Thank you, Chair.
Thank you, Commissioner, for noting this committee's unanimous report and recommendations to the government in February. We hope that the government has consumed it as you did.
One recommendation in that report, one that you have made in a variety of rather tangential ways, is to work with the European Union privacy regulators. In just a couple of weeks the new EU GDPR, the general data protection regulation, comes into effect. It protects virtually every data element of citizens across the EU, from their basic information—social insurance number, in the Canadian context—to all of their social media activity, all of their personal information, the computers they own, their telephone numbers, and so forth.
Has this Facebook scandal, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, AIQ, all of the things we're talking about today, and the fact that artificial intelligence, which has generated magnificent benefits to society, to mankind, while at the same time there's been a rush to develop new programs without any consideration for protections and precautions...? Is it time for Canada to consider something like the GDPR regulations to protect privacy, from the most minimum basic level up to the most complicated, when it gets to algorithms and stereotyping and exploitation?