Industry and Technology Committee on June 18th, 2026

[Ted Falk, Conservative, Provencher, MB]

To what extent would you reimburse anybody?

[Jeanette Patell]

—and preventing this in the first place.

We recognize the human cost here, and we also recognize that we need to have criminals held accountable for their actions.

[Ted Falk, Conservative, Provencher, MB]

Thank you. I need to split my time.

[Kathy Borrelli, Conservative, Windsor—Tecumseh—Lakeshore, ON]

Ms. Patell, a 2026 study looked at 434 loan apps across several countries and found that 141 appeared to violate national regulatory rules, while 147 appeared to violate Google's own policies. After researchers disclosed the findings, Google removed 93 flagged apps from Google Play, representing more than 300 million cumulative installs.

If these apps were violating Google's own rules, why were they available on Google Play in the first place? Why did it take outside researchers to identify them, and why haven't all of the 147 apps been removed?

[Jeanette Patell]

There's a lot to unpack there. I'll speak to how we apply our rules to Google Play.

As I said, we review 200 billion apps daily. For example, we found that 95% of problematic apps are being side-loaded. That's an important stat to understand when it comes to the apps that are exploiting sensitive permissions.

[Kathy Borrelli, Conservative, Windsor—Tecumseh—Lakeshore, ON]

I'm looking particularly at the financial apps that are asking for highly sensitive information, not harmless games or basic utilities. Why isn't the standard for loan, investment, crypto, banking and debt relief apps much higher? Why aren't you catching them before they even reach the users?

[Jeanette Patell]

There are high standards for apps to be available on Google Play. We are assessing whether apps are valuative on a constant and ongoing basis.

In terms of the specifics of why an outside researcher would have identified one segment of apps to be problematic versus what our assessment led to, I can't speak to that. All I can say is that we are committed to consistently applying our rules across the apps.

We welcome inbound inquiries from external experts. We work with outside experts all the time in this space. I would be happy to bring some of my colleagues to have a conversation with you about the standards we apply for financial services apps in our Google Play store, because it is something that we take incredibly seriously.

I've said before that this is an ongoing challenge. We are in a very adversarial space, where criminals are seeking to circumvent protections. We welcome the conversation, because we take it so seriously, but this is a fight without a finish line. We are going to have to continually show up, day to day, to invest in hardening our systems, and we can do that only in partnership.

[Kathy Borrelli, Conservative, Windsor—Tecumseh—Lakeshore, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ben Carr]

Thank you, Ms. Borrelli.

Mr. Bardeesy, the floor is yours, sir, for five minutes.

[Karim Bardeesy, Liberal, Taiaiako'n—Parkdale—High Park, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

I'm sorry I'm not there with you today in person, and I very much appreciate this opportunity.

Ms. Patell, I want to start with some questions around the interface between people who have suspicions of seeing fraudulent activity and then the opportunity to have that addressed.

Across your products, do you have a customer service standard time of response when there is an advertisement that's flagged as potentially fraudulent? Does it differ across products? What is that standard?

[Jeanette Patell]

If I understand you correctly, your question is with regard to the time to assess a user report of a problematic ad or other type of content.

[Karim Bardeesy, Liberal, Taiaiako'n—Parkdale—High Park, ON]

That's right, and a response and/or resolution time.

[Jeanette Patell]

As I said earlier, this is something that's really context-dependent. One of the things to keep in mind when you're thinking about turnaround times for decision-making is that having rigid decision-making can essentially lead to over-blocking content or essentially penalizing legitimate actors for the behaviour of bad actors. When I say that it's context-dependent, it's because we do need to apply a rigorous analysis to whether something is policy-violative or not and to understand the behaviour of that account.

What I have been sharing with the committee is that we are invested in doing that rapidly and to being agile to respond as the threat evolves.

[Karim Bardeesy, Liberal, Taiaiako'n—Parkdale—High Park, ON]

Do you have a customer service standard with respect to when someone can expect to hear back from a person at Google?

[Jeanette Patell]

As I said, I think what we look at is how we can do this in a way that is effective and responsive and essentially drives to a balanced outcome.

I think that what I'm hearing from you is a desire for some sort of bracketing of time frames, but when we're looking at the evaluation of content and the behaviours that might need to be assessed, having a rigid time frame does not always drive to those outcomes.

[Karim Bardeesy, Liberal, Taiaiako'n—Parkdale—High Park, ON]

I understand.

I'm speaking more on behalf of those who seek communication back from the company when they have flagged something.

I want to pick up on Mr. Falk's questions about reimbursement.

Again, it's a similar question. Do you have a customer service standard or written policy with respect to the potential for reimbursement when someone has been defrauded through links that might be on the platform?

[Jeanette Patell]

I think, when we talk about this, I want to keep in mind that there are victims here who are deeply harmed, and the perpetrators of that crime should be held accountable for that. We are doing what we can to litigate, freeze their assets and disrupt the infrastructure behind their operations. We are also doing everything we can to never even take revenue.

We have to, in our minds, understand where we need to focus on the source of this problem. The source of this problem is criminal organizations that should be held accountable as opposed to giving perpetrators a free pass.

[Karim Bardeesy, Liberal, Taiaiako'n—Parkdale—High Park, ON]

I understand. Thank you for flagging some of the activities that you've done on the [Technical difficulty—Editor].

Could you speak to the role of the financial crimes agency that is being proposed here in Canada? What kind of relationship could you see it having with Google Canada or Google product lines that have deep penetration in Canada? How could the standing up of the new agency interface with your effort?

[Jeanette Patell]

I'll have to think about that.

I think, for example, that this agency should potentially join the Global Signals Exchange so that it can benefit from the ingestion and distillation of billions of signals and be able to collaborate with platforms of all kinds to detect and respond rapidly to scams and bring down these criminal organizations.

I think this is a space where we'd be very open to collaboration. We're happy to continue conversations with the Department of Finance Canada around that.

[Karim Bardeesy, Liberal, Taiaiako'n—Parkdale—High Park, ON]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ben Carr]

Thanks, Mr. Bardeesy.

Mr. Ste‑Marie, you have the floor for two and a half minutes.

[Gabriel Ste-Marie, Bloc, Joliette—Manawan, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Ms. Patell, if fraudsters commit fraud and these ads are published on your platforms, you certainly have some responsibility, in my opinion, and you must take it.

Google's parent company, Alphabet, does not report or publish its profits or revenues by country, while its net profits exceed $130 billion U.S. globally.

Google's estimated revenues in Canada are $12 billion Canadian. Your global net profit margin is 30%. Presumably, then, you're making $4 billion Canadian a year in profit, mostly from the ads you're selling. Moreover, you pay almost no taxes here because you record the profits in tax havens such as Ireland and Bermuda.

Knowing all that and knowing that you help publish the ads of criminal organizations that are causing local residents to lose thousands of dollars, such as the $30,000 scam reported in La Presse two days ago, do you consider yourself a socially responsible company here in Canada?

[Jeanette Patell]

I would just note that I lost the last part of the question.

[Gabriel Ste-Marie, Bloc, Joliette—Manawan, QC]

Do you consider yourself a good corporate citizen here in Canada?

[Jeanette Patell]

Thank you for the opportunity to respond to that. Absolutely, I do. I think the leadership that Google is showing here goes well above and beyond what we see.

First of all, there's our co-founding the Global Signal Exchange, so that we can have real results. We're tackling the source of the problem and using our resources to litigate proactively and bring down and disrupt the infrastructure of sophisticated criminal organizations. We're building products and entire business models that rely on and reinforce a healthy, trusted digital ecosystem, where we are applying layers of protections and strengthening our products to be safe by design.

It's everything I spoke to earlier: billions of devices being protected, billions of problematic attempts by criminals to victimize Canadians being blocked.... We are all in an environment where we are dealing with an incredible challenge. Saying we're going to be able to prevent trespassers from ever accessing systems is a level of perfection that we work every day to achieve. It requires incredible investment, dedication and teams that are not only doing this for our products but are sharing it freely with other platforms around the world so that they can benefit from our investments in this.

Absolutely, I am incredibly proud of this. When you look at the source of this problem, I want it to be very clear that I find it.... We have all lived...we all know someone who has been victimized in this regard. We're here to show up as a partner in this fight and to say we do not want our systems to be abused, we are doing everything in our power to constantly improve the safeguards applied, and we want to work in partnership so that this problem is tackled.