewhere around the order of 2,500.

[Dave Van Kesteren]

How many?

[Dan Rogers]

Twenty-five hundred.

[Dave Van Kesteren]

There are 2,500. That's a pretty good number, but when one looks at the NSA, for instance, in the United States and looks at.... First of all, there's just the enormity of their buildings. They have thousands upon thousands and thousands.

As I said in my opening remarks, most people would trust your organization, but what assurances do we have that organizations like the NSA...?

Mark Zuckerberg was in front of Congress a short number of months ago, and there were some real charges laid before that. There was collaboration between that organization, the CIA and a number of others. How do we not know that all of our information, all of the work that we do on all our files, isn't just being shifted about there?

[Dan Rogers]

Thanks for the interesting question and for your remarks about CSE being trusted.

In our context, we've had a very close relationship with our Five Eyes partners and our international allies in that space for a very long time, 70 years. The reason for that alliance is a shared set of values around things like protecting democratic institutions and a trusted alliance between our countries. We have conventions in the intelligence context that we don't target each other's citizens and a long history with them of ensuring that we have privacy protection measures that are afforded to each other's citizens as well as to our own. In the intelligence space, that's a long-standing practice and it continues today.

[Dave Van Kesteren]

I chose the United States, which is the largest group, I think, that would have the capabilities of doing whatever, but, of course, the Chinese are not far behind, and we've recently heard some disturbing reports of.... Somebody help me.

[Irene Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

Huawei.

[Dave Van Kesteren]

Huawei. Those are, I think, more the issues that Canadians are somewhat concerned about. I know I certainly am.

What do we have in our defence mechanism to guard us from that type of foreign attack?

[André Boucher]

This goes to the security end of our organization.

Maybe piling on a little bit on what Dan has said about the team and the size of the team, the power of 2,500 is really the power of 2,500 plus our Five Eyes colleagues, and that helps you scale, when you're facing foreign threats of different kinds, of all kinds. We work very closely together. We share advice and guidance, and we share the perspectives on what the threats are, the methods that they use, and what to do about it.

On the specifics of countries or technologies, of course there will be moments when, within the Five Eyes, we might have different views and different opinions, but that's to be expected, because we're from different nations. We have different sovereign rights and different organizations, and we have different systems, in fact, and a different presence already. Where you see perhaps some discussions between us, our situation is different. We take different measures, but at the end of the day, around the table, when we sit down and look at a similar scenario, we always come to the same conclusion. Where there might be some differences on the surface, I assure you that, where it matters at the deep end, we are very closely aligned, and we have been for 70 years.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Nathaniel Erskine-Smith]

Mr. Gourde, you have 30 seconds.

[Jacques Gourde, Conservative, Lévis—Lotbinière, QC]

I'll be brief.

The security of confidential information is very important in Canada. For example, your cell phone numbers and email addresses will remain confidential if you don't give them out.

Two years ago, I was in Florida, where they have a public directory. I went onto the platform and typed in my name and address because I wanted to know whether a telephone number would appear. All my cell phone numbers and email addresses appeared on the screen. We can't do that in Canada. Canadians' personal information is secure and confidential, but it isn't in other countries.

Is there something we can do to correct that?

[André Boucher]

In the example you cited, it's a bit like the old white and yellow pages in the phone books that used to be distributed. There are varying degrees of information. If your information has appeared on the Internet, then it's all around the world because it's on several global servers. If you did the same search in Canada, you'd probably have found the same thing.

What's private is the information that's on your device and that you haven't shared. This goes back to previous questions. You have to be very careful when you share information. You have to read user contracts carefully and understand what you're committing to because you're dealing with a public network.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Nathaniel Erskine-Smith]

Thank you very much.

The next five minutes will go to Mr. Baylis.

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

Thank you, Chair.

Mr. Durocher, you said you did an investigation into Google. What did you investigate? You said they made a commitment to stop doing something. What did they commit to stop doing?

[Anthony Durocher]

Basically, the investigation was focused on search advertising and display advertising. Overall, we looked at seven potential theories of any competitive harm as to how competition may be hindered or how Google's actions were raising rivals' costs. On the balance of the evidence, we concluded that only one of those theories warranted taking action, and it essentially had to do with what's called the AdWords API terms and conditions.

It's a rather technical issue, but advertisers in the digital economy sometimes have to manage campaigns across different platforms, and essentially the inclusion of certain terms in that prevented advertisers from doing so effectively and using Google's rivals. This was dealt with with a five-year commitment that was provided to not introduce these terms and conditions into Canada.

I should point out that the Federal Trade Commission, which is our sister agency in the United States, had previously done a review and found the same issue as well.

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

My concern is that, as was already mentioned, the European Union and its commissioner who takes care of anti-competition, Margrethe Vestager, fined Google $3.6 billion. She said, “Google abused its market dominance as a search engine by promoting its own comparison shopping service in its search results, and demoting those of competitors.”

First of all, this sounds like anti-competition activity by our rules too. Did you investigate this?

[Anthony Durocher]

That's an excellent question.

That's why it's important to recognize that the competitive dynamics are not the same across countries necessarily. The European Commission has two decisions relating to Google. The one you mentioned is related to Google Shopping. Google Shopping did not figure prominently in our review, because the nature of the service that was introduced in Canada was really.... It came out in 2016. The introduction of these services are not the same across countries. That's why when we explore what other agencies are doing, we have to recognize that the nature of the services offered and the competitive dynamics are not necessarily the same as in Canada.

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

What Google was doing in Europe, you're saying, they were not doing in Canada, or did we not have laws to stop them from doing it in Canada?

[Anthony Durocher]

I would say the evidence suggested it did not raise an issue under our laws.

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

That means they could be doing the exact same thing in Europe as they're doing here, but in Europe it's bad enough that they get fined $3.6 billion, and here we say that it's not affected by our law. Is that what I understand?

[Anthony Durocher]

We're an evidence-based agency, and I would suggest that the evidence, as it pertains to countries in Europe, is not the same that we would consider here, nor the commercial realities—