Chairman Lightbound and honourable members, thank you for the opportunity to share my views on Bill C-27, legislation that will have profound consequences on Canada's economic prosperity, freedom, democracy, consumer protection and child well-being.
The Digital Charter Implementation Act prioritizes the interests of large data monopolies and their ecosystem of traffickers. It sets a dangerous precedent by allowing corporations to allocate to individuals, children and vulnerable groups the harmful economic, political and social consequences of the data-driven economy. It normalizes and expands surveillance, treating human rights as an obstacle to corporate profits.
Bill C-27 requires a wholesale redo, and my written submission includes comprehensive proposed amendments.
A high-level perspective of some of the foundational flaws with the bill as tabled include the following: one, use of a notice and consent framework, which creates a pseudo-compliance system that enables personal data harvesting and intrusive profiling while spamming users with misleading consent barriers; two, a legitimate business interest carve-out that allows corporations to put the pursuit of profits above the interests of consumers, where businesses are allowed to privately self-determine what constitutes legitimate surveillance and behavioural modification to trample on fundamental rights but are under no obligation to notify consumers how they are tracking and profiling them; three, a diminishment of protections for children and vulnerable persons and an omission of meaningful measures that curtail insidious surveillance and behavioural manipulation practices that are driving the current youth mental health crisis; and four, an artificial intelligence and data act that doesn't include an independent and expert regulator for automated decision systems and excludes the right to contest decisions made with AI, such as insurance, school admissions and credit scoring. AIDA needs to be scrapped completely.
There are many more flawed parts of this legislation, all detailed in my submission.
The recent letter by Minister Champagne indicating willingness to make some unspecified amendments is a woefully inadequate approach to dealing with the serious flaws in this bill. It joins the long list of bad governance practices, which is how we ended up with this untenable bill in the first place.
There has been much gaslighting from industry lobbyists and self-interested parties whose profits depend on mass surveillance, arguing that meaningful AI privacy regulations limit innovation. Privacy and AI regulations are not impediments to innovation. As innovation economists and digital policy experts have shown, the unique features of the data-driven economy—specifically, data's network effects alongside economies of scope, scale and information asymmetry—mean that the more data a company gathers, the more value it gains from it. Every new dataset makes all pre-existing datasets in the hands of the same few companies more valuable, disproportionately enhancing the power of established data giants and their vested assets. This is why, in less than a decade of the data-driven economy, we have seen the greatest market and wealth concentrations in economic history, a reduced rate of entrepreneurship, innovation and business dynamism and, also, lowered wages.
Properly regulating insidious data collection and trafficking, as other jurisdictions are doing, would not only address concentrated economic power, but also force business to compete on the level of quality and innovation, not surveillance and manipulation, as is currently the case.
I am an entrepreneur, investor, co-founder of the Council of Canadian Innovators, and a vocal advocate for Canadian technological and innovation success in global markets. It's deeply troubling to hear the government talk about advancing Canadian innovation, because earlier this year the government admitted that it has no AI strategy. We are merely funding basic research that principally supports the growth of foreign data monopolies.
This lack of capacity to understand and regulate the digital economy has real consequences, chief among them a steady decline in the standard of living and prosperity for the average Canadian, particularly in Ontario and Quebec, which used to drive our national prosperity. Because Canada is unable to create policies to harness the potential of IP, data and AI, the OECD recently projected that Canada's economy will be the worst-performing advanced economy of 2020-30 and the three decades thereafter.
The choice you have is to adopt Bill C-27, a deeply flawed attempt at privacy regulation, or to create new legislation that builds trust in the digital economy, supports Canadian prosperity and innovation and protects Canadians not only as consumers but as citizens. The choice is a continued erosion of Canadian prosperity, emboldening surveillance and manipulation and deepening the mental health crisis of our youth, or a healthy democracy, long-term prosperity, robust freedoms and the protection of our children.
Thank you.