Business leaders: Bill C-51 will hurt Canadian tech sector
Sixty leading Canadian businesspeople, entrepreneurs, and investors, including Flickr cofounder Stewart Butterfield and XML co-creator Tim Bray, have signed the following open letter:
April 21, 2015
The Right Honourable Stephen Harper, P.C. M.P.
Office of the Prime Minister
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa, ON K1A 0A2
CC:
Daryl Kramp, M.P.
Chair
Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security
Justice Building
House of Commons
Ottawa, Ontario K1A OA6
James Moore
Industry Minister
2603 St Johns St
Port Moody, BC V3H 2B5
Dear Prime Minister,
The challenge of being Canadian today is to uphold our values of openness, tolerance, and trust of others, while maintaining a very real understanding of the dangers of terrorism and the government’s need to protect us. But sometimes this balance is not struck correctly and we, as business people and entrepreneurs, are convinced that Bill C-51 is not balanced the way we as Canadians would want.
Many have spoken of the impact that Bill C-51 will have on Canadians in their everyday lives, so let us speak to the business impacts. We work with international clients, and we fear that this proposed legislation will undermine international trust in Canada’s technology sector, thereby stifling the kinds of business our respective technology companies can generate when that level of trust is high.
We believe that, despite the rising tide of the knowledge economy, this legislation threatens to undermine Canada’s reputation and change our business climate for the worse:
First, we must not allow censorship to become commonplace. Bill C-51 provides too much leeway for the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) to take unjustified actions against our businesses, including the takedown of websites. As it stands, C-51 criminalizes language in excessively broad terms that may place the authors of innocent tweets and the operators of online platforms such as Facebook, and Twitter, along with Canada’s Hootsuite and Slack, at risk of criminal sanction for activities carried out on their sites. The Bill further empowers CSIS to take unspecified and open-ended ‘measures’, which may include the overt takedown of multi-use websites or other communications networks with or without any judicial supervision.
We understand that harmful activity can occur online, however Canadian law already prohibits hate speech and promotion of criminal offences. This legislation proposes unnecessary and excessive speech prohibitions which, as Professors Forcese and Roach have pointed out, "contains no defences for legitimate expression of political or religious thought." Taking down websites without these safeguards can unduly impact our ability to do business and commerce.
Second, we believe that Bill C-51 will effectively grant the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), which is empowered to assist CSIS, an implicit offensive mandate to act within Canada. There is little sober second thought in the new open-ended world of covert action that C-51 creates for CSE. New CSE digital disruption activities can include measures such as the false attribution of disreputable content to individuals, and even planting of malware on individual computing devices.
We are already concerned about the negative impact the activities of CSE and CSIS, including reports of spying on our trading partners, have had on Canada’s reputation. The impact of these new rules could collapse the necessary distance between investigative and executional powers. This distance should be increased, not done away with.
Furthermore, Bill C-51 leads to expanded powers to detain or revoke travel for people on the Specified Persons list. We need to rethink the fundamental problems with the “false positives” on this list, and instead address this flawed process. Travel to and from Canada is a necessity for international trade.
Most importantly, we ask for data security. We know that many of our clients, including our government, will only host services in Canada because of the invasive privacy issues in the U.S. The U.S. tech industry has already lost billions in revenue because of this, and we don’t want it to happen here.
We also know that the U.S. National Security Agency has been targeting Canadian businesses, including Rogers and Royal Bank of Canada, with the full knowledge of the CSE and our government. We can’t even get a clear understanding of the details, due to the lack of independent oversight of our spy agencies.
The data disclosures on innocent Canadians and those traveling to Canada for business or recreation, could make our clients leave us for European shores, where privacy is valued. Duplicated data flowing between multiple unsecured federal government and foreign government databases leaves Canadians and Canadian businesses even more open to being victimized by data breaches, cyber criminals and identify theft.
Even without the increasingly permissive data disclosure practices enabled by C-51, federal government agencies have seen over 3000 breaches of the highly sensitive private information of an estimated 750,000 innocent Canadians in recent years. More than 200 Canadians have come forward in recent months to say their personal or professional lives have been ruined, due to information disclosures, despite never having broken the law. As it is we have a privacy deficit in Canada that erodes trust in both commerce and trade -- Bill C-51 deepens that deficit.
These are serious issues for us in business. Bill C-51 does not make us safer, and will impact our business. Can we afford to be left behind in the growing arena of the global technology marketplace? We are aware the government has admitted the bill is flawed and plans some minor amendments to C51. The amendments do not adequately address the underlying concerns set out above.
Why rush this legislation when there are so many reasons to rethink the approach? Why not establish effective Parliamentary oversight on par with our global counterparts? Why not establish a Royal Commission into the general state of digital privacy protection in Canada and get this right? Our values are too important to rush such an important decision.
We agree with the over 198,000 Canadians who have called on the government to scrap this reckless, dangerous and ineffective legislation through the petition at: http://StopC51.ca
We hope for a quick response that addresses these serious economic concerns.
Sincerely,
Ryan Holmes
Founder and CEO
HootSuite
Stewart Butterfield
President & Co-founder
Slack Technologies, Inc
Tobi Lütke
CEO
Shopify
Tim Bray
Principal
Textuality Services, Inc.
Co-founder of OpenText
Former employee of Sun Microsystems and Google
John Ruffolo
CEO
OMERS Ventures
Chris Breikss
President
6S Marketing
Mack Hardy
President
Affinity Bridge Consulting Ltd.
Phillip Djwa
President and CEO
Agentic
Suat Tuzlak
Alpine Bakery
Matt Buie
Financial Advisor
Assante Capital Management
Steve Rogoschewsky
CEP
BlackSun Inc.
Aiyana Kane
Owner/operator
Bandidas Taqueria, Restaurant
Steve Rio
CEO
Briteweb
Jeff Booth
CEO
BuildDirect.com
Dennis Pilarinos
CEO
BuddyBuild
Marc Baumgartner
Founder
Codename Design
Frank Christiaens
Managing Partner
CrossPacific Capital Partners
Josh Stuart
President
cStreet Campaigns
Jennifer Chen
CEO
Curiate
Parminder Singh
CEO and Founder
Digital Equity Holdings
Colin Mansell
Managing Partner
Drive Digital
Boris Mann
Managing Partner
Full Stack
Daryl Hatton
CEO
FundRazr
Lindsay Eason
Co-Founder
GreenStep Solutions Inc.
Tara Mahoney
Creative Director
Gen Why Media
Brent Holliday
Founder & CEO
Garibaldi Capital Advisors
Peter Henry
CEO
GrowthLogic
Katherine Dodds
President
Hello Cool World Media
Ray Walia
CEO
Launch Academy
Kelsey Theikoop
Owner
Lions Gate Softworks
Adam Lorant
Partner
Magellan Angel Partners
John Seminerio
Partner
Magellan Angel Partners
John F. Gray
Co-founder/CEO
Mentionmapp
M Hassaan Rahim
Managing and Relations Partner
MRKS Media
Glyn Lewis
Co-Founder
NewMode
Jennifer North
President
North Accounting Services
Kevin Kimsa
Managing Director
OMERS Ventures
Gideon Hayden
Senior Associate
OMERS Ventures
Qasim Mohammad
Analyst
OMERS Ventures
Mike Gifford
President
OpenConcept Consulting Inc.
Campbell Macdonald
CEO
Pathful
Danny Robinson
Founder/CEO
Perch
Colleen Hardwick
CEO
PlaceSpeak
Will Anderson
CEO
PPM 2000
Chad Kohalyk
Predicative Inc
Dan Eisenhardt
Founder & CEO
Recon Instruments
Susan McLennan
President
Reimagine PR
Joel Solomon
Chairman
Renewal Funds
Richard Lau
Co-Founder
Resume.com
Luke Aulin
CEO
RTOWN
Mo Dhaliwal
Director of Strategy
Skyrocket
David Crow
StartupNorth
Lee Feldman
Founder, THNK,
Founder, BlastRadius
Amir Javidan
SVP Operations
Tio Networks
Andrea Curtis
Director
Transformation Projects
Michael Goodman
President
Tri City Capital Corporation
Graeme Bunton
Tucows
Ryan Dochuk
Co-founder
TunnelBear
Rick Perreault
Co-Founder & CEO
Unbounce
Sean Alam
Developer
Unmetered Internet Corporation
Boris Wertz
Founding Partner
Version One Ventures
Michael Litt
CEO
Vidyard
Andrew Reid
Founder - President
Vision Critical
Jim Fletcher
Director
Vision Critical
Michael Tippett
Founder
wantoo
James Lochrie
CPO
Wave
Kirk Simpson
CEO
Wave
Urszula Lipsztajn
CEO
WorkBrite
Matt Toner
President
Zeros 2 Heroes Media
Comments
1 Comments
Edward
Apr 21, 2015 at 8:20pm
I would suggest these businesses leave Canada. This government is not going to change anything on Bill C-51