00:00:00.000This spring, Canadians finally got a fight about their data they could see.
00:00:04.140They call it surveillance pricing. The idea that a company can look at your browsing history,
00:00:08.660your postal code, take a guess at your income, and quietly charge you more than the person
00:00:12.560standing right next to you. And people were furious, rightly. But here's what almost nobody
00:00:18.140noticed. While we were all arguing about whether the grocery store was ripping us off,
00:00:22.780four other bills were moving through Ottawa. And those bills don't just decide whether a
00:00:27.820corporation can use your data against you they decide who else gets to see it not through some
00:00:33.700secret back door through the front door written into law one reasonable sounding bill at a time
00:00:39.260so today we're going to do the thing that nobody wants in ottawa we're going to read
00:00:44.280them together and find out what they actually mean to canadians
00:00:47.640all right here we go liam debor uh with a look at privacy from uh well through a different lens
00:00:59.120actually potentially from each other uh today we're talking about how new laws that have hit
00:01:05.580the books here in canada are going to make a difference to our privacy and potentially our
00:01:11.480freedoms and let's get into it because even before the show you and i are having a pretty
00:01:17.200no I wouldn't say heated but we do have some opposing views of this I mean I think I take the
00:01:24.360maybe standard less polished view of this by thinking okay we've passed a bunch of privacy
00:01:31.640laws lately that I think are there to protect us you know there's a law on the books now that is
00:01:37.720I think targeted at predators and people that could be taking advantage of us there are privacy
00:01:45.140laws in place now that are meant to you know keep our own data private and the sharing of that
00:01:51.500what are your thoughts you think that maybe there's something more nefarious or
00:01:56.780am i am i just thinking oh yeah everything's fine i want to be protected by laws yeah i don't know
00:02:03.860whether it's really nefarious so to say or whether it's just movement towards a like i view these
00:02:11.760more as are as large scale trends so not that every individual decision is uh sought out but
00:02:19.060that we just we do see this more and more pull towards just centralized data and also surveillance
00:02:25.700in the case of these bills here yeah c c8 c22 c12 and c36 and what you end up seeing with these
00:02:33.920separate bills it's really funny how it comes together is because they often start uh for
00:02:40.480instance the border bill and the data bill collection bill were one in the same they couldn't
00:02:47.240get that passed there was too much pushback and so then they just separate it and then put them
00:02:51.800into two different bills and push them forward you often see bills with unrelated items in them and
00:02:56.900you think okay they're packaging this up okay and so like i can i can understand the argument that's
00:03:03.480put forward on certain ones like say for instance the child exploitation stuff and we want to be
00:03:09.900able to get more data and look into these sorts of things but i guess where my head goes with that
00:03:15.080is when i see things like for instance i believe it was a year or two ago there was a sting operation
00:03:20.020called project juno uh that took place here in ontario and they found within uh 100 days i believe
00:03:28.380it was over 1100 different people trying to solicit ludax from miners uh across ontario
00:03:37.840and none of that really led to any major convictions or anything so they essentially
00:03:43.680got the data they found out who was doing it but they never pressed charges going forward or
00:03:47.960actually did anything meaningful with it and so my mind there I'm going to assume that's because
00:03:53.300the laws did not allow for them to use that data to pursue charges for sure but even too if you look
00:04:01.940at sting operations, for instance, once they try to actually lure the person into that, there was
00:04:07.820no there was no investment. They just essentially went, yeah, we had these people responding to an
00:04:12.840online ad by a child. And that's what we found. But they you could have used that information in
00:04:19.180a certain way if you wanted to. But that's where my mind goes is seeing things, whether it's those
00:04:27.340kind of crimes or whether it's other crimes in general it seems to me like the law isn't being
00:04:33.100applied to get the uh like for instance the bail stuff or um other other uh easy on crime depending
00:04:41.640on say identity politics and that kind of stuff where we're letting people out uh on easier
00:04:46.920sentences i wouldn't see why you would have to expand law in order to deal with problems when
00:04:55.840you've already got laws to deal with those problems and you're not applying them properly
00:04:59.720oh interesting so that's kind of where my head goes with it to create a new law seems almost
00:05:05.620contrived when you've already got the means to do it you're just not executing it in that way
00:05:10.200right and then so that would lead me to think maybe there is something other than the stated
00:05:16.440purpose behind it i get you yeah um and i mean it at this point we if we put all of the different
00:05:22.720bills together, you know, it paints a pretty clear picture as to, yeah, this centralization
00:05:30.220of surveillance in data. So we've got the Cybersecurity Act, Lawful Access Act, the
00:05:38.120Immigration Borders Act, and the Privacy Consumer Data Act. But what these allow them to do is they
00:05:45.040allow the corporations and the companies to collect more data on you. It also mandates that
00:05:52.200they have to keep metadata for a year who you've been calling your texts all of this kind of stuff
00:05:57.660they're pushing to get behind the encryption on those messages as well and then uh they're also
00:06:06.400pulling back the burden of proof that they would have to have in order to get somebody's data and
00:06:15.400the watchdog that is in charge of making sure no procedures are overstepped is also their
00:06:22.640leash is getting shortened. So just all of these things at once seem to me to be pointing to the
00:06:30.100direction of just essentially expanding surveillance capabilities. Once again, a surveillance bill would
00:06:35.700have been too obvious. That I do understand. I can see the sensibility in looking at this and
00:06:42.860saying okay if we go through it bill by bill i mean uh which of the bills you have to help me
00:06:48.680i forget my c's the cyber security act i think is uh that that one is easy for us to i think get
00:06:57.780behind because once again stopping crime stopping you know predators you know uh protecting
00:07:05.600our most vulnerable i think was the intent behind that but at the same time it does allow access
00:07:14.220unprecedented access in canada uh to data that once again is unprecedented because historically
00:07:21.100all the data they that anybody had on us was already in the hands of the government anything
00:07:26.440else we had was our real privacy so and i said to you before the show i don't even know if our data
00:07:32.620is really and i even said to you with no no no offense liam but you and i our data seems a little
00:07:39.740useless to most people i think by and large and your response was yeah but it's the overall mass
00:07:46.620data and the pattern recognition that can be had and the right and i don't know that any of these
00:07:53.340laws that we're talking about really would prevent the government from being able to do that right
00:07:58.240Right. And I do, I think my take on it is that this is, we're seeing the things that have already
00:08:05.920been happening, being formalized through legislation. So for instance, during the COVID
00:08:12.180stuff, it came out, there was a national post article about this. And even an MP came forward
00:08:16.760as well about how the public health agency of Canada was spying on the metadata and cell phone
00:08:23.960data of 88% of Canadians. It was like 31 million different Canadians at that point. And then so
00:08:31.220they're tracking. And yeah, it's not that I feel as an individual I'm getting spied on, but the
00:08:37.760mass collection of that data is then used in order to do what they would call nudging techniques
00:08:44.960and then go, okay, well, if people are doing this, they're behaving in this general way,
00:08:50.180What do we need to do to nudge them to that general?
00:08:53.800How do we take their momentum for what they are already doing and make it our momentum?
00:08:59.340Right. Right. And so so, yeah, I don't view it as much on a personal level as to what it allows them to do on a major scale or even to we've seen scandals in the past when it comes to these the the online data stuff where it was the whole Cambridge Analytica stuff back in the the Trump days.
00:09:18.320right where they were using uh metadata from social media sites in order to predict elections
00:09:23.840or even that as well you go okay 60 of the people are on the fence about this issue therefore i need
00:09:31.440to tailor my messaging to this to nudge them on this issue towards this wave that's beneficial
00:09:36.800for me so it's it's yeah it's less about the individual spying as more so as the the large
00:09:43.280scale uh nudging that i see as an issue one of the times that i saw this happen was actually
00:09:48.480during the trump election the first time when uh polling came out that hillary clinton was way in
00:09:54.000the lead and really i think what had happened there was the polling uh companies got out there