With Canadian Parliament prorogued and key tech bills stalled, companies are adopting European regulations like GDPR as guidelines. Experts discuss the challenges and opportunities this presents for the Canadian tech landscape, highlighting the need for updated legislation in areas like data protection and artificial intelligence.
TORONTO — Canadian tech companies say they are patching together their own standards, mostly borrowed from European laws, to guide them through the limbo of prorogation.
"It's another kick down, right?" said Will Christodoulou, co-founder of Toronto-based fintech startup Cyder. GDPR is an expansive piece of legislation that requires anyone handling the data of EU citizens or residents to only keep personally identifying information for as long as necessary and ensure any processing prioritizes security, integrity, and confidentiality.
The bill would have created three new acts rooted in consumer privacy, data protection and AI guardrails. Increased fines for certain serious contraventions of the law would be the higher of five per cent of gross global revenue or $25 million. But Antoine Guilmain, a partner at Gowling WLG and co-lead of the firm's national cybersecurity and data protection law group, argued"it's not like there's nothing in Canada at the moment."The federal government also has a voluntary AI code of conduct any organization can sign. Signatories promise to outfit their AI systems with risk mitigation measures, use adversarial testing to uncover vulnerabilities in such systems and keep track of any harms the technology causes.
Bill C-26, which made it all the way to the Senate before it was amended and sent back to the House of Commons, would have boosted cybersecurity requirements for federally regulated industries.
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