OpenMedia and civil society testimony before INDU on Bill C-27 (2 November 2023)

On 2 November 2023, six civil society organisations and academics testified before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Industry and Technology (INDU) — meeting 94 of the 44th Parliament's first session — as part of INDU's ongoing study of Bill C-27, the Digital Charter Implementation Act, 2022. The hearing ran from 3:31 to 5:31 p.m. in Ottawa and is the corpus's primary record of OpenMedia's direct parliamentary testimony on Canada's first federal AI regulation framework.

Bill C-27 and the AIDA provision

Bill C-27 bundled three acts: the Consumer Privacy Protection Act (CPPA), modernising private-sector privacy law; the Personal Information and Data Protection Tribunal Act, establishing an enforcement body; and the Artificial Intelligence and Data Act (AIDA), Canada's first federal AI regulatory framework, adopting a risk-based approach requiring operators of "high-impact" AI systems to identify, assess, and mitigate risks of harm and bias. AIDA vested primary AI oversight in the Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) and proposed an AI and Data Commissioner operating under that department — a structural arrangement that civil society had from the bill's introduction in June 2022 argued created a conflict of interest, given ISED's concurrent mandate to subsidize AI development.

The INDU committee began formal witness hearings on the bill in September 2023, after it had passed second reading on 24 April 2023. Minister Champagne appeared as the first witness on 26 September 2023. The November 2 hearing was part of a sustained civil-society witness round that followed.

The September 2023 coalition letter

The November 2 testimony was preceded by a coalition mobilisation. On 25 September 2023 — the same week the INDU hearings opened — a coalition of 45 civil-society organisations, experts, and academics released an open letter demanding proper parliamentary treatment for AIDA's AI regulation provisions. Signatories included OpenMedia, the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group (Tim McSorley), the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (Daniel Konikoff), the Public Interest Advocacy Centre (Yuka Sai), the BC Civil Liberties Association, and University of Toronto Professor Emeritus Andrew Clement. The letter advanced five demands: (1) recognise privacy as a fundamental human right; (2) remove AIDA from ISED's exclusive jurisdiction to resolve the conflict of interest between AI promotion and AI oversight; (3) close vague AIDA language creating regulatory loopholes; (4) expand stakeholder consultation beyond industry insiders to civil society and affected communities; and (5) extend AI regulation to both public and private sectors. The witnesses who testified on November 2 largely overlapped with the coalition's signatory list.

Witnesses and their positions

The six witnesses at INDU meeting 94 were:

• Matthew Hatfield (OpenMedia) — testified that the privacy reform component of Bill C-27 was "long overdue" and worthy of passage with amendments, while the AIDA AI provisions were "frankly undercooked" and should be removed from C-27 for full public consultation before advancing as separate legislation. He rated AIDA "between a three and an undeciphered symbol," noting that the committee did not yet have every piece of the puzzle on what AIDA would ultimately be. On children's privacy, Hatfield argued that the protections the bill would extend to children's data — treating children's information as sensitive — should apply to all Canadians, not just minors. OpenMedia also submitted a detailed written brief to INDU.
• Tim McSorley (International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group) — focused on the bill's national security exemptions, which the ICLMG described as "unacceptable and dangerous for our rights," and reinforced the shared civil-society position that AIDA's AI regulations fail to adequately address human rights concerns.
• Daniel Konikoff (Canadian Civil Liberties Association) — raised concerns about children's data protections and the committee's findings on children's biometric and location data commercialisation.
• Sharon Polsky (Privacy and Access Council of Canada) — characterised current practices around children's data, where information is "gathered surreptitiously and shared with the data broker industry," as "reprehensible," and highlighted the bill's failure to define "sensitive information" despite designating children's data as sensitive — a significant definitional gap the witnesses collectively identified.
• John Lawford and Yuka Sai (Public Interest Advocacy Centre) — participated as co-signatories of the September 2023 coalition letter who translated its five demands into testimony.
• Sam Andrey (Toronto Metropolitan University) — provided academic context on AI governance design.

OpenMedia's three structural calls

OpenMedia's testimony condensed its written submission into three structural demands on the AI provisions specifically: (1) separate AIDA from C-27 entirely, allowing each legislative track — privacy reform and AI governance — to receive the independent parliamentary scrutiny and public consultation each required; (2) ensure that any AI Commissioner created under the legislation reported to Parliament rather than to ISED, whose industry-promotion mandate made it structurally unsuited to serve as the sole AI oversight authority; and (3) mandate a parliamentary review of any AI regulation within two years of implementation, building in an iterative mechanism to keep pace with rapidly evolving technology. These three asks, made at the committee table in November 2023, matched the formal amendment package OpenMedia and stakeholders would deliver to parliamentarians in March 2024.

Significance

The November 2, 2023 INDU hearing is the corpus's primary record of OpenMedia's direct parliamentary testimony on federal AI governance — the moment at which the OpenMedia Bill C-27 campaign's community mobilisation (nearly 40,000 member inputs, 10,000+ contacts to government on AI) translated into spoken committee testimony on the public parliamentary record. It is also the hearing at which the civil-society coalition that had formed around the 25 September open letter put its five core demands before the committee collectively — assembling in one chamber representation from privacy law, civil liberties, consumer advocacy, and academic AI governance that shared a common position: that Canada's first federal AI framework was structurally compromised by its insertion into a privacy bill and its placement under an industry-promotion ministry.

Bill C-27 never reached a vote. Parliament was prorogued on 6 January 2025 following Prime Minister Trudeau's resignation, killing all pending legislation including C-27. The testimony placed on the INDU record in November 2023 — on the structural conflict in AIDA's design, the inadequacy of its safeguards, and the need to separate AI governance from privacy reform — became part of the documentary basis for subsequent Canadian AI policy debates in the successor Parliament.