I suppose Canadians should breathe a sigh of relief. Accustomed as we may be to pleading with our political leaders — only to have those pleas fall on deaf ears — finally, the federal government has decided to modernize Canada’s rules regarding the digital data that has become so central to our lives.
Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry Navdeep Bains has tabled a bill called the Digital Charter Implementation Act, which looks to modernize Canada’s approach to how companies handle the personal information they collect about Canadians.
If passed, the bill would ensure Canadians had the right to destroy their own data, and allow the government to levy hefty fines against companies who fail to comply.
It follows another announcement by the Trudeau government that promised to expand broadband access to almost all the country by 2030.
So far, so good, right?
But a lingering problem with Canada’s approach to the internet and political policy more generally is our insistence on forever playing catchup and refusing to ever lead. On far too many issues, from climate to drug policy to the social safety net to health care, Canada lags its more progressive counterparts in Scandinavia and elsewhere.
What might it thus look like if Canada decided it wanted to be a leader in what you might call “digital civics” — that is, an internet not simply run by private companies but instead designed to work for citizens?
Consider the current state of things. Minister Bains’s bill is meant to mitigate the nature of the modern internet — the fact that almost all online services run by collecting data on its users and use that information to target ads, thus forming a business model. All of the core functions of what it means to be online today — email, calendars, social networks, news and more — operate this way.
But if those functions form a core part of modern life, it helps to look back at how we historically dealt with new things that quickly became essential.
Take electricity. As detailed in Nicholas Carr’s book “The Big Switch,” electricity was first used by large companies who generated their own power for their own factories. Over time, however, it became clear that centralizing the distribution of a basic utility made more sense than a scattershot series of private enterprises.
It’s a helpful model. For one, it might help us rethink what the role of the state is in relation to the internet. Right now, governments act as overseers of the internet: a body that mostly keeps out of how private companies behave, occasionally stepping in with regulation such as this new bill.
Yet, in many other aspects of life — transportation, utilities, health care — the government considers it a responsibility to actually provide basic services to its citizens.
How that might work for the web does in fact have precedents elsewhere.
Perhaps surprisingly, the former Soviet republic of Estonia is among the world leaders, and provides an example of what Canada might do. Starting in the 1990s, Estonia worked to establish itself as a digital-first government. Now, citizens there have an e-identity that transfers easily across government services, can vote securely online, can make instantaneous online payments, and much more. Ninety-nine per cent of government services are now available online, from filing taxes to online schooling.
Other countries have since caught up to some of Estonia’s advances, and as a small country with a public who generally trusts its government, what Estonia achieved isn’t always applicable elsewhere.
What it does suggest, however, is that the digital realm and its function to us as citizens isn’t only the domain of private companies looking to extract data from us; instead it is something best thought of as a public good, a network of infrastructure and utilities that should form a core part of a government’s responsibility to its people.
Thought of that way, Canada’s meagre attempts to rein in tech giants or finally provide broadband seem belated at best, and short-sighted at worst.
Rather, Canadians should instead demand that governments start to think about what they can do to make the digital realm serve citizens: to institute a unique digital identity that allows Canadians to access digital services without being personally identified, modernize online banking, or investigate ways to enfranchise more people while keeping elections and voting secure.
Then there are more far-flung ideas that are nonetheless still worth contemplating: of whether or not digital public space might actually be public rather than owned by Facebook or Twitter (though what form that might take is still unclear); and perhaps even the establishment of a publicly funded, arm’s-length, third-party body that could offer public alternative to ad-supported digital services like email or calendars — albeit with strict legal limits around privacy.
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Some of these ideas could work, and some may, upon further inspection, fall flat.
But the point is to try to think bigger — that is, to resist that all-too-Canadian urge to either accept what is, or to be smug about being slightly better than our neighbours to our south, while lagging the countries to whom we should in fact be comparing ourselves.
For too long, Canadians have simply felt relieved when their governments have taken it upon themselves to act. Why not try and lead instead?
