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.
Wiertz Sebastien - Privacy by Sebastien Wiertz (CC BY 2.0) https://flic.kr/p/ahk6nh
Privacy
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.
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.
Government Says There Are No Plans for National Digital ID To Access Services
The government has confirmed that it has no plans to create a national identification system. The issue arose in a sessional paper response released this week to a question from Conservative MP Marilyn Gladu. Gladu asked “With regard to the government’s implementation of a digital identification that will be mandatory to access government services and pay taxes: what is the plan and progress of the government on the implementation of a digital identification and what are the implementation dates for each phase?” The government’s short answer: “the Government of Canada is not implementing a federal or national digital identification credential.”
The Year in Review: Top Ten Posts
This week’s Law Bytes podcast featured a look at the year in review in digital law and policy. Before wrapping up for the year, the next three posts over the holidays will highlight my most popular posts, podcast episodes, and Substacks of the past year. Today’s post starts with the top posts, in which two issues dominated: lawful access and antisemitism. While most of the top ten involves those two issues, the top post of the year featured an analysis of the government’s approach to the digital services tax, which ultimately resulted in an embarrassing climbdown by the government.
Recent Posts
The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 263: The Lawful Access Act Roundtable With David Fraser and Robert Diab 
When Writing About Antisemitism Proves the Point: What the Replies Reveal 
Acting on Antisemitism: If This Was Always Possible, Why Didn’t It Happen Sooner? 
Setting Canada’s AI Policy Priorities: My Appearance Before the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology 
The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 262: Zack Shapiro on the Claude AI Native Law Firm
