A Coherent Domestic and Foreign Digital Policy for Canada?

Résumé analytique

The laissez-faire era of technology regulation is over, and Canada is part of the global race to regulate the tech sector. Three significant bills are before Parliament (C-11, C-18, and C-27), but this brief argues that key elements of Canada's domestic regulatory framework are in tension with its stated foreign policy objectives in the digital sphere. Canada has a long track record of advocating for a global, free, open, interoperable, secure, and reliable Internet, exemplified by its leadership in the Freedom Online Coalition (FOC), a multilateral coalition of 36 like-minded governments. As FOC chair in 2022, Canada led the drafting of the Ottawa Agenda's 11 principles, including commitments to multi-stakeholder governance (Principle B), resisting Internet fragmentation (Principle D), and upholding human rights obligations, the rule of law, legitimate purpose, and non-arbitrariness (Principle K).

Provisions of Bills C-11 and C-18 are difficult to reconcile with these tenets. Clauses 4.1 and 4.2 of Bill C-11 empower the CRTC to regulate essentially all audiovisual content hosted on social media platforms, since such content indirectly generates revenue, raising free-expression concerns under international human rights law. Bill C-18 (the Online News Act) would require search engines and social media platforms to compensate news organizations for facilitating access to news content by any means, a premise that challenges the free, open, and interoperable Internet by sweeping in hyperlinks, and it withholds copyright exceptions such as fair dealing from online intermediaries.

The brief concludes that Canada could achieve coherence through more precisely drafted legislation, and that it must pursue domestic technology policy consistent with its foreign policy vision if it is to be taken seriously on the world stage.