Madam Speaker, it is a great privilege to rise to speak in the House. I should note that I will be splitting my time with the great member for Bay of Quinte.
A couple of years ago, when I was on the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics, we tabled this great report on facial recognition technology and the growing power of artificial intelligence. The concurrence motion on this was brought forward a couple of weeks ago by my colleague from Calgary Nose Hill, and she articulated very well why we needed to do the study in the first place because of the problems that we have in Canada with the unregulated use of facial recognition technology.
We have a situation where policy has lagged behind and technology is moving at lightning speed. The government's answer to this is Bill C-27, which is a broken piece of legislation, which has already been admitted by the Ministry of Industry. The minister has said that we need to improve upon it through amendments at committee, but when it is this broken, in three parts, it really makes it more difficult to modify and manage. We need to go back to the drawing board. I just want to point out some of the problems that we studied at committee. We heard about how Tim Hortons' app, for example, was actually tracking the movement of customers who were using the Tim Hortons app to buy their food and then tracking their movements for the first 10 minutes after they left a Tim Hortons store. Tim Hortons then sold that information to other stores so that they could harvest that data and then determine how best to access those customers.
It was a complete violation of privacy but an ingenious way of making use of an app and GPS, and using that technology to be able to track people. If Tim Hortons could do that, imagine what nefarious actors could do here in Canada or around the world.
We also heard, from a security perspective, how the RCMP and other police agencies across this country made use of facial recognition technology that came out of the Clearview AI database. The disturbing part of Clearview AI is that it scraped all of its images from social media to train its artificial intelligence. It accessed Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. When the company then programmed it, whether knowingly or unknowingly, it created a racial algorithm that was biased, especially with regard to men of darker complexions. Whether they were Middle Eastern, whether they were African, Black or brown, they were definitely discriminated against in the technology. They were wrongfully accused through facial recognition that was being used en masse by the RCMP and other police agencies here in Canada as well as in the United States, causing discrimination in arrests that were ultimately wrong at the end of the day.
The same was happening with our indigenous Canadians, who were also being wrongfully accused through the use of Clearview AI technology by the RCMP. We also had TELUS providing data and giving locations of people, for tracking, for things like COVID, to the Public Health Agency of Canada, again, a complete violation of the privacy rights of Canadians.
We cannot forget how we had, of course, the trucker convoy up here and we had the public doxing of those that were part of the trucker convoy. They were located using GPS and then someone was able to go into the system and map them out on Google Maps and publicly disclose their banking information as well as their home addresses, a complete violation of Canadian privacy. We dug in on this when we were part of the committee on ethics and privacy and protection of information.
We want to make sure that individuals are aware of it. Public education needs to keep up. At the end of the day, we need to make sure that there is the right to know that our data has been collected through facial recognition, with all of the cameras that we have around here on the Hill, never mind what is happening in other public spaces, like airports, train stations and stores. There needs to be a public disclosure of that, so that people know, when they are entering, that there is proper signage. We get into all of this in the recommendations.
People have the right to have that information disposed of, including images that may be left up on social media platforms and images that have been collected by government agencies and corporations. Employees are exposed to this at work, because there are cameras all over the place monitoring. When they leave that platform or they leave that employment, or they are no longer, supposedly, on a watch-list, their data should be disposed of. That right to disposal is paramount.
Of course the government's answer to this was Bill C-27. It did answer the report, too. If I have time, I will get into their response to the report.
I should just point out that as Conservatives, we believe that digital data privacy is a fundamental right of all Canadians. It urgently requires us to have the legislation, protections and enforcement to guarantee the privacy of all Canadians. We also believe that Canada's digital policy framework is in dire need of modernization. It is outdated, it is stale and the technology is moving much too fast. We are lagging behind our international counterparts. When we were at the committee, we heard about best practices, particularly from the European Union, and how we need to institute some of their ideas and their policies so that we can have the flexibility to adjust to data as it is being modernized and the technology is advancing, but also to ensure that Canada's privacy protections are in place.
Now, as I mentioned, we have serious concerns about Bill C-27 and so we are going to be looking at ways to redraft that bill, making sure that we bring forward the proper legislation, not burdensome red tape on small businesses, Canadians and sole proprietors. We are going to put forward a lot of common-sense amendments, as Bill C-27 is currently being studied by the industry committee, I believe. There needs to be lots of consultation and input from stakeholders, Canadians, security agencies and the government on what is needed and what plans there are.
Bill C-27 is an omnibus bill. It has three chunks of legislation in it.
Some of the key problems in Bill C-27 have to do with part 1, which deals with the consumer privacy protection act. We believe that it is the right of businesses to collect and use some personal information, but we also want to bring home greater privacy protections for individuals and charities, and bring clarity for organizations, which is right now missing in that part of the bill.
Then the government also set up, in part 2, the personal information and data protection tribunal act. Putting in place a privacy tribunal appointed by the government to put Liberals in place to oversee the privacy protection of Canadians is a concern. As we have been debating here, the Liberals who were appointed to the green slush fund, SDTC, ultimately ended in corruption. We want to make sure that we do not have another layer of bureaucracy. We do not need to overburden this and slow down the prosecutions for those who misuse and violate the privacy laws of Canada. We need to work more closely with the Privacy Commissioner and advocate for the removal of this tribunal. As the Privacy Commissioner has also said, it is completely unnecessary. We want to have quicker prosecutions and quicker turnarounds, and remove the gatekeepers that the government is proposing.
Then the final part of this bill is part 3, dealing with the artificial intelligence and data act, which I can tell colleagues right now is outdated and broken even though it is not even legislation yet. It was introduced in June 2022 and things have moved so quickly with things like ChatGPT, new generative AI systems and new facial recognition systems that the act that is prescribed in there does not work. We are concerned about giving too much regulatory power to the government on a legislative and policy framework that is already outdated when Canadians need protection today on the technology of tomorrow.
