A Senate committee has voted to eliminate the government’s proposed new standard that privacy experts say would have made it easy for agents to search personal cellphones at the border.
The government bill introduced in the Senate, Bill S-7, amends the Customs Act to clarify the circumstances under which border officers can search personal digital devices like cellphones and laptops. It would create a new standard of “reasonable general concern” for cellphone searches at the border, which civil liberties groups have said is too permissive.
On Monday, senators on the national security and defence committee passed an amendment proposed by Sen. Mobina Jaffer to replace that proposed new standard with “reasonable grounds to suspect,” the most permissible standard that currently exists in law, which is still more restrictive than the government’s proposed new threshold.
Now that the committee has finished its study, the bill heads back to the Senate, which will decide whether to accept or reject the committee’s recommendations. The bill will then make its way to the House of Commons.
And what are reasonable grounds?
What will senators do with this?:
The federal government is cutting short debate by MPs of its online streaming bill, a move Tory MPs have condemned as “draconian” and “disturbing.”
They say curbing scrutiny of the bill line by line in committee is an attempt by the government to rush it through the House of Commons and will lead to the creation of a “flawed and incoherent” law.
Bill C-11, as it is known in Parliament, updates Canada’s broadcasting laws and would regulate streaming services such as Netflix, as well as YouTube, Spotify and TikTok.
The Liberals have given MPs until midnight to table amendments to the bill, and until Tuesday evening to scrutinize it clause by clause in committee.
Tory heritage critic John Nater said the government motion to limit scrutiny in committee, which is being discussed Monday in the Commons, is a “guillotine motion on steroids.”
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Judging by the testimony before the heritage committee over the past few weeks, these measures are opposed by both the sites themselves and the Canadians who share content on them. The only people who seem to support them are the Liberals and the usual crowd who think no industry should be free from the control of our benevolent overlords in Ottawa.
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When asked whether Sec. 4.2 of the act, which lists very broad criteria for what exactly would be considered a “program” for the purposes of regulation, would include content posted to social media, Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez insisted it would not. Yet he was directly contradicted by Ian Scott, chair of the CRTC, who said that, “4.2 allows the CRTC to prescribe by regulation user uploaded content subject to very explicit criteria.”
That “very specific criteria” includes content “uploaded to an online undertaking” that “directly or indirectly generates revenues” for a social media service. Given that sites such as YouTube make money from ads placed before videos, this could potentially encompass anything that is uploaded.
But don’t worry, because Scott insists the CRTC has no interest in regulating your cat videos, even though it will have the power to do so. “It is not the focus of the CRTC,” he said. “We have lots of things to do. We don’t need to start looking at user-generated content.”
So there you have it. We just have to trust that this government, or any future government, will not abuse the extraordinary powers being granted to it. Just like we trusted the Liberals not to invoke an act intended for war or insurrection when a bunch of their ideological opponents decided to camp out in Ottawa. What could possibly go wrong?
One thing that is certain is that the legislation would force “online undertakings (to) clearly promote and recommend Canadian programming … and ensure that any means of control of the programming generates results allowing its discovery.” In other words, it would compel services such as YouTube and Netflix to alter their algorithms to promote Canadian over international content — a measure that even Canadian YouTubers don’t seem to want.
Representatives from YouTube have argued that this will end up backfiring because the algorithm will be forced to recommend content that viewers have little interest in watching, which will make the system less likely to recommend those videos to others. While true, it is also the case that a company like Google could tweak its algorithm to account for this bias. But that’s not really the point.
The larger problem is a government that thinks it has the right to dictate how a private company’s software operates; a government that is so intent on giving its regulatory agency total control over the internet that it is insisting on putting provisions in the bill that prevented the legislation from passing last time around and its own regulator insists it doesn’t have any interest in using.
But do not attempt to adjust the picture, for this is Canada, where the Liberals will control all that you see and hear.
That remains to be seen as the House of Commons is set to leave for the summer soon.
Why does this all sound familiar?
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