CanadaPolitics

After the financial crisis circa 2008 there was a high-profile international debate about which approach was best for banking regulation: Detailed legalistic rules that try to cover every possible situation, or rules that set forth simple principles to make clear the spirit of the law with the understanding that they might not cover everything and may even need to be violated in case of emergency. I'm not sure what Mark Carney had to say about it, but I suppose we can guess.

In other contexts it can be an interesting debate but when it comes to C-2 it seems beside the point. Regardless of which approach is preferred that bill in its most problematic parts lays out clear and simple principles which are themselves ill-considered, unconstitutional, and deeply out of step with the values Canadians expect our government to embody and respect..

I'm still concerned about Bill C-2 and the erosion of Canadian Privacy right that we have by default that could be legislated away. Some other parts of it make a lot of sense, but it needs significant revision in the fall before I can get behind it.

I'm not a fan of how "American" the whole bill feels in general. Service providers (which have been clarified by the government to mean virtually any public-facing business) can be more or less compelled or effectively encouraged to surrender our information to the government on premises much weaker than currently. The mechanism is that by volunteering the information (and barring themselves from disclosing it publicly), they are legislatively protected from lawsuits. They can not do that but lose that protection from liability and conversely, risk prosecution if they disobey certain orders in "exigent circumstances". Most firms are not really going to care about their customers as much as their own liability risks.

The standard to obtain this info is also lowered by a lot and the "warrant" is being defined in this act more loosely.

These are all concerns to me because it is much harder to obtain our rights to digital privacy back once we lose them, and every reason in the book has been used by governments across the world to try to erode these. Yes, we should prosecute crimes and creating a "framework" to handover data does make sense to me but there needs to be a lot more transparency in the process, and I'd prefer not to embed a gag order/non-disclosure provision without clear availability of recourse. A lot of things are changing in this bill, so we need more time to look at this one (I'll give C-5 more of a pass since it is actually part of what Carney campaigned on).

Really interesting analysis. I hope it pans out. I agree we have little experience with the alien ideas of "Confucianism" and I'm not going to pretend I'm qualified to evaluate whether Mark Carney is or is not in fact "it", but I'm definitely supportive of the idea that overwhelming bureaucracy is crippling in a way that few people in this country ever take the time to acknowledge much less do anything about, and the ones who do occasionally say something about it (typically libertarian-types) aren't ones I would trust to actually remove said bureaucracy at all, as they typically want to do it for completely the wrong reasons. I certainly don't love our mountain of regulations and policies but I struggle to see any other way of protecting ourselves from those within and outside of government who would do us harm. If this "Cabinet rule" as Carney calls it is the answer, I'm onboard and I eagerly await some results. But I still have significant concerns and reservations. I guess time will tell, but I'll continue watching carefully.

I really appreciate this person’s thoughts and feel the article is well written/structured