Information & Ethics Committee on May 28th, 2019

[Ellen Weintraub]

PayPal, gift cards and all of those things are deeply concerning. If the money is going directly to a campaign, they can't accept more than a small amount of money without disclosing the source of it, and they're not allowed to accept anonymous contributions above a very small amount of money. However, once you get into the outside spending groups—super PACs and groups like that—they can accept money from corporations, which by definition are a shield against knowing who is really behind them.

[Damian Collins]

I'd be interested in the comments of all three of the witnesses in response to my next question.

Ad transparency seems to be one of the most important things we should push for. Certainly in the U.K., and I think in other countries as well, our electoral law was based on understanding who the messenger was. People had to state who was paying for the advert and who the advert was there to promote. Those same rules didn't translate into social media.

Even though the platforms are saying they will require that transparency, it seems, particularly in the case of Facebook, quite easy to game. The person who claims to be the person responsible for the ads may not be the person who is the data controller or the funder. That information isn't really clear.

I wonder if you share our concerns about that, and if you have any thoughts about what sort of legislation we might need to make sure there is full, proper disclosure as to who is funding campaigns.

[Ellen Weintraub]

I absolutely share that concern. Part of the problem, as far as I know, is that they're not verifying who is behind the ad. If somebody says Mickey Mouse is the sponsor of this ad, that's what they're going to run on their platform.

[Damian Collins]

I'd be interested in hearing from the other two panellists as well, whether they have any concern regarding how we would create a robust system of ad transparency online.

[Daniel Therrien]

I would add that to reduce the risk of misuse of information in the political process, you need to have a series of laws. In Canada and a number of other countries, such as the United States, political parties, at least federally in Canada, are not governed by privacy legislation. That's another gap in the laws of certain countries.

You need a series of measures, including transparency in advertising, data protection laws and other rules, to ensure that the ecosystem of companies and political parties is properly governed.

[Damian Collins]

It sounds like the heart of it is having regulators who have statutory powers to go into the tech companies and investigate whether they feel the appropriate information is being disclosed.

[Daniel Therrien]

We can investigate companies in Canada, but we cannot investigate political parties. A proper regime would authorize a regulator to have oversight over both.

[Damian Collins]

That would be both parties and the platforms that are providing the advertising.

[Daniel Therrien]

Yes.

[Damian Collins]

I don't know if the audio feed to Malta is working.

[Prof. Joseph A. Cannataci]

The audio feed is working, thank you, Mr. Collins. I thank you also for the work you've put in on your report, which I must say I found to be extremely useful for my mandate.

Very quickly, I share the concerns of both the previous witnesses. The importance of who the messenger was is very, very great when it comes to ad transparency. I share serious concerns about the use of blockchain and other distributed ledger technologies. Frankly, not enough research has been carried out at this moment in time to enable us to examine the issues concerned.

I happen to live in a country that has proclaimed itself the blockchain island, and we have some efforts going on with legislation on blockchain, but I'm afraid there is still a lot of work to be done around the world on this subject. If at all possible, I would suggest that the committee lend its name to some serious resources in studying the problem and coming up with proper recommendations.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Zimmer]

Thank you, Mr. Cannataci.

We're over time and we have some members who need to go to a vote. Therefore, I need to get to Ms. Vandenbeld as soon as I can.

I will try to get back around if you need a more fulsome answer.

Ms. Vandenbeld.

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

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you very much for being here and for your very informative testimony.

I'd like to focus my questions on the foreign threats to democracy and what I call the enabling technologies: the social media platforms, the “data-opolies” that are allowing for those foreign threats to actually take hold.

I note that, as legislators, we are the front lines of democracy globally. If those of us who are elected representatives of the people are not able to tackle this and do something about these threats.... This is really up to us and that's why I'm so pleased that the grand committee is meeting today.

I also note the co-operation that even our committee was able to have with the U.K. committee on AggregateIQ, which was here in Canada when we were studying Cambridge Analytica and Facebook.

However, we do have a problem, which is that individual countries, especially smaller markets, are very easily ignored by these large platforms, because simply, they're so large that individually there is not much we can do. Therefore, we do need to work together.

Ms. Weintraub, do you believe that right now you have the tools you need to ensure that the 2020 U.S. election will be free, or as free as possible, of foreign influence?

[Ellen Weintraub]

I hesitate to answer that question. As I said in my testimony, there are various laws that I wish Congress would pass. There are regulations that I wish I could persuade my colleagues on the commission to agree to pass.

I think we are not in as good shape as we could be, but I do know that the Department of Homeland Security and all the state and local governments have been working very hard on ensuring the physical infrastructure, to try to ensure that votes don't get changed, which of course is the biggest fear.

When it comes to foreign influence, as our FBI director said, we are expecting our adversaries to be changing up their game plan, and until we see it, we won't know whether we're ready for it.

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

In Canada, one of the issues is that during an election campaign it's very hard to know who has the authority to be able to speak out, so we've put together the critical election incident public protocol, which is a group of senior civil servants who would be able to make public if it's known through the security agencies that there is, in fact, a foreign threat.

Has the U.S. looked at something such as that? Is it something that you think would work internationally?

Mr. Cannataci, I would ask you to also answer that in terms of the global context. I wonder if you're seeing things that could potentially, during an election period, allow for that type of authority to be able to speak out on that.

I'll start with Ms. Weintraub and then go to Mr. Cannataci.

[Ellen Weintraub]

I do think that authority is there. I think there are federal officials who are empowered to make that type of information public if they become aware of it, as they become aware of it. There are obviously national security and intelligence concerns that sometimes hamper that type of transparency.

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

Mr. Cannataci, you mentioned that there are international treaties of sorts on data and privacy protection, but is there a clearing house of sorts of international best practice?

We're finding in this committee alone that there are very good examples that we're sharing, but is there any place where these best practices are being shared and tested, and documented and disseminated?

[Prof. Joseph A. Cannataci]

Not to my knowledge. We have coming up two United Nations committees, at least one of which might be discussing ancillary subjects. There is the so-called open-ended working group inside the UN, which will start working probably in the autumn, where you might be tempted to broach the subject.

I would, however, be pleased to work together with the committee in order to devise any sets of mechanisms that can be shared on good practices, because most of the attempts we have seen in manipulating elections involve profiling individuals in one area or another and then targeting them in order to get their votes.

I'd be very pleased to carry out work, together with the committee, in that direction, and anybody who wishes to share good practices is very welcome to do so.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Zimmer]

Thank you, Ms. Vandenbeld. That's your time.

We'll go over to Mr. Angus for five minutes.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you for appearing, Ms. Weintraub.

You Americans are like our first cousins, and we love you dearly, but we're a little smug, because we look over the border and see all this crazy stuff and say we'd never do that in Canada. I will therefore give you the entire history of electoral fraud and interference in Canada in the last 10 years.

We had a 20-year-old who was working for the Conservatives who got his hands on some phone numbers and sent out wrong information on voting day. He was jailed.

We had a member of this committee who got his cousins to help pay an electoral paying scheme. He lost his seat in Parliament and went to jail.

We had a cabinet minister who cheated on 8,000 dollars' worth of flights in an election and went over the limit. He lost his position in cabinet and lost his seat.

These situations have consequences, and yet we see wide open data interference now for which we don't seem to have any laws, or we're seemingly at a loss and are not sure how to tackle it.

I can tell you that in 2015 I began to see it in the federal election, and it was not noticed at all at the national level. It was intense anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant women material that up-ended the whole election discourse in our region. It was coming from Britain First, an extremist organization. How working-class people in my region were getting this stuff, I didn't understand.

I understand now, however, how fast the poison moves in the system, how easy it is to target individuals, how the profiles and the data profiles of our individual voters can be manipulated.

When the federal government has new electoral protection laws, they may be the greatest laws for the 2015 election, but that was like stage coach robberies compared with what we will see in our upcoming election, which will probably be testing some of the ground for the 2020 election.

In terms of this massive movement in the tools of undermining democratic elections, how do we put in in place the tools to take on these data mercenaries who can target us right down to individual voters each with their own individual fears?

[Ellen Weintraub]

I don't even know how to begin to answer that question.

Obviously Canada has a different system from ours in the United States. I don't always agree with the way our Supreme Court interprets the First Amendment, but it has provided extremely strong protections for free speech rights, and that has ramifications in the area of technology, in the area of dark money, in the area of money and politics.

If it were up to me, I think they would veer a little bit more toward the Canadian model, but I don't have control over that.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Mr. Therrien, I will go to you.

It was your predecessor, Elizabeth Denham, who identified the Facebook weakness in 2008 and attempted to have them comply. If they had done so, we might have avoided so many issues. Now, in 2019, we have you making a finding in the rule of law under your jurisdiction that Facebook broke our information protection act.

What has been very disturbing is that Facebook has simply refused to recognize the jurisdiction of our country, based on our supposed necessity to prove to them whether or not harm was caused.

I'm not sure whether you heard Mr. Chan's testimony today, but in terms of the rights of democratic legislators to ensure that laws are protected, how do we address a company that believes it can pick and choose, opt in or opt out, among national laws?

[Daniel Therrien]

You refer to the findings of my predecessors 10 years ago. It's certainly disconcerting that practices that were identified 10 years ago and were said to have been corrected by better privacy policies and better information to users were not actually corrected. There were superficial improvements, in our view, but in effect, the privacy protections of Facebook 10 years after the investigation of the OPC are still very ineffective.

On the jurisdictional argument, I believe the argument of the company is that because Canadians were not personally affected in terms of the ultimate misuse of the information for political purposes, this somehow results in the lack of jurisdiction for my office. Actually, however, what we looked at was not limited to the impact of these privacy practices on the Canadian political process. We looked at the sum total of the privacy regulatory scheme of Facebook as it applies not only to one third party application but all third party applications, of which there are millions.

I'm certainly very concerned that Facebook is saying that we do not have jurisdiction, when we were looking at the way in which Facebook handled the personal information of Canadians vis-à-vis millions of applications and not only one application.

How do you ensure that Facebook or other companies heed the jurisdiction of Canada? Well, based on the legal regime that we have, we are left with the possibility of bringing Facebook to the Canadian Federal Court—and this is what we will do—to have a ruling on Facebook's practices, including whether it is subject to our jurisdiction. We don't have much doubt that they are subject to our jurisdiction, but it will take a court finding to decide that question.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Finally—

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Zimmer]

Thank you, Mr. Angus. You're out of time.