The Senate Standing Committee on Banking, Trade and Commerce has spent the past month and a half actively engaged in a detailed study of the regulatory framework for open banking. The study has included government officials, representatives from Australia and the UK, and Canadian banking stakeholders. I appeared before the committee yesterday as a single person panel, spending a full hour discussing a wide range of policy concerns. My core message was that the committee debate over whether Canada should have open banking missed the bigger issue that millions of Canadians already use open banking type services despite the friction in making their data easily portable to third party providers. I recommended several reforms in response, including stronger privacy laws, mandated data portability with informed consumer consent, and consumer protection safeguards that recognizing the likely blurring between incumbent banks and third party providers.
Archive for April, 2019
Canadian Privacy Commissioner Signals Major Shift in Approach on Cross-Border Data Transfers
The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada has released a consultation paper that signals a major shift in its position on data transfers, indicating that it now believes that cross-border disclosures of personal information require prior consent. The approach is a significant reversal of longstanding policy that relied upon the accountability principle to ensure that organizations transferring personal information to third parties are ultimately responsible for safeguarding that information. In fact, OPC guidelines from January 2009 explicitly stated that “assuming the information is being used for the purpose it was originally collected, additional consent for the transfer is not required.”
The LawBytes Podcast, Episode 6: Former CRTC Vice-Chair Speaks Out on the Plan to Regulate and Tax the Internet – “Dangerous Game to Play”
For the better part of two decades, Canadian cultural groups have been pressing Canada’s telecom and broadcast regulator, the CRTC, to regulate and tax the Internet. The CRTC and successive governments consistently rejected the Internet regulation drumbeat, citing obvious differences with broadcast, competing public policy objectives such as affordable access, and the benefits of competition. That changed last year when the CRTC released Harnessing Change: The Future of Programming Distribution in Canada, in which it dramatically reversed its approach. Peter Menzies, a former CRTC commissioner and Vice-Chair of Telecommunications, joins this week’s LawBytes podcast to help sort through Cancon funding, Internet regulation, and the CRTC.
Supporting a More Competitive Canadian Wireless Market: Speak Out on Navdeep Bains’ Proposed CRTC Policy Direction
Last month, Innovation, Science and Economic Development Minister Navdeep Bains took his most significant policy step to date to address telecommunications concerns by issuing a proposed policy direction to the CRTC based on competition, affordability, consumer interests, and innovation. As I noted at the time, the proposed policy direction will make a difference as those perspectives will become a more prominent part of the regulatory process that cannot be easily dismissed.
Australian Digital Alliance: Copyright 20/20 – Dr Michael Geist
At this talk, I reviewed the copyright law reforms in Canada where exceptions to copyright infringement were recognized, and what impact this had on the use of copyright materials in Canada today. Looking at the outcome, I outline some of the lessons that can be learned.
Recent Posts
The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 225: How Canada Can Leverage Digital Policy to Retaliate Against Trump’s Tariffs 
The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 224: Why Prorogation and Donald Trump Spell the End of an Era in Canadian Digital Policy 
Why Years of Canadian Digital Policy Is Either Dead (Prorogation) or Likely to Die (Trump) 
New Era and New Risks: Meta’s Content Moderation Reforms and Freedom of Expression Online 
The Year of Disbelief: The Relentless Rise of Antisemitism in Canada
