Latest Posts

Artificial_Intelligence_(_Ai_) by Anaf Ibn Shahibul 2 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Artificial_Intelligence_(_Ai_).jpg CC BY 4.0

The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 258: Jaxson Khan With an Insider Perspective on AI Policy Development in Canada

Earlier this month, the government quietly released a “what we heard” report this discussing the response to its 30-day sprint AI consultation from last October. The consultation was promoted as giving Canadians – including a 28 person expert advisory board – the chance to provide their views on AI as the AI Minister Evan Solomon works toward a national AI strategy. The consultation garnered some criticism for its speed and missing perspectives on the expert panel.  More recently on the use of AI to assess the results have sparked further doubts about it.

Jaxson Khan is the CEO and Founder of Aperature AI and a Senior Fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. But before that, he served as Senior Policy Advisor the Minister of Innovation Science and Industry, where AI was one of his lead responsibilities. Jaxson joins the Law Bytes podcast to provide an insider perspective on AI policy development along with his thoughts on the AI consultation and its results.

Read more ›

February 23, 2026 — 0 comments — Podcasts
Privacy Please by ricky montalvo (CC BY-ND 2.0) https://flic.kr/p/8RF3Ez

Time for the Government to Fix Its Political Party Privacy Blunder: Kill Bill C-4’s Disastrous Privacy Rules

Just weeks after last year’s election, Mark Carney’s government committed not one, but two privacy blunders in rapid succession. First, Bill C-2 – literally the first substantive bill of the new government – buried lawful access provisions in an omnibus “border measures” bill that would have established unprecedented warrantless access to the personal of information of Canadians. Second, days later it introduced Bill C-4, which was framed as affordability measures bill but included provisions that exempt political parties from the application of privacy protections. The bizarre assault on privacy felt like an opportunistic attempt to insert unpopular rules in the hope that few were paying attention. The strategy was failure: the government ultimately introduced a new border measures bill with lawful access removed (new lawful access rules are expected in their own bill this year) and now a Senate committee which studied the Bill C-4 privacy rules has recommended that they be killed, removed from the bill, or subject to a two-year sunset clause.

Read more ›

February 18, 2026 — 4 comments — News
Social Media Apps by ajay_suresh CC BY 2.0 https://flic.kr/p/2mYT4yc

The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 257: Lisa Given on What Canada Can Learn From Australia’s Youth Social Media Ban

Social media bans for younger users have begun to take hold in various countries, particularly in Europe. In Canada, Bill S-209 may ostensibly be about underage access to pornography sites, but the bill’s proponents seem positively giddy at the prospect of a broader application to social media. This trend started in Australia, which passed a social media ban for those under 16 in late 2024 with the law taking effect just a couple of months ago.

Lisa Given is the Distinguished Professor of Information Sciences at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology or RMIT in Melbourne, Australia. She has been closely tracking and commenting on the Australian legislation and she joins the Law Bytes podcast to discuss its origins, how the law functions, the concerns it has raised, and what lessons Canada might draw from the experience to date.

Read more ›

February 9, 2026 — 7 comments — Podcasts
Instagram and TikTok logos displayed on a laptop by Cure Media https://flic.kr/p/2mdTmeZ CC BY 2.0

Court Ordered Social Media Site Blocking Coming to Canada?: Trojan Horse Online Harms Bill Clears Senate Committee Review

Critics of Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne’s successive bills that ostensibly target pornography sites have for years warned of the privacy and equity risks that arise from mandated age verification and the dangers of over broad legislation that would extend far beyond pornography sites by covering social media, search, and AI services. The Senate committee reviewing the latest iteration of those bill – Bill S-209 – met yesterday to conduct a clause-by-clause review of the bill. That the bill passed through committee pending some supplementary remarks was not a surprise. However, that the privacy and equity concerns barely merited a mention and that regulating social media sites was viewed as feature not a bug was a wake up call.

Read more ›

February 6, 2026 — 8 comments — News
2023 US-Canada Summit by Eurasia Group CC BY 2.0 https://flic.kr/p/2osnFe4

An Illusion of Consensus: What the Government Isn’t Saying About the Results of its AI Consultation

The government quietly released a “what we heard” report this week discussing the response to its 30-day sprint AI consultation from last October. Described as the “largest public consultation in the history of ISED”, the report relies heavily on AI for its analysis as the government notes that it used “Cohere Command A, OpenAI GPT-5 nano, Anthropic Claude Haiku and Google Gemini Flash to read through the submissions and identify common themes.” Given that it received 64,600 responses to 26 questions, it says AI enabled it to shrink a process that would typically take many months into a matter of weeks.

In addition to the public consultation survey, AI Minister Evan Solomon formed a 28 person expert committee that provided the government with 32 different papers and reports. Those documents were similarly subject to AI analysis with the “what we heard” report devoting several pages to the expert analysis and recommendations. Yet unlike the public survey responses, the government has posted all the experts’ reports, which allows the public to see the actual advice alongside the government’s summary of it.

Since the government used AI to summarize the expert reports, I thought I would do the same.

Read more ›

February 4, 2026 — 6 comments — News
1 2 3 … 1,444