I know we've had some preliminary conversations. I don't think this particular motion captures the scope of what we wanted to do with regard to the study of the telecommunications industry.
Please indulge me, Madame Chair, while I pull up the motion on my phone here. I think there has been quite a bit of study of this in previous Parliaments. I'm probably inclined not to support it, but perhaps we can work the concepts into a different motion.
I'm more interested in looking at the affordability and accessibility of wireless as well as mobile, and we could probably look to the future of the 5G operating environment. There's going to be a lot more data transferred in that particular operating environment. I think there's an opportunity for this committee to review of some of the privacy components contained in the Minister's mandate letter, which are also going to be precipitated by this issue.
For me—and I've expressed this to colleagues before—something that Parliament hasn't looked at is the concept of personal data rights and data ownership. I would point the committee to article 20 of the GDPR—the European Union legislation—which talks about, in layman's terms, essentially the right of individuals to be able to contact a company that owns their data and say that the company has to give their data back to them. Similar legislation around people's rights to be able to tell companies that they can't sell their data has recently become law in California.
Those two concepts together have given rise to concepts like data co-operatives where, given that people now have those rights, intermediaries could, in theory, act as a co-operative to sell data back to companies that are using this. We haven't really studied that concept in this Parliament, and I don't think it's necessarily in opposition to the digital charter. I think it's complementary to it. As this concept emerges, we will need to chat about what the regulatory environment looks like and if this is something that Canada is willing to consider, especially as other jurisdictions are moving into this area, and especially with regard to free trade. I also think that Canada is a player in this regard because we're a smaller market and we might be able to adopt some of these changes.
I don't know if my colleagues feel like that, but I'm not inclined to support this motion because I don't think it captures the spirit of what we were talking about. I would like to work with this committee to capture some of the essence of it and perhaps make it a little broader, so that we're talking about access and affordability within wireless broadband and mobile, as well as about data ownership, given the ubiquitousness of data transfer that will come in a 5G operating environment. That's where we would want to go.
If colleagues are more comfortable having this discussion in camera, I'm happy to do that as well.