The federal government on Monday will introduce its long-promised update to Canada’s private-sector privacy law, a bill that the federal artificial intelligence strategy and federal officials have hinted will address some of the major privacy risks posed by AI.
Officials are set to provide details on the legislation Monday afternoon after it’s tabled by AI Minister Evan Solomon in the House of Commons.
The bill is expected to include protections for children’s data as well as measures ensuring Canadians’ data is not used for surveillance pricing by private retailers like grocery stores.
Solomon has been promising privacy reform legislation for months, and the Liberals included it within a key pillar of the federal AI strategy focused on Canadians’ safety and building trust around the technology.
“We’re looking at things like right to deletion in privacy legislation,” Solomon told reporters earlier this month. “You want to make sure children’s information is treated sensitively … (and) we’re looking at (enshrining) privacy as a fundamental right.”
It would be the Liberal government’s third attempt to update the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) for the digital age, after introducing bills in 2020 and in 2023 that did not become law.
Since then, there have been growing concerns about how generative AI platforms like ChatGPT have used personal data to train their chatbot models.
A joint investigation by federal and provincial privacy commissioners last month found OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, engaged in “overly broad” data collection without getting Canadians’ consent.
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That investigation led OpenAI to commit to enhanced privacy safeguards and data collection policies, according to the watchdogs, who said Canada’s privacy laws need modernized language that restrains AI companies from overly broad and accountability-free data harvesting.
Federal privacy commissioner Philippe Dufresne has repeatedly called for better oversight powers under the federal PIPEDA law, including the ability to issue monetary penalties that hold companies to account for breaking the law.
In an email to Global News, Florian Martin-Bariteau, a law professor at the University of Ottawa, pointed out the federal government’s new online harms bill would give such enforcement powers to a future digital safety commission that will oversee measures for social media and AI platforms.
“I hope they will propose to give strong enforcement powers to the privacy commissioner” as well, he said.
That hope has been echoed by other privacy law experts.
Yet Michael Geist, a professor and Canada Research Chair in internet and e-commerce law at the University of Ottawa, has said the Liberal government’s approach to privacy issues over the past year has been concerning.
He points to Bill C-22, the legislation on lawful access for police and national security investigations, that has raised alarm around possible requirements for tech companies to retain users’ metadata and create access capabilities for law enforcement — something companies and experts have warned could be exploited by hackers.
“This is a government that (is talking) about making a fundamental priority to privacy a foundational element of forthcoming privacy law — and yet at the same time, is putting forward as part of Bill C-22 what may be one of the most invasive privacy-related issues we’ve seen in years in Canada,” he told Global News in an interview last week.
Liberals have blocked opposition efforts to summon Dufresne to the House of Commons public safety committee’s clause-by-clause study of the lawful access bill.
At the committee’s latest meeting on Thursday, Liberal MP Sima Acan said the bill “has nothing to do with the privacy of people and their information,” prompting laughter from other committee members.
The online harms bill, meanwhile, would require social media companies to verify users’ ages in order to ban children under 16 from holding an account, creating another data collection regime with little apparent oversight.
“Simply put, the government cannot credibly claim to treat privacy as a fundamental right while actively undermining that right through a series of other bills and efforts to sideline the Privacy Commissioner of Canada,” Geist wrote on his website Sunday.
More to come…
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