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More Transparency Not Police Reporting: Navigating the Safety-Privacy Balance for AI ChatBots

My Globe and Mail op-ed begins by noting that AI Minister Evan Solomon summoned executives from OpenAI to Ottawa last week to explain why the company declined to alert police that it had flagged the account of Jesse Van Rootselaar, the Tumbler Ridge shooter who killed eight people earlier this month. The company stopped short of warning authorities, concluding that the account activity did not meet its standard of an “imminent and credible risk of serious physical harm to others.” After the meeting, Mr. Solomon expressed disappointment with OpenAI, saying the company had not presented “substantial new safety protocols.” Justice Minister Sean Fraser said it expects OpenAI to make changes, or else the government would step in to regulate artificial intelligence companies.

The desire to hold someone responsible for the potential prevention of the Tumbler Ridge tragedy is understandable. Add in the mounting pressure for AI regulation, and OpenAI makes for a perfect target for blame and threats of government action. Yet holding AI chatbots liable for reporting to police what users privately post in their conversations creates its own risks, undermining privacy and effectively encouraging heightened corporate surveillance.

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March 3, 2026 — 0 comments — Columns
What a great read by @stephen_wolfram@twitter.com 😎 “What is ChatGPT doing… and why does it work?” by David Roessli CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 https://flic.kr/p/2oEJVLM

The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 259: The Privacy and Surveillance Risks of AI Chatbot Reporting to Police

Over the past ten days, Canada has witnessed one of the fastest-moving technology policy debates in recent memory. What began as reporting about a tragic act of violence – the shootings in Tumbler Ridge, BC –  quickly evolved into questions about AI safety, corporate responsibility, police reporting obligations, and now potential AI regulation.

This week’s Law Bytes podcast is a bit different from the norm. Building off my Globe and Mail op-ed, I walk through what has happened thus far, examine the potential policy responses, and explain why both the Online Harms Act and current AI legislative models are poorly suited to this problem, and argue that Canada instead needs to start thinking seriously instead about an AI Transparency Act.

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March 2, 2026 — 0 comments — Podcasts
SenateCA tweet, https://x.com/SenateCA/status/2027197059397275879

Nobody Wants This: Senate Rejects Government’s Anti-Privacy Plan for Political Parties By Sending Bill Back to the House With a Sunset Clause

Faced with a bill that would leave political parties subject to weaker privacy rules than virtually any other major organization in Canada, the Senate voted yesterday to amend the bill by including a sunset clause on the privacy provisions that gives that the government three years to come up with something better. The change is designed to allow the new rules, which as the Senate heard repeatedly from experts and privacy commissioners are not real privacy rules at all, to apply immediately but expire in three years. This will have the effect of killing a B.C. privacy challenge that sparked the legislation in the first place. The bill heads back to the House of Commons, where the government can either accept the change and have the bill pass or reject the change and send it back again to the Senate. If it is sent back, the Senate is unlikely to oppose the privacy elements in the bill again.

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February 27, 2026 — 0 comments — News
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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.

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February 23, 2026 — 2 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.

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February 18, 2026 — 5 comments — News
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