THE STANDING SENATE COMMITTEE ON LEGAL AND CONSTITUTIONAL AFFAIRS
EVIDENCE
OTTAWA, Thursday, May 28, 2026
The Standing Senate Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs met with videoconference this day at 10:34 a.m. [ET] to examine the subject matter of Bill C-25, An Act to amend the Canada Elections Act and to enact An Act to change the names of certain electoral districts, 2026.
Senator David M. Arnot (Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Chair: Honourable senators, welcome to the Standing Senate Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs. My name is David Arnot, senator from Saskatchewan and chair of the committee. I invite my colleagues to introduce themselves.
[Translation]
Senator Miville-Dechêne: I’m Julie Miville-Dechêne from Quebec.
[English]
Senator Mohamed: Senator Farah Mohamed, Ontario.
[Translation]
Senator Oudar: I’m Manuelle Oudar from Quebec. Welcome.
[English]
Senator Pate: Welcome. I’m Kim Pate. I live here on the unceded, unsurrendered and unreturned territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe Nation.
[Translation]
Senator Clement: I’m Bernadette Clement from Ontario.
[English]
Senator Prosper: Senator Paul Prosper, Nova Scotia, Mi’kma’ki territory.
Senator K. Wells: Senator Kristopher Wells, Alberta, Treaty 6 territory.
Senator Simons: Senator Paula Simons, Alberta, Treaty 6 territory.
Senator Duncan: Senator Pat Duncan from the Yukon.
[Translation]
Senator Aucoin: I’m Réjean Aucoin from Nova Scotia.
Senator Saint-Germain: I’m Raymonde Saint-Germain from Quebec.
[English]
The Chair: We are meeting to continue our pre-study of the subject matter of Bill C-25: An Act to amend the Canada Elections Act and to enact An Act to change the names of certain electoral districts.
For our first panel, we are pleased to welcome the following witnesses: Philippe Dufresne, Privacy Commissioner of Canada, Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada; and Elizabeth Denham, Former Information and Privacy Commissioner of the United Kingdom and British Columbia.
We have had some technical difficulties. Diane McLeod, Information and Privacy Commissioner, Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Alberta, is not available. So we will proceed with the panel of two witnesses who are present. If things change, we’ll make some adjustments.
The floor is yours, Mr. Dufresne, for five minutes, followed by Ms. Denham for five minutes. Then we’ll move to senators’ questions.
[Translation]
Philippe Dufresne, Privacy Commissioner of Canada, Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada: Mr. Chair, members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today to discuss Bill C-25, the Strong and Free Elections Act, alongside my colleagues, Diane McLeod, the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Alberta, and Elizabeth Denham, the former U.K. Information Commissioner, former Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia and current Chair of the Jersey Office of the Information Commissioner.
Earlier this month, I provided a written submission on Bill C-25 to the House Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs. As in that submission, my remarks today will focus on areas of the bill that relate to the policies that political parties have for the protection of personal information.
[English]
As we have seen recently with the data breach of the list of electors in Alberta, unauthorized use and disclosure of voter information can have serious and concrete implications. For example, I have heard about the danger that this has caused for survivors of domestic violence because their addresses were leaked.
It was also reported that the coordinates of a former Alberta premier were part of this wrongful disclosure, thereby demonstrating that this type of breach can also threaten the safety of all parliamentarians.
A breach such as this underscores the need for political parties to be subject to the important privacy requirements that are already set out for public- and private-sector organizations under federal law.
[Translation]
Canada’s political parties are not currently subject to federal privacy laws — neither the Privacy Act, nor the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, or PIPEDA.
In 2018, for the first time, the Elections Modernization Act set out requirements for political parties to develop privacy policies, submit them to Elections Canada and publish them online.
Those requirements did not, however, include many of the obligations set out in other federal privacy legislation.
[English]
I appeared before this committee in February to discuss Bill C-4, which received Royal Assent in March. The bill amended the required elements for existing privacy policy obligations of federal political parties, provided an enforcement mechanism through the Commissioner of Canada Elections and retroactively excluded federal political parties from the application of provincial or territorial privacy legislation.
The recommendations that I put forward for Bill C-4 are consistent with the ones that I am now making for Bill C-25.
Bill C-25 would improve the current regime by doing the following: adding new safeguarding requirements, including for personal information that is transferred to third parties; requiring that political parties report breaches to affected individuals in certain circumstances; and prohibiting political parties from selling personal information, disclosing it to cause someone harm or providing false or misleading information to individuals about the reason for collection.
These are positive developments, but I would continue to recommend additional elements that are necessary to enhance protections for the personal information of electors. Obtaining consent; limiting the collection, use and disclosure of personal information; ensuring accuracy; and providing rights of access and correction are important elements of public- and private-sector privacy and data-protection laws in Canada and around the world. These should, in my view, be requirements for federal political parties as well.
[Translation]
Privacy breach reporting is another important feature of privacy laws for individuals and regulators.
I recommend adding a requirement for political parties to report breaches to an independent regulator, such as my office, Elections Canada and/or the Commissioner of Canada Elections within seven days of becoming aware of a breach.
This would ensure timely reporting and provide clarity regarding legal obligations. Moreover, it would enhance oversight, foster accountability and help prevent repeat harm, providing stronger protection for Canadians.
[English]
Finally, Bill C-25 should allow for formal cooperation between my office, the Commissioner of Canada Elections, and Elections Canada. The ability to collaborate improves the work of regulators and brings clarity to complex issues that cut across sectors and jurisdictions. On this point, I welcome the bill’s clarification that the Commissioner of Canada Elections would be able to enter into memoranda of understanding with appropriate regulators, and my office will be there to assist in any way that we can.
Political parties handle highly sensitive information. Canadians deserve privacy rules for political parties that provide meaningful standards and effective independent oversight to ensure that electors’ fundamental right to privacy is protected.
Thank you. I’ll be happy to take your questions.
The Chair: Ms. Denham, five minutes, please.
Elizabeth Denham, Former Information and Privacy Commissioner of the United Kingdom and British Columbia, as an individual: Thank you. Chair, honourable senators, thank you for the invitation to appear today. I appeared before this committee virtually, and it’s lovely to see you all in three dimensions today.
I speak to Bill C-25, not just as a privacy expert, but as someone who has spent decades regulating how personal data is collected, analyzed and used in democratic processes.
As the former Information Privacy Commissioner of British Columbia, and later as the U.K. Information Commissioner, I bring a dual jurisdictional perspective. I’ve seen first-hand how local data practices connect to broader democratic vulnerabilities and how modern political campaigns operate behind a digital curtain.
In 2017, my office in the U.K. launched what became the largest regulatory investigation of its kind into the use of data analytics in political campaigning. In that investigation that was 18 months, we investigated 30 organizations, including political parties, social media platforms, data brokers and firms such as Cambridge Analytica and its Canadian counterpart, AggregateIQ.
That investigation exposed a comprehensive ecosystem of invisible profiling and microtargeting that really showed significant misuse of personal data to influence voters without their knowledge. Importantly, we secured full cooperation from political parties even in that highly charged environment. With the parties following the investigation, we introduced a formal code of practice for political data use, and that demonstrated that independent oversight does not impede democracy; it strengthens it.
So the central lesson there is clear: democratic trust requires data transparency, and self-regulation by political parties is not sufficient.
This brings me to Bill C-25. While I recognize the intent to modernize electoral law and that the bill now includes some limited prohibitions and requirements, the privacy provisions are still inadequate. They fall short of Canadian and international standards, and this creates a troubling double standard.
A Canadian has more legal rights against their dentist than they do against the party asking for their vote. I wanted to highlight three key concerns.
First, privacy rights must not depend on who is collecting the data. The bill allows political parties to operate outside some very important core principles, such as meaningful consent, purpose limitation and access rights, and yet parties hold some of the most sensitive information and data about Canadians, and they should be held to the same standards as other organizations.
Second, independent oversight is missing. The bill excludes the Office of the Privacy Commissioner and relies instead on internal policies of political parties and the Chief Electoral Officer of Canada in a very light-touch way. That is insufficient. Credibility depends on an independent regulator with the power to audit, investigate and enforce.
Third, the data breach framework is incomplete. While individuals are to be notified when they reach the threshold of a real risk of significant harm, there is no requirement to report breaches to an independent regulator, and there is no clear timeline. This really limits accountability and weakens protection.
In closing, data privacy in political campaigning is not solely a regulatory issue; it’s a matter of public trust and national security. Bill C-25 provides a partial, uneven framework, and it omits important elements of modern privacy law.
The tools that are now available to profile and influence voters are advancing rapidly, as are cyber-threats from criminal and state actors. I appreciate the committee is working hard under a short timeline, but rushing legislation with significant privacy gaps like these risks entrenching a system that leaves Canadian voters exposed.
I urge you to amend Bill C-25 to ensure that federal political parties are subject to robust, independent, fulsome oversight consistent with standards across Canada and Canadian society.
Thank you for your attention. I look forward to your questions.
The Chair: Thank you.
I now believe we have Diane McLeod, Information and Privacy Commissioner of Alberta, available by video conference. Ms. McLeod please proceed. Five minutes, please.
Diane McLeod, Information and Privacy Commissioner of Alberta, Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Alberta: Good morning, chair and committee members. Thank you for the opportunity to share my views on amendments to Bill C-25 regarding provisions to establish a privacy framework for political parties within the Canada Elections Act.
Having listened to prior committee meetings, I know that my commissioner colleagues have discussed the importance of privacy protections for personal information used by political parties, as they have today. My colleagues have also provided recommendations on how to strengthen this framework.
Alberta has recently experienced the worst breach in Canadian history involving voter data. Albertans are angry and extremely frustrated about this breach and some fear for their safety.
My office has received over 300 emails about this breach; many have expressed a loss of confidence in the ability of political parties to protect their personal information.
Given this, I want to focus my message today —
The Chair: Ms. McLeod, I’m sorry, I have to interrupt. Unfortunately, the translators are not able to make the proper translation because of the communications from your headset or something. There is a problem.
In this case, I would invite you to give your evidence through a memorandum to the committee, and we will see if there is an opportunity to have you come another time after the technology issue has been rectified.
Ms. McLeod: Okay.
The Chair: Sorry about that.
Ms. McLeod: All right.
The Chair: We will now move to questions. I will start with the deputy chair, Senator Batters.
Senator Batters: Thank you to all of you for being here, and I apologize to the witness from Alberta for that technical challenge we had.
I ran out of time before I was going to look at the exact provision of the bill, so I’ll go off what the Library of Parliament indication is, that Bill C-25 amends the Canada Elections Act to add qualifications that have to be met for a registered or eligible party to request and receive preliminary lists of electors for a given electoral district.
It says in here: Namely, the registered party must have held a seat in the House of Commons on the day before the writ was issued, endorsed a candidate in one of the last two elections in a given electoral district — and then it says here “or,” so I’m assuming that this should be “or,” but you can correct me if I am wrong — endorsed candidates in at least two thirds of all electoral districts in the preceding general election.
I’m assuming that sort of qualification is new and doesn’t currently exist. Obviously, I’m more used to the larger registered parties that would have no problem meeting that, but there are, of course, many more registered parties that exist.
Could you please let me know if that is correct and that it is an “or,” because the second criteria about endorsing the candidate in one of the last two elections would be considerably more permissive? If you could tell me about that. Also, if it’s an “and,” that would seem to provide considerable qualifications that have to be met before a party would get all of this information — these preliminary lists of electors.
How do you think those restrictions would affect the political parties’ access to the elector’s personal information? What would you say the implications for fairness and the functions of the democratic process would be? Mr. Dufresne, if you could answer that.
Mr. Dufresne: Thank you. I think this is a question perhaps my colleagues, the electoral authorities and the CEO, would be better placed to answer in terms of the details of the mechanisms of how the information is provided to you. We can certainly provide a written response after looking at it in greater detail, but I would want to make sure I’m able to provide you with the most helpful insight on this.
Senator Batters: Sure. We heard, actually, yesterday, so I’ll have to look back at that provision of the bill. Maybe the sponsor might know that because that would be an important question. Because we’re just in a pre-study situation here, we’re at a disadvantage because we haven’t even had a speech in the Senate before we started to look at this in this committee.
I’ll go on, Mr. Dufresne. I certainly know that Bill C-25 doesn’t — you had certain recommendations that you made on Bill C-4, as you’ve indicated, and you’re making those same recommendations now. I’m assuming that’s because none of those have been taken up. Despite the fact that there has been some time that has passed between Bill C-4 and now Bill C-25, I’m assuming you haven’t received any — though the government kind of indicated at the time of Part 4 of Bill C-4 that, don’t worry, we’re going to bring in a Canada Elections Act amendment that will cover these kinds of things.
Did the government consult with you at all on your recommendations before they introduced Bill C-25, which now has been known for a number of months?
Mr. Dufresne: We have not been consulted on this.
I would note that this committee also made some recommendations following the last round of consultations on Bill C-4, and Bill C-25 adopted some of them. It improves the requirements for safeguarding requirements and transfer to third parties. It requires the reporting of breaches but only to individuals. Before, there was no reporting at all. Now there is reporting to individuals, which is a good thing, but there still is no reporting to a regulator, and that’s a clear gap. I think my colleague, Ms. Denham, has highlighted that as well. It’s essential that the regulator be informed quickly. We see the situation in Alberta. It cannot be all on the individual to deal with this. That is a clear gap in the recommendations.
There continues to be the absence of some of the core privacy principles, like meaningful consent, appropriate purposes, data minimization, correction and so on.
It is an improvement, but it is a small one, and it could go much further.
Senator Batters: Thank you. Just one quick thing. Yesterday, when the Chief Electoral Officer of Canada was here, he provided some specific recommendations that he is making for amendments. The first one that I picked up on when he was here yesterday, he was saying to preserve their privacy, the Chief Electoral Officer would no longer be required to publish a list of the names, municipalities or their equivalent and the province of residence for the returning officer for each electoral district in Canada. When you don’t have an actual street address or some sort of further identifying thing, simply by including somebody’s name and municipality, I didn’t believe that to be anything that really provides us very much as far as privacy and wouldn’t necessarily be required. What are your comments on that?
Mr. Dufresne: I think one of the things we’re learning with privacy and technology — and the Supreme Court’s Bykovets decision on lawful access talked about it — is that we can do more and more with less information. We can do more and more with IP addresses and with correlating individuals.
I would support a restriction of information being made public. I think that you do not need the specific address of individuals to be able to make some conclusions.
Senator Batters: All that this currently provides is name and municipality, so Philippe Dufresne, Ottawa, Ontario, and that’s it. The amendment proposed by the Chief Electoral Officer would purport to take out the municipality. I was saying to the Chief Electoral Officer that in larger centres, it may be obvious what municipality that person is from, but in a large rural riding like those in Saskatchewan, you may have numerous small towns and cities within it, so it may be necessary to kind of identify who exactly that person is, but it’s not an address.
Does that give you comfort knowing that there is not an address, just a simple name and city?
Mr. Dufresne: It does. This is not one of my main recommendations for improvements to the bill, but I would give significant weight to the Chief Electoral Officer’s views on that as well.
Senator Batters: Thank you.
[Translation]
Senator Miville-Dechêne: Mr. Dufresne, the committee met with the minister, Mr. MacKinnon, yesterday. Perhaps you listened to the meeting. I asked him outright what he thought of your recommendations, and I focused on the issue of consent. He said he didn’t think it was realistic to obtain informed consent in a context where door-knocking is already difficult. These weren’t his exact words, but he said that candidates didn’t collect a lot of information when knocking on doors and that, in any case, the Liberal Party had very good practices in place to keep data confidential and took the matter very seriously. Is that a compelling argument, in your view? Why is consent so important given all the data available on social media? Is this something we can actually skip, since political parties aren’t for-profit businesses, as he’s frequently said?
Mr. Dufresne: First, I agree that political parties aren’t businesses. They aren’t the same thing. Suitable amendments could be made. That said, privacy laws currently apply to small- and medium-sized businesses and organizations that, in some cases, are less sophisticated than political parties. Privacy principles can be tailored to the context. If there’s a need to define what constitutes appropriate consent in the specific context of door-knocking by political parties, we can work with them on that. We can and should come up with an interpretation that takes into account the context they operate in. I think it’s increasingly important to be transparent and to understand what the data Canadians provide can be used for, against the backdrop of AI and everything it can do with those data. The comment about security and confidentiality relates to safeguards, which have been improved in Bill C-25.
Senator Miville-Dechêne: Ms. Denham, you worked on the U.K.’s and British Columbia’s models. How do the parties deal with consent in practice? How do they apply it? Do they ask people to sign a form? Do they ask for oral consent? How do they do it? Did parties push back on implementing that part of the law?
[English]
Ms. Denham: Consent is a challenging matter. When a volunteer, a member of the party or a candidate appears on the doorstep, there could be a reliance on implied consent. I think people understand, when faced by someone on the doorstep, that they are collecting information. They do make it transparent. In the conversation, “We are collecting this information for this purpose.” If the conversation continues with someone on the doorstep, that’s implied consent.
Senator Miville-Dechêne: Is that acceptable with the rules that are in place?
Ms. Denham: That is acceptable. What the U.K. has done, instead of consent, political parties rely on legitimate interest to collect information. Legitimate interest means that democratic engagement is considered legitimate, so there is actually a whole permissive use of data for democratic engagement. Here is the “but.” It has to be transparent, and there are limits to how much information is collected.
I think everybody understands that when somebody is campaigning on the doorstep, they are collecting some basic information, such as opinions, who they are going to vote for, what their concerns are, their address, et cetera. It’s when political parties and their contractors scrape data from the web, when they combine the data with purchased data broker information and when data analytics companies are actually running psychological profiles —now we’re getting into an area where it’s not reasonable democratic engagement for that collection.
I think a very good process is to actually develop a code of practice for political parties because they are special. They are different in our society. But I think what we’re faced with here in Bill C-25 is just not sufficient, especially when you consider AI-generated messages, AI-generated deepfakes and all the things that we’re facing now. In 2017 or 2018, these tools were not available, and now they are pretty cost-free.
I think consent is not necessarily what you need, but a code of practice would really help.
Senator Miville-Dechêne: Thank you.
Senator Prosper: Thank you to our witnesses. Nice to see you again.
I want to pick up the discussion as mentioned earlier by Senator Batters with respect to the nature of the information collected. It might seem like a benign thing where you have a name and you have a city or a municipality, with the question being, what is the harm? I would like to expand upon that.
Mr. Dufresne, you mentioned more and more can be done with less information. Ms. Denham, you just mentioned that data can be combined, I think you mentioned from a purchased data broker. I’m also curious about your earlier reference to invisible profiling and microtargeting.
Ms. Denham, I wonder what you would say to that point of baseline data, like a name, a city or a municipality. How can that potentially create situations that are a threat or an affront to democratic institutions and the privacy of personal information?
Ms. Denham: From my experience in the U.K. when we did the deep dive into looking at how political data and campaigning data are collected and used, when I say there was misuse, I think that U.K. citizens had no idea that Facebook profiles, look-alike audiences and data broker information that actually describes their purchase history or where they like to take holiday, all of that information was being combined into profiles. Obviously, federal political parties have not been investigated in this country in the same way they have in other countries, but I suspect that these same tools and practices may be in place.
I think that’s why we’re looking for proportionate, transparent and fair use of data. Canadians at least need to know and should have access to their file to see how they are being categorized. Maybe they are being racially profiled, as we found in the U.K., and that was a really significant issue.
With all of the tools available, campaigns are mostly digital now, as opposed to conversations in the public square and on doorsteps. I think that transparency, fairness, proportionality and oversight are absolutely needed when it comes to political parties. I hope that I have answered your question.
Senator Prosper: Thank you. Anything further, Mr. Dufresne?
Mr. Dufresne: I would endorse that response fully and reiterate that the concept of necessity and proportionality are really central to privacy principles. That’s something that is missing that should be added. When you consider that, then the necessity of political parties to do their work and to campaign are key factors. They will be more necessary for certain things than commercial businesses. That’s where their unique status comes into play. Then you need to have proportionality to determine if they are collecting more than they need. Can people challenge that? That’s where the access rights come into play.
It’s not to say that you will have a regime that ignores the reality of political parties. You have to take it into consideration. But the answer shouldn’t be that there is no proportionality at all. This work has to take place and has to be vetted by an independent expert regulator.
Senator Prosper: Thank you both for your work.
The Chair: Colleagues, I have a couple of short questions for Mr. Dufresne and Ms. Denham.
I want to explore the scope of the harm. If voter data became public, either by the party, by an associated third party or a hacker, could it be used for fraud? Could it be used for doxing or real-life targeting? In a data breach or a publication scenario, are consequences for a federal political party the same as for other organizations in Canada?
I’m informed by the large data breach of Desjardins Group in 2019, where there was a class action and a $200 million value to that class action. Credit monitoring was provided for free for five years to all those who were affected, which were 10 million Canadians.
I want to know: what does it take to put the toothpaste back into the tube when a breach occurs? Certainly, individuals are required to do their own search of Equifax to make sure their financial data is not breached.
Really, I would like to explore, what should Parliament and Canadians learn from the Alberta election list controversy and about the risks that arise after voter information leaves the election agency’s custody?
Mr. Dufresne: Thank you. This really goes to the heart of both of our recommendations to make sure there is a reporting obligation to a regulator in the case of a breach. As you highlight, this has a real impact on Canadians. The law talks about the real risk of serious harm, and that could be financial harm in terms of your credit rating or fraud. It could be physical harm in terms of threats or discrimination. It can be psychological harm in terms of the stress that you’re going to have because you know that this information is out there.
In the political context, it could reveal your political views. It could reveal sensitive personal information. The harms are real. In some cases, you can’t undo it because it could be available on the dark web. It’s out there, so you need to prevent it as much as you can. You need to have a robust and quick reaction after the fact.
We did a case involving breaches at the CRA recently. Our work involves determining the mitigation mechanisms and tools that are available. How quickly are you reacting to this? What are you offering to citizens to offset those harms? All of that has to be very robust, and this, again, is why the lack of a reporting obligation to a regulator is a key gap that should be one of the key priorities, in my view.
Ms. Denham: I agree with all of that. One of the outcomes of data breach notification to a regulator that we have seen around the world, because that’s part of modern privacy law, has been that organizations are more seriously securing data. They are investing and putting resources into securing their networks. That is absolutely critical. We know that there are more sophisticated tools — AI is one of them — to be able to find the vulnerabilities in systems. Given that, I think reporting to a regulator when there is a breach also ensures that the risks are mitigated so that it’s not repeated. Organizations take it much more seriously.
The harms? Well, the toothpaste is out of the tube, but, with things like credit reporting, there are flags. If someone is actually trying to take out credit in a victim’s name, then they are advised. However, we’re really trying to strengthen the network security of all organizations, and one of the most important recommendations I want to make is a duty to report significant breaches to an independent regulator.
The Chair: Thank you.
[Translation]
Senator Saint-Germain: It is always important to have organizations like yours here, given how fundamental privacy and the protection of personal information are. That said, I see two seemingly different aspects to your remarks on this bill. The first pertains to the requirements for political parties, Elections Canada and the Office of the Commissioner of Canada Elections to protect data collected during a federal election. That’s the first aspect I want to talk about before turning to the second one, which is more about foreign interference and the use of personal information for disinformation.
Yesterday, when we began our study, we met with the Chief Electoral Officer and the minister. As it is, federal political parties are allowed to collect only the basic information necessary to contact voters, but also to ensure that the Chief Electoral Officer can rely on the electors’ list he’s proposing. To your knowledge, do federal political parties collect information they do not need to discharge their duty of necessity and proportionality? Do you have any reason to believe that parties are engaging in the unnecessary and unreasonable collection of information and not protecting that information?
Mr. Dufresne: I have no reason to believe that, because I don’t have the authority to investigate that kind of thing. Currently, that information would not come to my attention. The important thing, in my view, is that the legislation makes clear that it is a requirement. If the political parties are already doing this and handling information appropriately, then great, but it needs to be clearly laid out as a requirement. Right now, we’re working with Elections Canada, and we’ve issued better practice guidelines for political parties. I hope they will follow them, but today, they don’t have to.
Senator Saint-Germain: My second question is about the specialization of the oversight bodies. There’s Elections Canada and the Office of the Commissioner of Canada Elections. Do you think giving your office visibility into that would create duplication?
Mr. Dufresne: It would depend on how it was done. If both bodies have the authority to investigate the same thing, it’s important to ask whether it is necessary and whether they play complementary roles. Sometimes, investigations are conducted jointly. I do that with my provincial and international counterparts. In certain circumstances, that may be appropriate.
Senator Saint-Germain: Third, you said that when a data leak or breach of confidentiality occurs, it should be reported to an organization — let’s say yours. That would happen after the fact. In relation to such a leak or breach of confidentiality, do you see a role for prevention?
Mr. Dufresne: Absolutely. Requiring safeguards to be put in place, as Bill C-25 does, is very positive and will strengthen the prevention component. As my colleague Ms. Denham said, an obligation to report after the fact would strengthen the regulatory authority’s role and provide an incentive to consult at the front end.
Senator Saint-Germain: Regarding the broader issue of disinformation, the political parties have to convince people, so they use a range of data that are public. In the case of your office or the Office of the Commissioner of Canada Elections — it doesn’t matter which one — how realistic is it to expect that the organization would be able to prevent and regulate those types of risks, which are real? I fully recognize that. My fear is that we slide back into an Orwellian dystopia and try to do way too much in a world that isn’t so easy to regulate.
Mr. Dufresne: I think it’s a good thing that Bill C-25 prohibits the use of deepfakes. I can’t speak for the Commissioner of Canada Elections, but as for our office, we work very closely with all the privacy commissioners around the world. We have very strong international bodies. I am chairing the global forum for the next two years. We consult each other regularly. In February, we issued a joint statement denouncing the generation of sexualized deepfakes, in the wake of the incidents involving Grok. I’m investigating Grok as we speak. We in the privacy and data protection community are very active on this issue and know that we need to watch technology. It moves very quickly. We have no choice. We put the necessary resources towards that.
Senator Saint-Germain: Thank you.
[English]
Senator Simons: It’s lovely to have Mr. Dufresne back and to have Ms. Denham live without the technical difficulties we had last time.
I’m from Alberta. I am disappointed we can’t hear from Commissioner McLeod, but as we discussed when we talked about Bill C-4, this regime relies on our good faith that political parties will act in good faith. It’s basically an honour system. They are allowed to set up their own protocols and privacy policies and then enforce their own privacy policies.
Bill C-25 does include a good amendment which says that a brand new party that has never fielded candidates can’t automatically get access to the electors’ list, but there is nothing here that stops a fringe extremist party that has existed for many elections and has fielded candidates from having that list. That’s the situation we had in Alberta. An extremist party had the list, and somehow that information ended up in the hands of an even more extreme right-wing group, which now knows where I live and where Senator Wells lives. Every Crown prosecutor, police officer, schoolteacher and every person in Alberta who might be at risk of being doxed or attacked have now been made vulnerable. That information has ended up in the hands of an American third-party app developer who, goodness knows, can vend that information to any commercial bad actor or international agent of influence.
In a world in which we clearly cannot guarantee that parties will always act with honour, what do we have to do to ensure that we have protocols in place to protect not just the information that parties collect on the doorstep but the foundational information that is in the voters’ list?
Ms. Denham: That’s the point of moving away from self-regulation, because that’s what it basically is. Parties will actually set the policies, and they are only under the microscope or involved in any kind of investigation when they don’t comply with their own provisions.
Data privacy is fundamental and foundational to political campaigning, and the Alberta breach is the perfect example of what can go wrong.
It’s absolutely critical, given what we know and what we have seen in other countries where there have been significant investigations, that we have a statutory regime. Bill C-25 includes some requirements for parties, as you say, new parties, but all parties should have the statutory requirement that follows fair information practices.
Commissioner Dufresne and I have mentioned some of what is missing, but you really have, more or less, a light touch, self-regulatory regime proposed in Bill C-25. It’s really weak compared to other G7 countries, and somehow those G7 countries are still able to carry out elections and campaigning while still being subject to robust oversight.
Mr. Dufresne: I agree. We focus some of the comments on the size of political parties or the challenges complying with that, but that’s true for small and medium enterprises. We need to make sure they can compete and we have a strong economy, but it’s not a zero-sum game. We can’t forget the real impacts that a breach of privacy has. You have described them perfectly. I made the link in my opening remarks about it even harms parliamentarians themselves. It harms democracy itself.
Senator Simons: We are in a potentially an even uglier separatist campaign, and now every member of Parliament from Alberta, whatever their party affiliation, their most personal information is public, for every senator, for every Court of Appeal judge. It’s a very frightening situation, and I’m not sure that people have processed all of the implications.
Mr. Dufresne: We often say, and we have said it internationally on numerous occasions, the link with privacy and freedom, the link between privacy and democracy. Privacy is an essential condition to that, and this is a concrete example.
[Translation]
Senator Oudar: I’m going to stay on the topic of independent monitoring. Mr. Dufresne, you recommended certain amendments to the bill, including that your office be empowered to hear individuals’ complaints regarding political parties, to proactively examine practices, to order compliance and to receive breach notifications in a timely manner. In your opening remarks, you referred to a seven-day time frame.
It’s now clear that the Chief Electoral Officer will ultimately have a limited role under Bill C-25. He’ll be able to check whether the political parties’ policies cover all the things they’re supposed to at the time of registration, but, ultimately, he won’t have the authority to then check whether the parties are actually complying with those policies. In practice, he also won’t be able to investigate systemic issues or order corrective measures in the event of a violation.
What do you recommend? What should the institutional model look like? What powers should the legislation include when it comes to handling complaints, carrying out verifications, issuing orders and receiving violation notices? What should be done to achieve the realistic goal of independent monitoring? I think it comes down to preserving democracy and public confidence in the system.
Mr. Dufresne: Thank you for your question. I would add that the Commissioner of Canada Elections was given a role in Bill C-25 and prior to that, in Bill C-4, so there is a mechanism for implementation. The commissioner can investigate a violation of the law. The Chief Electoral Officer isn’t the only one with a role in all this. That’s important. As far as the commissioner is concerned, the ability to work together and to enter into a memorandum of understanding is being added. We’ll be following this closely.
I know that the commissioner was here yesterday and that she said she’d like to work with us. That is a possible approach. The other approach, which isn’t the one that’s been recommended thus far, is to empower my office to do that. The decision is up to Parliament. What matters to us is having a rigorous and independent mechanism and, above all, robust obligations. Currently, they aren’t robust enough and could be strengthened.
Senator Oudar: Thank you.
[English]
Senator Pate: Thank you to both our witnesses. Do you have specific legislative language that you would suggest we include? In order to try and prevent these kinds of situations, that would be useful. I know you both have experience in this. You have experience in Canada, but also looking at the best language internationally you have seen — perhaps we can include that. It’s for both of you, but perhaps Ms. Denham could start.
Ms. Denham: I don’t have it at the top of my mind, but the code of practice for political parties I referred to that was drafted with the help of the parties in the U.K. is something you might want to look at. Given the short time frame that you have in the pre-study and the study of the bill, the data breach notification language in PIPEDA, or in the Alberta statute, in the B.C. statute, that language would be useful.
We talked a lot about breach notification. The other thing I really want to underscore — and I can certainly send you some language around this — is that there should be a statutory right of access for individuals to see their file, to find out what kind of information is tagged to their name and so on.
If I had to pick two things that are absolutely critically important, it would be the data breach notification to a regulator, and the second one is individual right of access. That is in every privacy statute in Canada and internationally. It’s a critical, fundamental right.
Mr. Dufresne: Thank you. I would echo that. In terms of the language for breach notification, you can pretty much mirror what is in PIPEDA. Similar to the language already there in terms of notifying individuals, it’s just notifying the regulator, whether it’s the Commissioner of Canada Elections or my office.
In terms of the substantive obligation, I would point to a document that we prepared with the Chief Electoral Officer of Canada called Guidance for federal political parties on protecting personal information. It’s on our website, but we’ll have it sent to the committee if it’s helpful. It sets out the best practices based on international law standards. For example, on this issue of limiting collection, we say:
Avoid indiscriminate collection by limiting the amount and types of personal information gathered to what is necessary for the identified purposes.
There are many examples of clauses that you could consider.
Senator Pate: Thank you very much.
The Chair: We look forward to receiving that, Mr. Dufresne.
Senator Clement: Most of my questions were asked by Senator Pate, so I’ll just cut to just one. Thank you for being here. I remember both of you from Bill C-4. It was surprising to me that you were not consulted at that stage; it continues to be a surprise.
You’re the chair, Mr. Dufresne, of the Global Privacy Assembly. In your opinion, does Bill C-25 make you proud as a Canadian and as chair of that organization? Do you feel like this will answer some of the international and trending issues going on right now?
Mr. Dufresne: Thank you for the question. Ms. Denham was chair of the GPA some years ago as well.
Ms. Denham: Canadians everywhere.
Mr. Dufresne: That’s right. To your question, internationally, if I’m speaking with counterparts about this, it would come out that we fall short of international practices. This is a choice that was made by the Canadian Parliament. I’m working toward it, and it is a legitimate democratic process, but it would stand out compared to international best practices. As chair of the Global Privacy Assembly, the best practices I would be advocating would not be this one. It would be international standards with robust privacy practices.
Senator Clement: That’s very clear. Thank you.
[Translation]
Senator Aucoin: Thank you for being here. This will be very quick.
You talked about a code of practice. I’m curious whether the bill could include an obligation to establish or draft a code of practice, while setting a deadline for enacting it. Could the bill indicate what the code of practice should cover? This past hour, we’ve heard a list of things that the bill is missing. If we try to plug all those holes, we’ll never get there. Would this be a faster, more practical way of achieving stronger data protection?
[English]
Ms. Denham: The code of practice is a good way forward because it contains all the provisions but is really more specific to political parties. It takes all of the principles that we’re talking about — the fair information principles — as well as the requirements in U.K. law and applies them to political parties in their own environment. That’s the strength of it, but Commissioner Dufresne would be able to tell you whether or not a code of practice could be subject to the oversight of PIPEDA. As far as I understand, you don’t have the power to develop codes of practice or codes of conduct.
[Translation]
Mr. Dufresne: In response to your question, I’d like to give an example. My office is working on a code of practice for protecting young people’s information. It will set out what our expectations are and what companies have to do. To do that, however, you need a basic level of authority. Right now, we don’t have any authority to look at political parties, so we couldn’t do that on our own initiative.
An interesting precedent does exist, though. Parliament amended the Proceeds of Crime (Money Laundering) and Terrorist Financing Act to authorize banks to share information in order to detect fraud. My office has to approve those codes of practice. It’s an interesting precedent, and it shows that you don’t have to choose between protecting privacy and fighting terrorism. A similar approach could be taken here, whereby this would be subject to codes of practice that my office or another authority would have to approve.
Senator Aucoin: Thank you.
[English]
The Chair: For our second panel, we are pleased to welcome Bill Hearn, Principal at HearnLaw and External General Counsel to Centre for Digital Rights.
Also in the same group is Mr. Jim Balsillie, who is the founder of that organization. There will be a total of five minutes between these two presenters.
Then we have Mr. Colin Bennett, Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Victoria, by video conference as well.
We also have Thierry Giasson, Professor, Political Science, Université Laval; and Thomas Larochelle, Graduate Student, Political Science Researcher, Université Laval. These two witnesses will have five minutes for their presentations.
Finally, we have Sébastien CoRhino, Member, Longest Ballot Committee, in person.
Mr. Hearn and Mr. Balsillie, please.
Jim Balsillie, Founder, Centre for Digital Rights: Honourable Chair and senators, thank you for inviting me to appear before you as you study Bill C-25. I am Jim Balsillie, founder of the Centre for Digital Rights, or CDR, and I am joined today by the centre’s general counsel, Bill Hearn.
I will focus my remarks on four areas.
First, the global economy has undergone a profound 40-year transformation, in which wealth, power and security are rooted in the ownership and control of the intangible assets of intellectual property and data — AI. They now dominate, comprising 92% of the S&P 500’s roughly US$55 trillion in value. These assets behave differently than tangible assets and require different economic and governance strategies.
Second, firms quickly realized that the human experience could be continuously captured as data, creating an infinite economic commodity that birthed the era of surveillance capitalism, where our experiences, choices and even our thoughts are captured, processed, influenced and traded for profit and power. The absence of proper economic strategies in Canada over the past 15 years of this data-driven economy contributed to Canada’s $1-trillion-per-year divergence from the U.S. during this time. This amounts to approximately US$100,000 per family of four per year.
Third, the lack of regulatory and governance strategies led to a litany of harms which continue to worsen. These harms are not siloed; they are crosscutting. The impacts on youth mental health, social polarization, democratic manipulation, misinformation, cyber harms and more are interconnected. This is particularly consequential for democratic rights, as algorithmic systems become more powerful and more personalized by the day, stripping citizens of meaningful agency over the information environments shaping their perceptions, beliefs and behaviours.
Fourth, in February, I testified to this committee that these harms have led to the erosion of fundamental human rights. The digital age is shaped by who controls the data, the algorithms that act on it and the information environments they create. This new era of human commodification violates fundamental human rights in new ways — areas that are protected under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Canada is a signatory.
To conclude, if the intent of Bill C-25 is to strengthen democratic resilience in response to emerging digital threats, then as written, it is not fit for purpose. Unless the legislation is updated to directly address surveillance business models built on data extraction, behavioural prediction and algorithmic manipulation, our laws will remain structurally incapable of protecting citizens and democratic institutions from the broad set of harms these digital systems produce.
Thank you, and I will now hand it over to Bill Hearn for his prepared remarks.
Bill Hearn, Principal, HearnLaw, General Counsel, Centre for Digital Rights: Honourable senators, I have been the Centre for Digital Rights’ lawyer since its founding in 2018, and for over eight years, the federal Liberal, Conservative and New Democratic parties have fought every attempt by individual Canadians supported by the Centre for Digital Rights to apply long-standing Canadian privacy principles that apply to all organizations in Canada.
It is with that experience that I want to make two points. First, for now at least, the Senate can expect the House to continue trying to pass a federal privacy law framework for political parties that violates the following: the division of powers under Canada’s constitution; Canadians’ right to an informed vote under the Charter; and Canadians’ right to privacy as upheld by the Supreme Court of Canada.
Second, I know this is just a pre-study, and the Senate may want a full study, but right now, Bill C-25 should be amended by replacing section 36 with a provision that repeals all the changes to the Canada Elections Act made by Part 4 of Bill C-4 that came into force on March 12.
Together with these amendments, the government should either amend the general federal private sector privacy law PIPEDA to expressly apply to federal political parties or pass a federal privacy law specific to federal political parties that includes PIPEDA’s fair information principles, the appropriate purposes rule and the understanding requirement. Such a law, as Ms. Denham suggested, might even include a legitimate public interest exception to express consent.
The validity of those points is underscored by the many developments described in my written opening remarks that are before you. I look forward to your questions.
The Chair: Thank you. Professor Colin Bennett.
Colin Bennett, Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Victoria, as an individual: Thank you, senators. Congratulations on dealing with this important issue.
My name is Colin Bennett, and I am professor emeritus of political science at the University of Victoria. I have researched and written about national and international privacy protection policy for over 40 years.
In recent work, I have researched and studied the uses and abuses of personal data in political campaigns. I first wrote about this issue in 2012 — 14 years ago — in a report to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner. So this whole question has been on the agenda for a long time.
I do want to — as the other speakers have done — focus my remarks exclusively on the provisions in section 36 of Bill C-25, and there are some minimal improvements to those security requirements over the amendments passed earlier in Bill C-4, but as you’ve heard, the overall regime is hopelessly inadequate.
The amendments in Bill C-25 have to be analyzed in conjunction with these earlier provisions, the aim of which was the following:
. . . to provide for a national, uniform, exclusive and complete regime applicable to registered parties and eligible parties respecting their activities in relation to personal information, including the collection, use, disclosure, retention and disposal of personal information.
The central point I want to make is that I don’t think these provisions do anything of the sort. I don’t think they achieve the central goal stated in the legislation.
As you heard, political parties must develop a privacy policy and ensure it is complied with by employees, volunteers and other agencies that work for the parties. But there is nothing to require federal political parties to apply a uniform set of standards for the collection, use, disclosure, retention and disposal of personal information.
They could — and, by all accounts, do — as the research has demonstrated, collect different categories of personal data from different sources. They could, and, by all accounts, do share it widely with a larger campaigning ecosystem. They could and, by all accounts, do follow different security practices and standards. There is nothing uniform about these provisions.
They hardly constitute a complete regime. Historical and international standards for privacy protection, reflected, for example, in the 10 principles that underlie Canada’s PIPEDA, go a lot further than the weak provisions included in the Canada Elections Act.
The current provisions permit the federal political parties to collect whatever personal information they wish from whatever sources and process it in any way they please, provided they are transparent about their practice and give illustrative examples. They do not allow individuals rights of access and direction, and they amount to little more than self-regulation entirely at odds with contemporary international consensus on how to protect personal information in the modern digital age, as you heard from Commissioners Dufresne and Denham.
Furthermore, the regime for the federal political parties will likely create considerable confusion for the organizations that process personally identifiable data on behalf of the federal political parties, and which are obliged to comply with the stronger requirements in PIPEDA.
We have done some research that demonstrates there are a large number of organizations that perform functions for our political parties at federal, provincial and municipal levels, and, most notably, nothing in these provisions obliges federal political parties to obtain consent when they collect personal data on Canadians. And yet, companies that work for them, and which are governed by the consent requirements in federal and provincial privacy laws, must do that.
Rather than establishing uniform rules, these provisions add considerable confusion.
The complete regime would also embody meaningful oversight and enforcement mechanisms. There is no clear process for complaint investigation and resolution. There is no indication of what individuals are supposed to do if they are dissatisfied with the response received from the party’s privacy officer. There is no further address available, and there are examples of people engaging with parties about this and receiving those kinds of non-responses.
With all due respect to Elections Canada and the Commissioner of Canada Elections, I do not believe they possess the resources or expertise to monitor the complex technical environment of modern digital campaigning. The current furor over the massive data breach in Alberta clearly demonstrates this sad reality. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, and its provincial and territorial counterparts, do have that expertise and can give appropriate guidance about best practices.
In B.C., where provincial parties are governed by provincial law, oversight is exercised jointly between the OIPC and Elections BC. If you’re looking for a model, you don’t necessarily have to look overseas — although that will be useful — just look at what has been happening in British Columbia with respect to provincial political parties.
In conclusion, I do not believe the Canada Elections Act is the appropriate statutory vehicle for imposing privacy obligations on federal political parties. The rules about the protection of personal information fit very uneasily within a statute designed to regulate the conduct and financing of federal elections.
Ideally, if I could wave a magic wand, as Mr. Hearn has said, part 4 of Bill C-4 will be repealed and the federal political parties should be brought within the scope of a modernized PIPEDA. Failing that, it’s possible to develop a separate regime for federal political parties, perhaps along the line of an enforceable code of practice negotiated, as former Commissioner Denham was regulated.
If the committee does not wish to go that far, then I think it would be timely for you to at least commit to a larger study of what is going on here of the practices of the federal political parties, which will help render those practices more opaque.
The previous witnesses received a lot of questions about: What do we know about what political parties are doing? And the honest answer is that honest people on the outside do not know because the practices are opaque and they have not been subject to proper investigation by regulators.
To conclude, Canada is one of only a handful of democratic countries where national privacy law does not apply to political parties and to the sensitive information on political party opinions they collect. And there is no evidence, despite assertions by the parties, that compliance with these laws in other jurisdictions hinders political engagement, constrains their ability to recruit volunteers, or otherwise prevents them from communicating with the electorate. There is no credible reason why Canadians should not enjoy enforceable privacy rights with respect to government agencies and commercial organizations and not without political parties.
Thank you very much for your attention.
[Translation]
Thierry Giasson, Professor, Political Science, Université Laval, as an individual: Thank you for having me, Mr. Chair and members of the standing committee.
My name is Thierry Giasson, and I am a full professor at Université Laval’s Department of Political Science. I’m also the Director of the Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship, and holder of the Research Chair on Democracy and Parliamentary Institutions at Université Laval.
With me today is Thomas Larochelle, a political science master’s student at Université Laval, and together we are researching Quebec’s regulatory framework on the use of personal information by political parties. I will be making the opening statement, but my colleague is available to answer your questions.
First, I’d like to thank you for inviting me to share my views on Bill C-25, particularly clause 36, which would amend section 446.6 of the Canada Elections Act.
This clause would add requirements and prohibitions to Subdivision C of the Canada Elections Act, which pertains to personal information collected by federal political parties.
Clause 36 also clarifies new provisions in Part 4 of Bill C-4, which was passed in March, amending the Canada Elections Act in relation to personal information.
Like the other witnesses you’ve heard from this morning — especially my fellow witnesses in this panel — I won’t beat around the bush. It is true that the new provisions in clause 36 of Bill C-25 give clarity to certain requirements the parties and their representatives have in relation to safeguarding personal information. However, these provisions still do not establish a genuine regulatory regime that clearly recognizes and respects Canadians’ privacy rights when it comes to the use of their personal information by political parties.
As you no doubt know, all the privacy and data protection laws in effect in Canada and the world are based on 10 specific principles that inform the transmission and transaction of personal information between individuals and organizations, and the security of that information.
First, an individual must be informed of any collection of their information by an organization and give their clear consent. This means that those seeking to obtain their information must clearly explain to the individual what it will be used for — that is, the specific purposes of use — and under what conditions: this includes, in particular, the duration of use and retention of the information and its possible transfer to third parties. Currently, neither the provisions of Bill C-25 nor subsection C of the Canada Elections Act ensure that Canadians have the opportunity to provide informed consent regarding how parties use their information.
Furthermore, these principles require that individuals be able to access their information, verify its accuracy and request that it be removed from the databases of the organizations collecting such information. Here again, nothing in Bill C-25 addresses these principles, and the new provisions added to the Canada Elections Act upon the passage of Bill C-4 in March 2026 — now set forth in section 446.2 of the act — directly contradict them, by stipulating that political parties cannot be required to provide access to the personal information in their possession, to correct errors or even to receive, review or process requests from individuals for this purpose. This is downright shameful, ladies and gentlemen of the Senate.
Finally, the last principle of privacy legislation concerns the right of any person to file a complaint regarding an organization’s failure to comply with the principles it is required to uphold. Here again, there is no provision to this effect in Bill C-25 or in the Election Act as amended by Bill C-4.
As you are now aware, Canada’s regulatory framework governing political parties’ use of Canadians’ personal information remains extremely limited, if not non-existent. In our view, this is a troubling situation that must be corrected quickly.
What Bill C-4 and Bill C-25 do is create is an exception for political parties, which are not subject to the same legal obligations as other organizations that collect and use Canadians’ personal information in the context of transactions or practices such as marketing, micro targeting, commercial profiling or targeted advertising. Yet these are activities that all federal political parties routinely carry out using our personal information.
In Quebec, in September 2021, members of the National Assembly unanimously passed Bill 64, now known as law 25, modernizing the regulatory framework governing the practices of all public and private organizations that use personal information. Originally, this modernization was also intended to cover political parties.
However, after eight months of studying the bill, the members of the parliamentary committee responsible for reviewing it adopted more than 30 amendments to the law as it applies to political parties. By acting like members of a cartel protecting their resources — for that is clearly what this is — Quebec’s elected officials have established an exemption where the parties do not have to comply with most privacy principles. In doing so, citizens lose all their rights regarding how political parties use their personal information.
No one in Quebec has spoken out about this situation. It appears that federal political parties now want to do the same thing as their Quebec counterparts.
We are here, alongside other Canadian researchers, to speak out and publicly address what political parties and their leaders are attempting to do.
What the provisions of Bill C-25 and Bill C-4 establish is not a regulatory framework governing political parties’ use of personal information. Rather, it is a concerted effort on their part to protect their flexibility regarding a resource that has become essential to their electoral organization: our personal information.
Our personal information allows political parties to run more effective and persuasive campaigns at a lower cost. However, the parties do not want to be accountable to us for how they use our information or for the purposes of that use.
Beyond security concerns, the use of personal information also poses risks to how our democracy works. It also jeopardizes the common good, public debate and the representation of interests.
In April 2018, I testified alongside Colin Bennett before a House of Commons committee in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. I concluded my presentation as follows:
The deliberations you are currently conducting on these issues, which are crucial to our democracy, are being evaluated by the Canadian public, which—as numerous studies over the past twenty years have confirmed—is skeptical and distrustful of the political class.
The democratic malaise currently present in Canada and Canadians’ lack of guidance and information regarding how political parties use their personal data undermine, in my view, many Canadians’ perception of political activity and our democracy.
Canadians’ expectations are high, and it would be wise to avoid disappointing them when you propose guidelines to the government for regulating political parties’ practices regarding the collection and analysis of personal data. The stakes are enormous.
Eight years later, senators, the issue of regulating the use and protection of personal information by federal political parties remains unresolved. Nothing in Bills C-25 or C-4 complies with internationally recognized principles of privacy protection.
How much longer must we Canadians wait for lawmakers to finally put in place a truly strict and rigorous regime that will protect our rights?
As their counterparts in Quebec have shown, federal political parties seem to have no interest in self-regulation. Furthermore, their elected representatives in the House of Commons have a conflict of interest when they orchestrate amendments to the Election Act on this issue, which is crucial to our democracy.
You, the vast majority of whom are independent senators, should seize this opportunity to take action. When the amendment you proposed to section 4 of Bill C-4 was rejected by the House of Commons, Senators Deacon (Nova Scotia), Prosper and Moncion spoke in the Senate on March 12 to wisely remind their fellow senators of the Senate’s constitutional role in the legislative process, the conflict of interest involving political parties and their elected officials regarding the regulation of personal information, and the leeway available to the non-partisan Senate to respectfully refocus bills from the House of Commons, including those dealing with amendments to the Election Act.
In that regard, my colleague and I invite you —
[English]
The Chair: Professor, I will ask you to wrap up, sir, thank you.
[Translation]
Mr. Giasson: We urge you to be bold and propose significant amendments to the provisions of Bill C-25 so that they truly reflect the 10 principles that guide privacy laws. Political parties and their elected representatives in the House of Commons will not do so. Your fellow citizens are counting on you.
Thank you for your attention.
[English]
The Chair: Thank you. Next is Mr. Sébastien CoRhino, Member, Longest Ballot Committee.
[Translation]
Sébastien CoRhino, member, Longest Ballot Committee: Good morning. Thank you for welcoming me to the Senate. I would also like to thank the translators.
[English]
Stay sharp. I forgot to send you notes. My bad.
[Translation]
I was very pleased to learn that amendments to the Canada Elections Act had been proposed through Bill C-25, and I eagerly set out to review them.
First, there is nothing about electoral reform. In Ottawa, we have known for 50 to 60 years that the electoral system is outdated, and we have been discussing it. Electoral reform should have happened at least 30 years ago. It’s a system that’s over 300 years old and comes to us from rural England — I must remind you — and here we are, in 2026, still discussing it. It’s completely ridiculous.
In 2015, a candidate running for prime minister of Canada promised that —
[English]
— the 2015 election will be the last election with the first-past-the-post voting system in the history of Canada.
[Translation]
Even I, Sébastien CoRhino, a party leader and a candidate for prime minister at the time, believed this was true and that Justin Trudeau was going to reform the electoral system before 2019.
[English]
I drove a good 10 hours to come up here. I have had a lot to think about.
What I have come along to is very simple. Like the Senators of Ottawa, I don’t think the rules for hockey games should be written by the winners of the last Stanley Cup — should they?
So why are the rules for the election written by the winners of the last election? We demand a non-partisan organization to look at the Canada Elections Act. We demand the Senate includes the reform of the electoral voting system in Bill C-25 and return it back to Parliament with these amendments.
[Translation]
For example, section 51 of Bill C-25 creates section 482.01, which prohibits false statements made with the intent to influence the results of an election, but only with respect to the procedures for exercising the right to vote. The bill protects voters from misinformation only if it is procedural misinformation, but contains no provision requiring elected candidates to honour their campaign promises.
[English]
You are modifying the electoral act specifically for long ballots not to exist anymore. But Elections Canada solved the problem with the special ballot, a write-in ballot, that is already used for postal voting and other uses. This ballot is absolutely perfect for the use of a lot of candidates in a ballot.
There are also other ways to prevent long ballots. I was the leader of the Rhino Party of Canada for 10 years. I have put my name on ballots for almost 20 years now. Yes, I have lost all 10 elections in which I was a candidate, but I have learned a great deal of stuff on Canadians. I have talked to a lot of people in our big country.
One of the things I hear a lot of times every day in the electoral campaign is, “How can you be a candidate in Winnipeg when you live in Rimouski?” Well, that is a simple thing you could do to prevent long ballots.
Candidates in an election should live in their own riding. Most Canadians don’t even know it’s possible to be a candidate in a riding where you don’t live. They don’t know there are ministers in this Parliament that don’t live in their riding and who don’t even visit their riding.
Politicians should not be in charge of making the rules for their own election. There is an inherent conflict of interest in allowing politicians to be the decision makers in this respect. It’s not limited to the election system. You, here in the Senate, might be the last bulwark into preventing this. You have to act strong and tell the Parliament this is enough. You have been voting the rule for your own election for 159 years now. This is now the end. Give the leadership of the electoral act to an independent body.
Elections Canada is admired for its professionalism and independence. Elections Canada is one of our nation’s most trusted government institutions, and that trust is deserved. It could be a newly created entity, or you enlarge the mandate of Elections Canada to put it in charge of the electoral act.
One last, good example on why elected officials should not write their own act: Political parties are exempted to privacy laws, which I know was a talk here in the Senate. What you proposed here is to put duct tape on the electoral act to prevent long ballots. Our goal at the Longest Ballot Committee is not to do long ballots and long ballots for the next few decades. Our goal is to have a real democratic system that is neutral and equal for all Canadians.
Do we want to see another 160 years of Canadian democracy written by elected officials? What will happen when members of Parliament will make rules to keep them elected forever and let a small group of lords rule the rest of this country?
Thank you.
The Chair: Thank you, sir.
We’ll now move to questions from the senators.
Senator Batters: Thank you, sir, for being here today.
I didn’t understand the correlation with your last name until you said you were the former leader of the Rhino Party. So your last name is either CoRhino or CoRhino, either a fantastic coincidence or you changed it, I’m assuming, to correlate.
Mr. CoRhino: My real last name on my driving licence, which caused a problem when I came in, is Côrriveau, so Côrriveau, CoRhino.
Senator Batters: Thank you. I appreciate that. That is good to know.
I am wondering with this Longest Ballot Committee, how is your organization set up? Is it something that is only volunteers? Is it mostly volunteers, but you have a paid structure? It lists you as “Member of Longest Ballot Committee.” I am wondering if you are a paid employee of this organization or an independent contractor or something like that. Do you receive remuneration? How many people are paid by the Longest Ballot Committee?
Mr. CoRhino: We have absolutely no money. I’m a poor artist, and I dream of living with music, but, honestly, it’s not possible right now.
We don’t have money from anything that is coming. The Longest Ballot, we are a very small team of usually three to four core members. We have volunteers who will help, for example, getting signatures and stuff like that. It’s a very small group, and we have no money.
Senator Batters: No one is a paid person?
Mr. CoRhino: No. I would say we almost have to pay. We don’t exactly pay, but we do spend time volunteering a lot.
Senator Batters: Trying to get all those signatures.
Mr. CoRhino: For example.
Senator Batters: Yes. One of the changes that is being made under Bill C-25 is to try to prevent these types of long ballot issues, some of the things that have happened with that, so there is now an offence. There is an offence to sign more than one nomination paper, and the consequence would, as we heard from Elections Canada’s Chief Electoral Officer yesterday, the consequence for that would be a maximum fine of $1,000.
Then there is also an offence for counselling people to do this: organizing, basically, to have multiple nomination papers signed by a number of different people. The organizers would fall within that. Even though that would be potentially assisting people to sign multiple nomination papers and under this revision to the act would be unlawful, it has the same consequence for the offence. It would be, again, a maximum $1,000 fine. The two are related, and that’s why I was also interested in hearing about your structure for your organization, but do you think that it should be an offence? Do you think it’s part of democracy? How do you contend that it should be? Do you think there should be a distinction between someone who is organizing to have this kind of thing or just a person signing more than one of these nomination papers?
Mr. CoRhino: For example, in 2015, I was a candidate in Rimouski. I have had on my nomination act the signature of every other candidate that was a candidate against me, including the incumbent, MP Guy Caron.
With a bill like this, this person, the Bloc, the Greens, all the candidates, they would not sign my paper. They would not sign it any more.
Why do we want to prevent people signing multiple election candidates? When you’re from a small party and you go on the street and say, “I need 100 signatures to put my name on the ballot. You don’t have to vote for me. You just agree that I’m on the ballot,” you put this kind of thing in the bill, and what does it say? It just says it’s going to be harder for someone to be a candidate.
We’re creating a permanent change in the Elections Act for it to be harder to be a candidate, while the long ballot is only a temporary thing. We were just doing a small protest, and we followed every law. This is the crazy part. We followed every law. A lot of protests don’t follow all the laws, and that’s okay. This is what democracy is.
Now what we’re going to do is open the Elections Act not to make it better for democracy in Canada. We’re opening the act for putting more about bâtons dans les roues in people who want to do a little bit of weird stuff. I think this is sad that we’re doing this right now.
[Translation]
Senator Miville-Dechêne: Mr. Giasson, thank you for your testimony. A witness on the previous panel told us that this is not so much about permission to collect information when going door-to-door — since that involves basic information — but rather that it becomes an issue when there is scraping of social media or the internet, and it can become unnecessary to go out and gather information. Do you agree with that?
Above all, since you have studied the case of Quebec extensively, do political parties scrape the web to create voter profiles that allow them to better understand voters and, therefore, better influence them?
Mr. Giasson: Thank you, senator. I have studied not only Quebec’s situation but also the federal parties. The findings I am presenting to you and my knowledge of data marketing practices are based on more than 30 interviews I conducted with federal and provincial digital strategists. So, I am aware of what the parties are doing in terms of data collection, data use and data aggregation for profiling purposes.
In Quebec, the reality varies depending on the parties’ resources. Since 2012, all parties have been compiling a multi-faceted data architecture. So, they use the data provided to them by Élections Québec from the permanent voter list, but they supplement their data with information provided to them more or less voluntarily. In fact, this is usually done voluntarily, but sometimes the people providing the data do not know for what purposes it will be used. Thus, through online petitions or small issue-based websites, people are asked to provide their email address and sometimes even their full address or ZIP code. This information is then integrated into the database and processed to develop profiles.
Senator Miville-Dechêne: I’m going to move on to the topic of federal parties, because we do not have much time.
Do federal parties scrape the web and use social media? How do you know?
Mr. Giasson: Yes, I know this from interviews I have conducted with digital strategists from federal parties since 2014 and 2015, and I have written about it. We know what they are doing. In Shopping for Votes, a well-known book, Susan Delacourt also conducted numerous interviews with strategists from all federal parties who discussed their practices. As Commissioner Denham noted, they use data provided to them by data brokers and also utilize consulting services offered by major social media companies. Facebook and Google offer consulting services to political parties to help them develop micro-targeting strategies that are more effective based on data specific to the platforms on which they will campaign.
Senator Miville-Dechêne: From the perspective of consent, that is where it would be essential. In your opinion, are these practices acceptable or unacceptable?
Mr. Giasson: I have a problem with doing certain things without people’s knowledge. If consent is not sought, it must be clearly stated for what purposes political parties are using personal data. Currently, political parties do not want to reveal these purposes. They want to keep these things secret. These are businesses and organizations that compete with one another and sometimes use the services of the same companies that advise them on profiling and processing their data. So, they do not want to tell us what they are doing. This is a huge issue.
If the purposes were known, we might feel more at ease, but right now, Canadians do not know what the parties are doing with their personal information.
Senator Miville-Dechêne: Thank you very much, Mr. Giasson.
I have a brief question for Mr. CoRhino. This campaign is confusing and upsetting many older voters who have more difficulty writing, as well as people from other backgrounds who are not very familiar with the language and who must write the name of the candidate they choose when voting. So, this is a disruptive factor, and you are doing this because it disrupts the system.
Mr. CoRhino: That is not why we did this.
Senator Miville-Dechêne: The reality is that this is disrupting the system. Have you managed to get your message across?
I see articles that only focus on the disruption to the system, but there is no mention of your desire for proportional representation. Are you serving your goals by running such a campaign?
Mr. CoRhino: It is true, the media loves to make a mountain out of a molehill.
In fact, the long ballot was used about seven times. Yes, the ballot was longer when people went to vote. It is surprising, but is it a problem? I would not go that far. In fact, if we look at the election results, we notice two things. First, there were fewer rejected ballots in elections with a long ballot, so fewer people invalidated their votes, and the election results are almost exactly what the polls predicted for this election. The people who went out to vote did not make a mistake in doing so, contrary to what the newspapers tried to make us believe.
Senator Miville-Dechêne: What about your message? Canada still doesn’t have proportional representation, and it doesn’t seem as though you’ve swayed more Canadians in its favour.
Mr. CoRhino: It hasn’t happened, but a lot of people support it. When we collect signatures and explain why we’re doing it, when we knock on doors and tell people that we’re collecting signatures for 100 candidates, that we’re putting normal politicians on ballots instead of career politicians and that we’re doing it for electoral reform, one-third of the people don’t understand what we’re doing, one-third of them do understand but don’t care, and one-third of them sign.
Senator Miville-Dechêne: Thank you.
[English]
Senator Prosper: Thank you to all our witnesses. I have a question. I know there are a number of panellists, but I do want to provide the opportunity for those so inclined to provide some answers to this question. I want to reference again Senator Clement’s discussion with Mr. Dufresne, who is the Privacy Commissioner of Canada and Chair of the Global Privacy Assembly. I have a basic question: are you proud of Bill C-25? Let’s just say the answer wasn’t good.
A colleague of mine that was having deja vu with Part 4 in Bill C-4, Colin Deacon, shared an interesting discussion with Senator Bernie Sanders with Claude, an advanced AI assistant. The basic question was, can you trust an AI company that profits from your data to protect your data?
We heard about a lot of deficiencies with respect to Bill C-25. With respect to public confidence in democratic institutions and the risks with respect to democracy and the common good, what would you offer with respect to that as it relates to Bill C-25? Thank you.
Mr. Bennett: Linking up with what was said in response to the last question, on the question of confidence, there is a recent Ipsos poll which says something like 35% of Canadians have trust in political parties to protect their personal data. Number one, there is a trust issue.
Number two, there is a transparency issue. The voters list going back 20 years is used by the major political parties to establish what are called voter relationship management systems, so VRMs. The principal example is liberalist, and over the years, those databases have been expanded and they have been made more sophisticated. And the basic name, information and address information is then supplemented with data that comes from other sources.
We don’t fully know where those sources come from. There are guesses. My colleague, Dr. Gaisson, has done some research. But it’s from a variety of things; polling, petition analysis, social media, as well as the engagement that political parties have on the doorstep, over the phone, through social media and email. They have become more and more sophisticated.
They play a central role in our democracy. I think that’s an important point to accentuate here. They are not just sort of marketing databases of commercial marketing organizations. They play a central role, and yet we know little about them. That is why I think it would be timely for the Senate to do a proper analysis and to bring in some of the consultants, people and companies that work for political parties to find out exactly what is going on, because outsiders, to some extent, are operating in the dark.
The third point I want to make is this: There are attempts to say that in terms of social media scraping, well on one level, companies will scrape social media and they find out what issues are trending during an election campaign. On the face of it, there is nothing particularly controversial about that. There is something controversial when they look at your behaviour on social media, what posts you like on Instagram or YouTube, and use that to inform the conversations that they have with you.
In other words, okay, we know that you’re interested in the environment, so let’s have that conversation on the doorstep about the environment. Without proper transparency, a lot of people will find that creepy.
To your question, ideally, I think the whole regime of the Canada Elections Act is fundamentally flawed. I can quite understand where the Privacy Commissioner is coming from. There should be attempts to fix it and improve the provisions for privacy policies. But I believe that it is trying to correct a regime that is fundamentally flawed. So, I would ask you to consider more radical reforms here and to think about how this whole system for the protection of personal data can be integrated into the larger regime for privacy protection in Canada. I do not believe that’s a threat to political parties and their ability to engage the electorate.
Those are a few of the things I wanted to throw out in response to the previous question. Thank you for your question.
Mr. Hearn: Chair, if I may add to Mr. Bennett’s remarks, first, the infographic in Figure 1. — I’m picking up on the Ipsos poll — shows that over 80% of Canadians agree that federal political parties should follow the same rules as everyone else.
Second, there is a broad consensus that the status quo is untenable. This even includes industry. This is reflected in a campaign called Voter Privacy. It’s a website campaign that is urging a House petition to be signed by Canadians. Thousands have signed it.
Third, getting to the bottom of what these voter relationship management systems are really doing requires someone — it has to be the Senate because the House isn’t going to go there — to do a proper, full study. I would refer you to the February 21 additional brief that I submitted to the LCJC that calls on the political operatives to be brought in. They are the only ones that understand the workings of the systems.
These include, for instance, Sean Wiltshire, Tom Pitfield with the Liberals, Michael Ray, Steve Outhouse with the Conservatives and Mary Shortall with the NDP. Thank you.
Senator Simons: I’m so frustrated with the privacy parts of this bill, and the fact that we have been basically told by the government — that is the Senate — unelected, we have no moral authority to amend the privacy parts of the bill.
I’m going to cheer myself up by talking to Mr. CoRhino. I have long had a certain tenderness for the performance art of the long ballot campaign as a form of political protest. The first time it was slightly charming. At a certain point, though, it becomes tedious to the point of being obnoxious. During the by-election campaign in Alberta a few months ago, it may even have really disadvantaged — I don’t want to say legitimate candidates — but candidates who had some potential to challenge Mr. Poilievre, who got lost in the welter of names.
Is there a different other way that you could make your point and engage in political protest without necessarily gumming up the works as we say in English to this degree?
Mr. CoRhino: The Battle River–Crowfoot by-election was not very useful because the elected MP won with 82% of the vote, and then, he decided to quit his seat. The population clearly said this is our MP, so why did this by-election exist in the first place?
In Terrebonne, Quebec, some journalists were eager to punch us in the corner, let’s say, and I don’t know exactly why, because what we did was not very different. We were on the same page. But the media attention was worse. That’s what you would have seen, and of course, it was.
As I said, personally, I don’t think I would do another one. I don’t exactly see why I would do more of this. I don’t see exactly why I would do more.
I will be very honest. When Justin Trudeau was elected with the promise to throw out the first-past-the-post system, I was the leader of the Rhino Party, and I was happy he got elected even if I was running to be Prime Minister myself. Honestly, I thought he was about to do it. There was a press conference where he sent a young minister, a young lady, to be chopped up by the journalists. He didn’t even go to the press conference to explain his decision as to why he wasn’t doing going through with it. He left that to a young lady minister. I was mad. I thought if this is what politics is, of course, Canadians are cynical about what is happening in Parliament. They trust politicians and senators, who are not elected, less and less. They will trust the electoral system less.
We’re going downhill right now. If we want to win back Canadians’ trust, we have to give them something so they can believe they can trust politicians when they promise to do something in a certain way. Sometimes, it’s not possible, but for electoral system reform, we have a 900-page book of committees, and all the recommendations are there. We just have to open it. It’s from 2016. We open it, and we have the proposed electoral system for Canada. It’s right there.
Senator Saint-Germain: Thank you to all six witnesses. You are bringing interesting perspectives to this committee.
[Translation]
My question is for Mr. Giasson. I’d like to go back to Bill C-25 if possible. I’d like to revisit the issue of privacy and the information individuals provide to political parties. In the course of our study of Bill C-25 — and Bill C-4 prior to that — I looked at the websites of five federal parties, the five that are represented in the House of Commons. In all five cases, I found that their privacy policies were posted on their websites, that officially collected information was limited and that they explained how it was protected and how it could be changed. It’s a pretty transparent process, actually.
I’d like to hear your thoughts as a political scientist on striking a balance in a democratic system based on fair elections. Political parties are part of the political system. Where is that balance between the protection of personal information and allowing political parties access to information that enables them to perform as political parties? How can they reach voters, make their case and get elected in today’s political context? Does Bill C-25 strike a balance between the need to reach voters and the importance of protecting them from the misuse of their information?
Mr. Giasson: Thank you for the question, senator. To your last point, there’s nothing in Bill C-25 that achieves that balance.
I’m comfortable with the fact that, as set out in subdivision C of the Canada Elections Act as amended by Bill C-4, political parties may have access to personal information in order to conduct activities that enable them to communicate with voters.
You talked about a voter, a person. What we’re seeing now with political and electoral communication that relies on personal information is that messages target very limited audiences. What we’re seeing is that conversations are becoming increasingly targeted, especially on social media. They focus on certain segments of the electorate. Other people don’t have access to that and don’t see those messages. This is an issue because an election should be a shared experience. I think parties should be limited in their ability to micro-target public debate on the bigger issues that shape elections every four years. What’s proposed in Bill C-25 will not protect that balance because the focus is more on security obligations.
Commissioner Dufresne was right when he said earlier that parties dealing with data breaches wouldn’t have to report them to a federal agency; they would have to contact the affected individuals. That’s an issue and, to me, balance is lacking.
Senator Saint-Germain: You said something important that I want to understand. Are you saying that a party whose platform is about tackling unemployment in regions where unemployment is higher, a party that would specifically target a group of workers, such as farmers, could not actually target farmers? You talked about small groups of voters who don’t have access to information that other groups of voters do have access to. I think it’s important that we fully understand your point of view, so here’s my straightforward question: Should we go so far as to regulate parties’ political communications in a democratic system?
Mr. Giasson: I think it can be regulated. We have practices related to the collection of personal information and political communications that do not exist in other democratic systems. In some systems and democracies, such as France, television advertising does not exist; it is prohibited.
We allow political parties to engage in certain practices that are not tolerated in other democratic systems. Societal and cultural factors may be involved, but the regulatory framework governing the conduct of elections is a big factor.
The approach proposed in Bill C-25 does not provide much guidance. This can result in a narrow public debate on micro-issues that target micro-audiences. That, according to several studies, is what we’re seeing now.
You mentioned a political platform. That’s interesting because not all parties release an election platform during a campaign. They’re increasingly disinclined to do so, in fact.
Any given individual’s electoral experience can be different from that of their neighbour or spouse when they follow election activity on social media.
Senator Saint-Germain: Thank you.
Senator Oudar: First of all, thank you to all the witnesses for sharing their expertise today.
Mr. Giasson and Mr. Larochelle, I will follow up on questions from my colleague, Senator Saint-Germain.
Yesterday, the minister spoke to us about door-to-door campaigning. We know we’re now hearing a lot more about AI-assisted micro-targeting in modern political campaigns. What you and Senator Saint-Germain said made me realize that we need to set clearer boundaries by prohibiting the identification of psychological profiles and the exploitation of citizens’ vulnerabilities to send targeted messages and specific responses.
Mr. Giasson, during your opening remarks, you mentioned the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Thank you for that. It made me realize what political parties can do with key messages. It’s true that there’s nothing about that or about consent to data collection in Bill C-25. My colleague, Senator Miville-Dechêne, brought this up during the debates: It contains no further restrictions on the use of data.
I’d like to hear your thoughts on the quality of democratic debate these days with micro-targeting and AI in the mix. Based on your research and your perspective, what connection do you see between the use of data-driven political micro-targeting and the quality of democratic deliberations nowadays?
Mr. Giasson: The quality of debate is in danger of declining.
I’m going to talk about what really happens in federal politics, since this is a federal bill. Collectively, every four years, we come together to elect our representatives to the House of Commons. If we no longer share the same experience or the same understanding of current issues because social media shapes our interactions with political parties, what shared understanding will we be voting on?
Now that tools, practices and principles have been borrowed from marketing, we kind of find ourselves with a consumerist perspective on politics in which voters are seen as consumers who must be offered things they’ll like, whether that’s in line with what other people need or not. Highly targeted campaigns aimed at micro-audiences pose a serious threat to our social cohesion, to our shared understanding and experience of political reality. It’s even possible to target and engage with just a few dozen or a few hundred individuals just because they live in the right parts of a riding, based on their postal code.
Political parties are already running this kind of campaign. The goal is to boost voter turnout. An effective campaign is one that gets the right voters to the polls at the right time. It’s now granular and extremely targeted. Thanks to social media, door-to-door canvassing, data, profiling and geolocation, they can identify where the voters they need are in order to get out the vote. This is a major issue.
Senator Oudar: Go ahead, Mr. Larochelle.
Thomas Larochelle, Graduate Student, Political Science Researcher, Université Laval, as an individual: I’ll begin by thanking you for the invitation.
I would say that Mr. Giasson’s comments and his answer covered everything.
I would like to address one point: It’s essential that all voters know what a candidate said. In my view, there’s a real problem if a political party or a candidate can make a promise to just part of the electorate. Other people may vote for them not knowing that they made that promise. I see this as a major issue because there’s no way for people to know what they’re all voting on.
I believe Mr. Giasson already mentioned that. I have nothing else to add.
Thank you.
Senator Oudar: Thank you both.
[English]
Senator Mohamed: Just more of a clarification. In response to the commissioner to increase penalties, penalties were actually increased in this bill, from $1,500 to $25,000 for individuals and from $5,000 to $100,000 for entities and for corporations.
I know we’ve heard the “thousand-dollar” amount, but that’s inaccurate. Just for reference, it’s section 67, page 31 of the English version of the bill. Thank you.
The Chair: Thank you, Senator Mohamed, for giving us that advice. We will take this into consideration. It is a very important point of clarification. Thank you.
Senator Miville-Dechêne: Just to add that I think we’re talking about two different things. If you check —
Senator Mohamed: We did check, and it is the same thing. If I am mistaken, I will come back.
The Chair: Thank you very much, everyone. I want to say to all the witnesses who have been here today we really do appreciate you taking the time to be with us.
Senator Simons: I’m sorry. Do we have time for more questions?
The Chair: No.
Senator Simons: Okay.
The Chair: I want to thank all the witnesses who have been here today and taken their time to assist us in our work. Obviously, we are doing a very truncated and expedited pre-study with only four panels, and we tried to accommodate everybody. Obviously, most of the witnesses didn’t get a chance to amplify what they would like to say, and that’s unfortunate, but it’s quite likely there will be more study done in this area before all is said and done on it.
I want to thank you, our witness who is in person, as well as all the people who have testified by video conference. We really do appreciate your work.
Colleagues, the last part of this meeting will be dedicated to discussing the report and providing drafting instructions to our analysts.
As noted yesterday, we are mandated to report back to the Senate no later than next week, Thursday, June 4. As such, the report will need to be very succinct, tightly focused and likely no more than two pages in length.
Before we proceed with the analysts’ instructions, I would like to take a moment to introduce our new analyst. Allison Lowenger is with us here today; she was here with us yesterday, as well. This is the first time it is appropriate to introduce her to our colleagues in this committee. Ms. Lowenger has been with the Library of Parliament for four years, most recently serving as one of the analysts on the Standing Senate Committee on Indigenous Peoples. She has civil and common law degrees from the University of Ottawa, during which time she spent summers working at a local criminal defence firm and with Innocence Canada, supporting their work on wrongful convictions. She articled as a judicial law clerk at the Ontario Superior Court and is a member of the Law Society of Ontario. Prior to law school, she was a land claims negotiator with the Province of Ontario for several years, in large part working in communities in Treaty 3 territory in northwestern Ontario and eastern Manitoba.
Welcome to the Standing Senate Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs, Ms. Lowenger. We’re very pleased to have you with us. We look forward to working with you.
You know a lot about Aboriginal issues.
Allison Lowenger, Analyst, Library of Parliament: I was learning.
The Chair: Colleagues, we’ll now open the floor to comments and observations. If members have suggestions or points they would like to see reflected in this report, now is the appropriate time to raise them.
I think it’s fair to say that we’ve heard that we commenced on this pre-study, but there is significant evidence that suggests that this particular legislation requires more extensive, comprehensive study because the issues being raised here are very important to the core values of Canadian democracy. We have had an expedited and very truncated set of witnesses in four panels. Obviously, we were unable to hear fully from all of the witnesses for various reasons. It’s likely that this bill will come to us at some point in the future, and, at that time, we may have an opportunity to complete or provide a more comprehensive opportunity to study the bill.
Those are just my opening comments. From that, I’m more interested in hearing what you would like to say in this report that we have to do, more or less, today — the instructions. We’ll see a draft of this on Tuesday and consider it on Wednesday next week.
Senator Batters: I find it unfortunate that the government has put us in this boat. This is not the way to do a pre-study. In fact, when the minister was here yesterday and I pointed out what I thought seemed to be an obvious matter that needed an amendment from the House of Commons committee, that being around the same consequences for someone who has potentially signed a few more than one nomination paper of $1,000 maximum fine, and then the offence of counselling someone to potentially sign dozens or hundreds of nomination papers would have the same maximum fine of $1,000. The Chief Electoral Officer of Canada told us about that, and I assume he would know such things because that’s what he came to testify about here. Then, when I questioned the minister about that, he confirmed that was the situation, thinking that it was good enough that it was just an offence for the first time.
Now, the sponsor is telling me that, no, actually, that might not be correct.
I don’t know. When I was questioning the minister yesterday, I said that I thought he should go back, since the House of Commons had not finished their clause by clause, and this is the type of thing that a pre-study is useful to do in the Senate: When we have found something, they can correct it in the House of Commons when it still is at committee stage before it comes to us in the first instance. But now it sounds like, no, that might not be the case.
So either the Chief Electoral Officer or the minister do not know what they’re talking about when they come to the committee about their own bill or else — I don’t know. It’s very strange, because we don’t have any opportunity right now to find out. I was going to suggest that it would be a matter that I would like to have noted in this report that seems to me to be problematic, and I haven’t seen anything in writing yet to show that it is not problematic.
Then again, another matter is that we wanted to have, as a panel — right now, actually — we wanted to have the three political party witnesses — the lawyers that we had for the previous Part 4 of Bill C-4 — to find out what their position is on this. They are an important part of this to get that balanced part of this. But they weren’t available because they are actually dealing with, I believe, the court case that’s dealing with this issue. That’s their time frame. Because we had such a truncated time frame, we didn’t have another opportunity to work them in, so we haven’t been able to hear from them.
I don’t know what we’re going to report. That’s the thing. Normally, when we have a pre-study, we have a chance for a longer, more detailed pre-study with all of the relevant witnesses we need to hear from. I know that we tried to get the government to extend the deadline so we could have a more reasonable time frame, and they refused.
Do they want a pre-study that does something, or do they want a rubber stamp? I don’t know what we’re going to say in this pre-study other than saying we had this many meetings, this many witnesses and, okay, I guess we’ll see the bill when it comes because we also don’t know if the House of Commons will amend it before it comes to us.
The Chair: Right. You are saying, as well, that one of the purposes of a pre-study here at the Senate is to give advance notice over to the other place that this is an issue and that they may address it and correct it there before it actually comes back?
Senator Batters: That is the best way that a pre-study can work, yes.
The Chair: Do you want to answer the question there, senator?
Senator Mohamed: I completely appreciate the frustration around whether or not there is clarity. I am told by the officials that it is an increased penalty.
I will endeavour, right after we’re out of this meeting, to get an answer in writing for clarity. I would appreciate that ability. This is what I’m being told by the officials, but we will double-check.
The Chair: Thank you.
[Translation]
Senator Miville-Dechêne: To quickly address the issue of political parties, we have received lots of testimony that clearly illustrates the gap between the government and the experts, who aren’t members of political parties, but who have all stated that Bill C-25 falls short of the standards used elsewhere in the Western world.
It would be hard to say we haven’t heard enough testimony. I think we’ve heard plenty, but, in a study of this scope and duration, I still have questions about AI, deepfakes, and foreign interference. We haven’t heard much testimony about those things.
We were likely influenced in our choice of witnesses because Part 4 of Bill C-4 was the subject of a highly controversial study, and we now find ourselves facing the same dilemma. When we tried to share our recommendations with the House of Commons, we were told that electoral activities were none of our business. Under the circumstances, it’s hard to feel comfortable re-entering a trying battle that sidelines us.
No, we’re not elected officials, but we do have a certain amount of discretion when we examine bills, and that’s basically our job. For all these reasons, perhaps we should limit ourselves to a more technical report.
[English]
The Chair: I didn’t hear.
[Translation]
Senator Miville-Dechêne: I don’t think we should expand on this.
[English]
The Chair: This just died.
Senator Miville-Dechêne: I don’t think we should expand this, make it another extremely big report. I think we should be very short on what we did.
The Chair: Here for this pre-study report, right?
Senator Miville-Dechêne: Yes.
The Chair: Okay.
Senator Simons: It’s interesting. I read the fourth report because I got a little confused with the way things were noted. Having read the fourth report, which we will discuss next week, I guess, it reminded me of all the concerns that we had during the Bill C-4 debate. Much of what we heard in the last two days has been a reiteration of that testimony. I’m glad that we’re doing that Bill C-4 report because we can make the points more strongly.
Senator Miville-Dechêne is correct. If we make this one more a factual narrative, a timeline of whom we spoke with, the one thing we could bring out a bit more — because we didn’t discuss it in our Bill C-4 debate — is the issue of the deepfakes and the difficulty of regulating internationally. That’s new material. That could be something that we might want to highlight more.
The other thing that I found perplexing is that the Chief Electoral Officer of Canada came to us yesterday with some quite thoughtful amendments. Well, this is the pre-study. We can’t make amendments. Are those amendment things that might happen at the House side?
Do we want to perhaps — picking up the theme of Senator Batters’ intervention — suggest we like some of those amendments, and we recommend to the House that they give them consideration?
Since we have pretty much been told we can’t amend, do we have this opportunity to say that there were some very thoughtful amendments? We didn’t vote on whether we liked all of them or not. We can say that the Chief Electoral Officer had critical amendments, and it would be good that the House gave them due consideration.
The Chair: I think I see consensus on that point. Maybe not. Go ahead.
Senator Batters: On that, I expressed disagreement with at least one of the amendments that the Chief Electoral Officer brought. I don’t feel like I had, at all, adequate time to look at these and to hear from actual other witnesses about whether they are a good idea or not.
I don’t think we’re in a position to say, “Hey, House of Commons, look at these.” I’m sure he is also providing it to them.
The Chair: Did we not hear that he had provided it to them and that they were perhaps going to deal with it in a clause by clause?
Senator Batters: They were going into clause by clause, I think. I’m assuming that’s where they would do it.
I don’t feel like I’m in a position to pronounce on that, or anything like that, or say that these are good, bad or agreeable.
Senator Simons: You could say there were thoughtful amendments that we could not, ourselves, consider at length.
It is a very odd two-step forward, one-step back process here.
The Chair: Carrying on, Senator Pate.
Senator Pate: Thank you. I would agree with what Senator Simons said. But if we’re not comfortable with that, I think underscoring the fact that we made very clear recommendations when we were dealing with Bill C-4. They were not listened to. We were dismissed unceremoniously.
We were essentially told it was going to be fixed in this bill, and now we’re seeing it’s not fixed.
I’m fine with it being the factual what happened, but I also think some kind of clearer indication that this committee is not happy that we’re being asked to — we were told it would be fixed in this bill. It’s not fixed. It’s only a pre-study.
We know what happens. Once the bill gets here, we’re expected to rush it through because we have done a pre-study. That’s not satisfactory. Some clear message that this kind of process, when we’re talking about democracy, undermines the very trust in the democratic institutions that we are sworn to uphold.
The Chair: A point of clarification, we have done a pre-study. We will get the bill. We have, as a committee, the discretion to say we’re going to study this bill in a fuller way and take the time to do it.
Senator Pate: Sorry to interrupt, but I would then support saying that, if amendments aren’t made, that we would be considering more completely the discussion.
I take Senator Batters’ point that we haven’t had a chance to fully explore it, but we would be considering those amendments and making them — to put the House on notice that, if they are not going to accept these, they have to give something more than just thumbing their nose at the committee.
The Chair: Okay.
Senator Saint-Germain: You made the first point I wanted to make. We will still have the opportunity, if we so wish, to amend the bill.
Personally, I believe that it’s very frustrating that we’re not able to witness again the representatives of the political parties, but for different reasons.
Many things were said that were not all substantiated by some experts, from my standpoint. I would like to have them benefiting from [Technical difficulties] because we may have had interest in cross-checking this information.
My other point is about the scope of this bill. We have received witnesses who made very interesting points, but out of scope. Electoral reform; it’s not a bill on electoral reform. I would say, more broadly, interfering in the management of the political strategies of political parties — I personally have some issues with that.
So I think that we need to be very clear and focus on this Bill C-25 and make observations perhaps on what was said regarding other aspects, but I think that we need to really be focused.
Senator Batters: I just wanted a couple of points remembered. On Part 4 of Bill C-4, it was not unanimous at this committee that the recommendations that were made by this committee, so if this report refers to that, then that needs to be recalled, and not to look like it was unanimous —
The Chair: This report on this pre-study won’t mention that.
Senator Batters: That’s what Senator Pate was saying earlier, that we would say that, “Oh, we thought you were bringing amendments that would afford to what we were concerned about with Bill C-4 in Part 4. Since those amendments are not included in here, we’re not happy about that.”
I’m okay with referencing the process. I’m also not happy with this process that I was describing earlier in detail, the truncated process. But I was not in favour of the recommendations that the committee made on Part 4 of Bill C-4. The same thing with the bill’s sponsor, Senator Cuzner, who was part of this committee for that part. So it wasn’t unanimous.
What I’m saying is that if there is a reference in this report about this pre-study that goes back to that, then it must be recalled that that was not unanimous. It needs to be referenced so that it doesn’t look like it was unanimous.
The Chair: If there is a reference, it would be that the majority of the committee but it was not unanimous.
Senator Batters: Yes. Exactly. Again, I think this government has generally shown that they ignore observations from this committee. They have for many years. I do not see the purpose of having lengthy observations in this report. I think that this report should be extremely brief and just basically mention what the situation is, and that it was very truncated, and that we’ll have to potentially consider a fuller study when it comes to the actual study of the bill because they forced us into such a tight timeline.
The Chair: I think we can capture that. I think it’s important to message that when this bill comes back, it’s quite likely there is going to be a much fuller study.
The analysts have absorbed all these comments. Do you think you have enough instructions to come up with a two-page report that succinctly captures the wishes of the senators?
Ms. Zazulya: Maybe I’ll just summarize what I heard, and you can correct me if I’m off track.
I understand that the report is mainly a summary of the study we did, the witnesses we heard from, the context with a comment about the truncated process, and the fact that when the bill is referred to the committee, there will be a much more comprehensive treatment of the subject matter.
I know there were some other comments, though, about highlighting the deepfakes and things like that. I’m not clear on what of that to include. There were also comments about signalling to the House of Commons. If there is any clarification on those points, that would be helpful.
The Chair: I’m going to make one point. I think we were expecting the three political parties to be here, and we’re disappointed that they were unable to assist us. Again, that’s down to the very truncated nature of trying to get this out in two days.
Senator Batters: That was the thing. It would be a little unfair to blame them because I think we gave them the choice of: Here is one hour, and we would like you to come, and can you come then?
The Chair: It’s disappointing they couldn’t come.
Senator Batters: Absolutely, for sure. It’s a reference to the truncated nature of it and the fact that the government is demanding that we have this pre-study report back to them by next week, which is kind of crazy.
The Chair: All right. Is there any assistance for the analysts on the issue of “deepfakes” and some of the — she wanted to perhaps mention that because it was mentioned by some of the witnesses.
Senator Saint-Germain: Senator Miville-Dechêne expressed the point very well. She said that we would have liked to have more time, and I would say exhaustiveness to appreciate the “deepfake” and misinformation and foreign interference. This is the point that she made first, and a few others supported it. I concur with you as well.
The Chair: The majority of the committee supports that. All right.
Senator Miville-Dechêne: In this case, I think we all agree.
Senator Pate: If I’m the only one who wants the reference to Bill C-4, I’m fine with not doing it. But I thought we may want to point out the pattern of it being ignored.
Senator Saint-Germain: Physically agreeing, nodding.
Senator Pate: I think there is a reference that concerns were raised by the committee that when we consider Bill C-4, we hope that the House will consider the issues that were raised then and now.
Senator Simons: It we want to give Senator Batters more comfort. Instead of saying “us,” we could say, “Witnesses said that the problems they highlighted when they testified on Bill C-4 were not fixed by —”
Senator Pate: [Technical difficulties]
The Chair: There was some kind of an expectation, because we had the sunset clause, that this would be addressed. But there wasn’t any commitment.
All right. I believe that we have covered this enough unless there are any other questions. Thanks very much, everyone. Thanks for your attendance here today.
(The committee adjourned.)