Mr. Speaker, Clearview AI should have been the red flag, when we read in The New York Times about this company that was stealing vast amounts of personal data to create photo databases of people's faces and then selling to whatever bidders came online. There was no interest in dealing with this from the federal government. I wrote to the Privacy Commissioner and asked him to launch an investigation, and he found that Clearview AI broke Canadian law.
This was the moment when the Liberal government came forward to bring new privacy legislation. We actually thought it would strengthen the Privacy Commissioner in this time of very troubling mass data theft of people's identities. The Privacy Commissioner told us that the changes to the law, by putting this tribunal over him to undermine his work, would make it impossible for him to find a ruling against Clearview AI today.
It is shocking that, in the face of the data thefts that we have seen with Cambridge Analytica, the rise of AI and the rise of facial recognition technology, the government actually undermined the privacy rights of Canadians to help out corporate interests. What are my hon. colleague's thoughts on this?