After Bill C-27: Toward a New Vision of Privacy Law in Canada
What happens when a country’s most ambitious attempt at AI and privacy reform collapses? This session examines the policy vacuum that emerged in Canada following the failure of Bill C-27 and asks a central question: How should privacy law evolve to address the systemic, collective, and equity-related harms of AI-driven data practices? Drawing on critical and intersectional approaches, this presentation argues that Canadian privacy governance remains anchored in an outdated model of individual informed consent, ill-equipped to confront algorithmic inference, biometric surveillance, and large-scale data extraction. By analyzing the limitations of PIPEDA, the structural weaknesses of Bill C-27, and Quebec’s Law 25 as a provincial counterexample, the session identifies both regulatory gaps and emerging possibilities. Participants will benefit if they are interested in AI governance, privacy law, public policy, digital rights, or platform regulation. Attendees will leave with: (1) a clearer understanding of the current Canadian privacy landscape; (2) insight into why consent-based frameworks are increasingly insufficient; and (3) a set of guiding principles for developing a more equitable and enforceable federal privacy regime. Rather than treating Bill C-27’s demise as a mere legislative failure, this session reframes it as an opportunity to rethink privacy as a collective right, one that should be considered from intersectional, contextual, and networked perspectives, and a foundation of democratic accountability in the age of AI.