Canadian gov’t claims privacy provision in online censorship bill was accidentally removed
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/canadian-govt-claims-privacy-provision-in-online-censorship-bill-was-accidentally-removed/
The government apparently 'deleted privacy safeguards that were included in the bill only two months after they were enacted,' a law professor said.
The Liberal government of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney confirmed that a privacy provision in the Trudeau-era Online Streaming Act law, which aims to censor legal internet content in Canada, may have been accidentally removed.
According to reports, the federal government is now “looking into” what happened to the privacy provision for Bill C-11, also known as the Online Streaming Act, that became law in 2023.
Last week, Michael Geist, a University of Ottawa law professor who has long been critical of former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s numerous internet censorship laws, noted that the privacy provision was removed two months after Bill C-11 became law. This was accomplished through an amendment to another bill.
According to Geist, in his August 25 blog, due to what is “likely a legislative error,” the federal government “deleted privacy safeguards that were included in the bill only two months after they were enacted.”
“As a result, a provision stating that the Broadcasting Act ‘shall be construed and applied in a manner that is consistent with the right to privacy of individuals’ was removed from the bill, leaving in its place two nearly identical provisions related to official languages.”
Geist noted that the Broadcasting Act has, for the past two years, “included an interpretation clause that makes no sense, and efforts to include privacy within it are gone.”
Canada’s Department of Heritage says it knows about the privacy omission, as it has been “recently been made aware of what appears to be an inadvertent oversight in a coordinating amendment and is looking into it,” a spokesperson noted in a statement to media. Continue…