Bill C-27: More privacy proposals made by federal government

On June 16, 2022, the federal government tabled a second set of major proposals to overhaul Canada’s main privacy law affecting retailers: Bill C-27, the Digital Charter Implementation Act, 2022 (their initial set of reform proposals, tabled in 2020, timed out when the 2021 federal election was called).

With the current session of federal parliament ending this week, retailers, along with the many other stakeholders, will have the summer to explore how the proposed legal frameworks in Bill C-27 could affect them and their customers. Among many other new requirements, the bill would establish a new federal law and new regulator specifically governing artificial intelligence and data, as well as penalties for breaking privacy rules to a maximum of 5 per cent global turnover or $25-million, whichever is higher.

Driven in part by international privacy reforms (e.g. Europe’s GDPR), various Canadian provinces have recently been considering and, in Quebec’s case, passing their own more stringent modernization reforms to regional data privacy laws. A nationally consistent data privacy policy landscape in Canada would be much better for retailers than the fragmented patchwork that could otherwise occur without federal leadership.

RCC had therefore co-signed an op-ed in The Hill Times earlier this year with several other industry associations calling for a re-introduced set of federal data privacy proposals for national consideration

Once parliament resumes sitting in the fall, Bill C-27 will need to go through several stages in order for it to pass into law and modernize the rules that currently govern private sector privacy federally.