My latest Globe and Mail op-ed begins by noting that digital sovereignty has emerged as the watchword driving Canada’s digital policy agenda, as the government seeks to position the country as a global leader in artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies. The increased emphasis on digital policy is welcome given the years of neglect or failed strategies that yielded little more than court challenges, trade disputes and blocked news links. Yet the focus on infrastructure spending as the key catalyst for addressing digital sovereignty risks is misplaced and unlikely to safeguard against lost autonomy and control.
Columns
Why Freedom of Expression Must Not Become a Right to Harass or Intimidate
My latest Globe and Mail op-ed opens by noting that my grandparents arrived in Canada in 1948, seeking to build a new life after surviving the Holocaust and knowing that most of their family had been killed in the death camps. They settled in Toronto, and in their later years moved to the northern part of the city, where my grandfather would go on daily walks in his predominantly Jewish residential area. He passed away many years ago, but those walks came to mind recently as I watched video of masked protesters roaming the same streets in north Toronto, leaving many residents fearful of leaving their homes.
Grocery Shopping While Jewish
In my family, it was always the “kosher Loblaws.” Featuring Ottawa’s only large kosher food section, the Loblaws location at College Square in the west end of the city is our destination several times per week for everything from groceries, to prescription refills, to challah bread for Shabbat. My Globe and Mail opinion piece published this weekend notes that as the only such store in Ottawa, it serves as both a place to see familiar faces and a reminder of the small size of the Jewish community here.
Last week, a 71-year-old man from Cornwall, Ont., is alleged to have entered the store and stabbed a Jewish grandmother multiple times in the back. The grandmother, well known in the Jewish community here, is thankfully now at home recovering. But the initial fears that this might be an antisemitic attack appear to have been borne out, as a review of the alleged attacker’s social media feed reveals a steady stream of antisemitic hate stretching back years. On Friday, Ottawa police announced they will be investigating the incident as a hate-motivated crime.
For the Jewish community, this means yet more security measures as grocery stores get added to a list that now includes synagogues, community events, schools, senior homes and campus lectures – a growing number of places requiring added security and secrecy to keep the community protected. For individuals, it means rethinking placing mezuzahs on the outside of doors, wearing a kippah or Star of David, or participating in Jewish events, given fears of heightened safety risks. The cumulative effect is the gradual erasure of a visible Jewish presence in Canada.
Let Competition Be the Guide: Why the Government and CRTC Got It Right on Wholesale Fibre Broadband Access
Late last night, Industry Minister Mélanie Joly announced that the government was leaving in place a CRTC decision that granted wholesale access to fibre networks. By sheer coincidence, today the Globe and Mail runs my opinion piece on the issue, in which I argued that maximizing competition regardless of provider should be the guiding principle for the government. I start by noting that the Canadian struggle to foster greater competition in telecom and Internet services dates back decades. As early in the 1970s, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunication Commission (CRTC) mandated that dominant companies such as Bell provide access to their key network infrastructure to open the door to new marketplace entrants. In recent years, the debates have shifted to granting wholesale access to wireless and Internet networks to inject competition into those services.
Commentary: Ensuring the Sovereignty and Security of Canadian Health Data
Following on our earlier Globe and Mail op-ed and Law Bytes podcast, I am pleased to co-author a commentary on health data sovereignty and security with Kumanan Wilson and Mari Teitelbaum in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. The key points identified in the piece:
- Canada’s population-based health data are an invaluable resource that provide economic and health system opportunities through the development of health-related artificial intelligence algorithms.
- Concerns about the potential monetary value of these data, access by the United States for surveillance purposes, and how data often reside on cloud servers owned by US companies, make it essential that Canada redouble efforts to ensure the security and sovereignty of data.
- We suggest a multipronged approach that includes encrypting health data by design, requiring health data be hosted on Canadian soil (data localization), inserting a blocking statute into privacy laws, and investing in the development of Canadian sovereign cloud servers to host health data.
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