OTTAWA (LifeSiteNews) – The Liberal government of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney confirmed that a privacy provision in the Trudeau-era Online Streaming Act law, which aims to censor legal internet content in Canada, may have been accidentally removed.
According to reports, the federal government is now “looking into” what happened to the privacy provision for Bill C-11, also known as the Online Streaming Act, that became law in 2023.
Last week, Michael Geist, a University of Ottawa law professor who has long been critical of former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s numerous internet censorship laws, noted that the privacy provision was removed two months after Bill C-11 became law. This was accomplished through an amendment to another bill.
According to Geist, in his August 25 blog, due to what is “likely a legislative error,” the federal government “deleted privacy safeguards that were included in the bill only two months after they were enacted.”
“As a result, a provision stating that the Broadcasting Act ‘shall be construed and applied in a manner that is consistent with the right to privacy of individuals’ was removed from the bill, leaving in its place two nearly identical provisions related to official languages.”
Geist noted that the Broadcasting Act has, for the past two years, “included an interpretation clause that makes no sense, and efforts to include privacy within it are gone.”
Canada’s Department of Heritage says it knows about the privacy omission, as it has been “recently been made aware of what appears to be an inadvertent oversight in a coordinating amendment and is looking into it,” a spokesperson noted in a statement to media.
Bill C-11 mandates that Big Tech companies pay to publish Canadian content on their platforms. As a result, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, blocked all access to news content in Canada. Google has promised to do the same rather than pay the fees laid out in the new legislation.
The bill was already supposed to have been implemented by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), the country’s broadcast regulator that is tasked with putting in place the law.
However, the CRTC said it will not be until late 2025 that it will finally have a framework to determine exactly how much streaming services will be forced to pay to be in line with mandates for more Indigenous and Canadian content.
Senator not happy with mistake
Digging deeper, it appears that during Bill C-11’s legislative process, Canadian Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne put forth an amendment, based on advice from Canada’s federal privacy commissioner, that the bill contain privacy protections. This then became part of Bill C-11, or the Online Streaming Act, which stated that it would be made so that it respects a person’s privacy.
Miville-Dechêne was not happy with the mistake, noting, “I’m a bit surprised, because I thought there were many levels of verification … But, you know, mistakes happen. I think now the question is that it has to be corrected quickly.”
Trudeau’s Online Streaming Act became law in April 2023, with the privacy protections included. However, this only lasted for two months, as the federal government went ahead with Bill C-13, which, as noted by Geist, had “buried at the end of the bill” a change to the “Broadcasting Act that few seemed to notice.”
A part of Bill C-13 amended the Online Streaming Act to alter language in a provision about official languages for so-called minority communities. This meant that, in effect, Bill C-13 replaced the privacy protections.
“Somehow, no one noticed the change or worked through the implications of the provision (unless, more troublingly, this was the government’s attempt to undo the privacy change). As a result, when both bills received royal assent, the privacy provision in the Broadcasting Act was replaced by a second provision on official languages,” Geist said.
“The Broadcasting Act’s interpretation clause now includes two very similar provisions on official language minorities and no provision on protecting privacy. One would hope that this was not the intent, but the government was always too focused on the political side of Bill C-11 and did not pay enough attention to the specific implications of the legislation.”
The government has claimed that despite the apparent mistake the public and private-sector privacy laws still apply.
