Business leaders: Bill C-51 will hurt Canadian tech sector

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      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