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Results: 1 - 15 of 239
View Brian Masse Profile
NDP (ON)
View Brian Masse Profile
2021-05-27 12:52
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Mr. Carney, I've had a digital bill of rights in the House of Commons for five years.
Do you support a digital bill of rights so that it's enshrined in legislation?
View Brian Masse Profile
NDP (ON)
View Brian Masse Profile
2021-05-11 12:05
I'll go on to a different question, because it is a health and safety issue for our interpreters.
My apologies to you, Mr. Vincent, but the reality is that it disrupts our interpreters, and they have a tough enough job as it is. I'll maybe go back to the transit question, because there's more to say there, and I can follow up off-line for questions.
Thank you, Mr. Vincent, but it is important for our translators.
We were talking about the data assembly. What are the concerns or the issues that you've already worked on for privacy? Privacy is one of the things that pops up with regard to collecting information and to confidence amongst users. Is that baked into some of the work you're doing right now? I see that as an issue. It's almost like a distraction, but at the same time, it is important to cover it off. Perhaps you can provide a little information about that.
Josipa Gordana Petrunic
View Josipa Gordana Petrunic Profile
Josipa Gordana Petrunic
2021-05-11 12:05
Thank you, Mr. Masse.
It's a perspicacious question and certainly it's the first thing that comes up when folks think about Sidewalk Labs and that boondoggle and everything that unfolded from that.
When we talk about data analytics and the transit and transportation world, whether it's bus, coach or truck, we're really talking about impersonal analytics of the machine. It's putting the loggers on the machine, the bus, the coach or the truck to determine how many units—how many kilometres—it is going per unit of energy. What is its efficiency on the powertrain? Is the motor performing at the efficiency level that the operator expects?
We put loggers on the chargers to know exactly how many electrons are coming from the grid and making their way through to the battery pack and being lost on the way. All of that adds up to dollars and those dollars add up to millions of lost dollars when you're talking about a complex transition to this kind of energy system.
Personal data is a non-issue right now because the data analytics we're talking about are analyzing the bus, the charger, the energy storage device, the fuel cell stack, the hydrogen electrolyzer—the energy systems or the inanimate objects that perform the actual propulsion.
Is it possible that, over time, in the creation of such a data trust, one could identify opportunities in obtaining the consent of riders in order to also track them? In the interest of transit, yes, it is a hypothetical possibility. If a data trust led by transit and communities were set up in the future, there would potentially be merit in asking Canadian riders if they would consent to having their data tracked. The primary reason for doing that would be to hand back benefits to transit riders in the sense that where you ride, how you ride and the time you ride should give you some reward or price deduction on your transit ride. That's an issue for a few years from now.
The big issue right now is the performance of the energy systems.
Vass Bednar
View Vass Bednar Profile
Vass Bednar
2021-04-15 11:52
Thank you, Madam Chair.
My name is Vass Bednar. I'm the executive director of McMaster University's new master of public policy in digital society program.
As I'm the co-author of a forthcoming white paper on the state of competition policy in Canada, I'm going to focus my remarks on the potential for reform of the Competition Act, particularly as it relates to the digital economy. I'll also commit to circulating that paper to members of this committee when it's published in the coming days.
When I started researching competition policy in Canada, I was struck by the lack of scholarship on the subject. Most publications come either directly from government officials or from private actors. There's not a whole lot of material that sits in a neutral middle ground, so I’d love to see more of that. I also observe a striking amount of capture in the sector. I’m not sure precisely how that contributes to any policy inertia, but I do sense the Canadian public is increasingly impatient with the legislation’s facilitation and maintenance of oligopolies in our economy. If we want to give our own companies a chance to compete, and protect consumers from new forms of online harm, we should proceed with a thoughtful review of the act.
It has been said that Canada doesn't treat competition policy seriously and that we tolerate high corporate concentration in an effort to be competitive internationally. In fact, former competition commissioner John Pecman has lamented that the bureau lacks the kind of independence that could make it more effective. To my mind, what it comes down to is that there are structural limitations in our legislation that hinder our ability to curb anti-competitive practices, especially for today’s digital economy. This puts us at a disadvantage compared to other countries.
One quick example is the seemingly arbitrary threshold for a merger review. This leads the bureau to potentially overlook anti-competitive mergers.
Another example is fines. The current commissioner, Matthew Boswell, has acknowledged that the maximum penalties for anti-competitive behaviour lack the teeth necessary to deter anti-competitive behaviour.
There's also this bigger question: Should Canada even make an effort to emulate either the American or the European approach to competition policy? Look, we're likely to benefit from the historic antitrust investigations into global tech firms just due to natural spillover effects, but other competition authorities are not going to scrutinize troubling digital competition issues in our own backyard. That's why it's important to me that we act as more anticipatory regulators that can spot harms on the horizon and act accordingly.
Consider a company that has admitted to fixing the price of bread and may have been colluding on wages with other grocers in the pandemic: Loblaw. Now as a case study, just think about their deepening across the financial space with PC Financial; health, with Shoppers Drug Mart and the PC Health app powered by League; insurance and the grocery spaces. This is a case study of the market power that can be achieved through detailed targeted ads and reduced privacy as they refine their proprietary advertising platform, Loblaw Media, emulating a playbook refined by Facebook and Amazon. While this may impact competition, it can also harm consumers by constraining their ability to access everyday essentials at a cheaper price, while Loblaw grows market share.
Right now, Canadian competition policy is silent on such Orwellian activities because the legislation and current guidelines do not adequately comprehend or even stop to consider whether and how data creates a competitive advantage, yet issues on data collection and processing are at the centre of current antitrust cases all around the world. Put simply, Canada’s Competition Bureau does not have the tool kit for a digital economy.
As part of any modernization, we're going to have to critically think about how we can redefine “dominance” via volume and maybe even richness of data, and also understand the competitive harms that can flow from dominant firms that hold large volumes of information. Maybe one of the most important lessons that Canadian policy-makers can learn from the U.S.’s recent work investigating past activity from Facebook, Amazon and Google, and also by China’s efforts with Alibaba is that it's difficult and might even seem disingenuous to retroactively change the policy environment in order to rationalize investigations against massive digital firms.
To my mind, Canada’s competition policy no longer serves our best interests, and digital markets are fundamentally different from traditional ones. This alone warrants modernizing the act alongside more robust privacy legislation in order to better manage these abuses and truly promote dynamism; otherwise, companies that pump up prices on bread for single moms can continue to trade on that same mother's personal information.
It's time for our legislation to catch up.
Thank you.
Dwayne Winseck
View Dwayne Winseck Profile
Dwayne Winseck
2021-04-15 12:05
In the 1990s and early 2000s, it was commonly believed that the advent of digital media and the Internet would usher in more competitive and diverse communications and media markets. However, in his summary of the results of a recent 30-country study, Columbia University professor Eli Noam concludes that concentration levels in mobile wireless, broadband Internet access and other communications markets continue to be “astonishingly high”. While the data for content media is mixed, the trend is in an upward direction.
Moreover, in the last decade, a handful of global Internet giants have remade the Internet in their image—a centralized Internet ruled by a few search engines, social media services and digital media content aggregation platforms. These conditions generally apply to Canada as well.
Where Canada does stand out, however—and not in a good way—is in its sky-high levels of vertical and diagonal integration. The figure distributed to the committee provides a snapshot of where things stand as of 2019 based on HHI measures of concentration—a point I hope we can discuss during the question and discussion period.
If the proposed mega-merger between Canada's second-largest and fourth-largest communications and media conglomerates, Rogers and Shaw, is approved, it would have four major implications. It would overturn a decade and a half of policies by successive Conservative and Liberal governments alike to foster a fourth maverick mobile operator in regions across the country. It would significantly lessen competition for the mobile wireless market at the national and provincial levels and for the national Internet access and cable television markets. It would reduce the number of doors that TV and film producers have to knock on from four to three when seeking a national distribution deal and from three to two in English-language regions of Canada. Moreover, with data combined from 18.2 million Canadians integrated across Rogers' and Shaw's multiple platforms, this deal raises substantial questions about the link between big data, market power, and privacy and data protection.
The proposed Rogers and Shaw merger is an excellent opportunity to see whether the Competition Bureau can use its existing tools to full effect and hold the line on current policies. It is also an excellent opportunity for it to turn its professed interest in the link between big data, market power, and privacy and data protection into action. This is also in sync with the recent report by the ETHI committee, “Democracy Under Threat”.
Competition policy should also go beyond assessing consolidations solely in terms of price to consider, for example, standards of data and privacy protection. For example, Facebook loudly touted its respect for people's expectations about trust and privacy when it competed with tens of other rivals during the competitive era for social media. Since taking over Instagram and WhatsApp in 2012 and 2014 and consolidating control over social media, however, it has systematically degraded the standards of privacy and data protection that it offers.
Price is, obviously, still a concern. Consider that in the oligopolistic mobile wireless industry in Canada, Bell, Rogers and Telus have been able to persistently charge high prices that are significantly higher than in comparable countries while offering mobile wireless plans with stingy data allowances that constrain how people use their phones and the mobile Internet. As a result, mobile data usage in Canada is about half the OECD average and a third of what it is in the U.S.
There is also a need to restore a focus on the broader effects of concentration on competition—for example, the creation of kill zones—as well as how the massive economy of scale, scope and network effects that are common to digital services are used to buttress dominant market positions, undercut rivals and expand into new markets.
The focus should also be on limiting the threat that concentrated corporate power poses not just to markets but to policy; society; the evolution, design and use of technology; and democracy.
Four principles drawn from the history of communications regulation should serve as guides for what a new generation of regulation for communications, the Internet and the digital economy could look like: structural separation, line of business restrictions, public obligations and public alternatives.
I'll now turn it over to Ben. I hope you can indulge him for half a minute.
Vass Bednar
View Vass Bednar Profile
Vass Bednar
2021-04-15 12:33
It strikes me that competition policy is inherently retroactive. We evaluate mergers after they happen. Sometimes we're going back in time, and what I worry about, since we're not being thoughtful about the digital economy and the implications of data and consumer data held by companies, is that we're going to be stuck in a situation where years in the future we're going to be retroactively applying that lens to companies in a way that, as I've said, appears disingenuous, confusing, and punishes firms more than empowers them to understand the most effective ways to be responsible innovators.
Ritesh Kotak
View Ritesh Kotak Profile
Ritesh Kotak
2021-04-15 12:55
I'll be brief in my remarks.
I'll use the example of a small flower shop. The flower shop, because of COVID, has been forced to essentially rethink how they're going to do business so they've gone online. That's opened up a lot of opportunities but also challenges. Consider, for example, cybersecurity, privacy and all those things that a small business might not think about. I have some stats here: 38% of small businesses get breached and one in four doesn't even know they've been breached. It's a whole other area of issues that they might not have traditionally budgeted for or might not have thought of. They might not be aware of their obligations or all of the legislative requirements.
If we were able to aggregate and reduce the burden through red tape reduction, it would allow them to compete and stay secure, and that's good for Canada in general.
View Nathaniel Erskine-Smith Profile
Lib. (ON)
It does seem that other competition authorities are looking beyond simply protecting consumers on price—though I wish we'd be protecting consumers better on price too—and are also looking at the digital economy and how we can protect consumers on privacy.
There's another interesting area when you look at the digital economy. The Facebook acquisition of Instagram is one example. You can imagine Shopify in the Canadian context could well do the same. They have an incredible amount of information about other companies that operate on their platforms. In Facebook's case, they're companies that in some ways become competitors to them. They can use the extensive amount of information they have about companies that operate on their platform to acquire competitors.
Do you see that as a challenge that ought to be addressed in some way?
Vass Bednar
View Vass Bednar Profile
Vass Bednar
2021-04-15 13:24
I absolutely see it as a challenge. It's not just information to acquire competitors. It's also to develop products, to set prices and to understand audiences to advertise to, right? Companies don't just compete on price anymore. They also compete on privacy, on data. I wonder and sometimes worry that....
I did mention the company Loblaw. I kind of think that Loblaw knows more about me as an individual than the Government of Canada. What they can do with that information, when it comes to both owning a platform and advertising on that platform, is similar to something we see with Amazon. It's been suggested that Amazon uses information from what people are searching for and purchasing to inform their own product development. Perhaps that's anti-competitive behaviour.
Again, that could come up in our own backyard. We need to think about it now so that we're not playing catch-up. I find playing catch-up very embarrassing.
View Don Davies Profile
NDP (BC)
Minister, I'm a lawyer myself. I've read my share of contracts. Are you saying that the confidentiality clauses in our contracts prohibit the release and disclosure of the entirety of the contracts, or just parts of them?
View Anita Anand Profile
Lib. (ON)
The confidentiality clauses apply to the contracts as a whole. I have gone back to the vaccine manufacturers to discuss this issue with them. They are, as one of the contracting parties, very concerned to ensure that Canada respects its contractual obligations.
View Earl Dreeshen Profile
CPC (AB)
Thank you very much, Madam Chair. I may want to share my time with Mr. Nader as well.
I have just a couple of comments.
We have just heard from the minister that as far as contracts are concerned, one of the two contracting parties could decide whether or not they want to have some of the details held in confidence, but are not some of the contracts that are being exposed by other countries with the same companies? If they are, then is it not Canada that is holding it up?
Also, of course, for these negotiations, if they are not identical, it would be interesting to know why it is that we've been suffering. Is this perhaps the reason why we don't want to show how difficult it is?
Bill Matthews
View Bill Matthews Profile
Bill Matthews
2021-02-04 12:40
Thank you, Madam Chair, for the question.
I think to maybe further elaborate on the comments Minister Anand made, it is a contract between two parties, and the differences you will have to keep in mind with other countries are that where there is manufacturing occurring in other countries, which the governments may or may not have been a party to in terms of financial investment or other pieces, that then draws a different discussion around potential disclosure.
We're certainly not in a world where we are interested in potentially being in breach of contract, especially given how important the product is, and it is a contract between two parties, as was already said. That's I think all I can offer on that front.
View John Nater Profile
CPC (ON)
Thank you for that.
Could you let us know whether there is a specific clause within that contract that causes that entire contract to not be disclosed to parliamentarians? Could you give us some information on that clause?
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