Over the past year, Canada’s digital regulators have been coordinating regulatory efforts on digital markets and platforms.
At the IAPP Canada Privacy Symposium 2024 in Toronto, staffers from each of the three agencies participating in the Canada Digital Regulators Forum — the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, Competition Bureau, and Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada — shared updates on their combined efforts and offered a look at what the forum will prioritize in the near future.
The forum features an annually rotating chair among the heads of the three agencies and does not produce binding policies, but issues recommendations for synergizing responses to regulatory issues affecting their respective jurisdictions.
OPC Privacy Investigator Jasper Hau, CIPP/C, said the forum represents an "informal means" for staff at each of the three regulatory agencies to "exchange ideas, best practices, conduct research and market analyses to solve problems."
"The issues arising from the digital economy do not fall exclusively into any one member's jurisdiction," Hau said. "On the contrary, we often find ourselves looking at the same issues from different angles from our own perspective, and with that being the case, it makes a lot of sense for regulators to come together and share our views and reach consensus where possible."
Privacy Commissioner of Canada Phillipe Dufresne recently assumed the chairmanship of the CDRF and touched on its work during his opening keynote address at CPS. He said the forum presents an opportunity for the regulators to "harness the collective expertise and impact of our agencies and strengthen our work to better respond to the scale, speed and global nature of digital markets."
"I look forward to building on the achievements of the first year of this forum, especially in the area of AI technologies, and to expanding its impact in Canada and around the world," Dufresne said in his speech.
In the first year of the CDRF, Competition Bureau Digital Enforcement and Intelligence Branch Special Advisor Rebecca Ianno, CIPP/C, said representatives of the three partnering agencies developed two overarching priorities to chart the course of future collaboration within the forum. The key priorities were, "prioritizing strengthening relations and cooperation among members," and committing to “developing a shared understanding of artificial intelligence, and its impacts on regulatory agreements of each member."
CRTC Strategic Policy and International Affairs Senior Analyst Grace Angkasa said members of the CDRF set out to accomplish three objectives in developing their shared understanding of AI: establish a common definition; raise awareness of the complications AI technologies could present to their respective regulatory efforts; and brainstorm "underlying principles and considerations for regulating AI."
To accomplish these goals, as spelled out in the forum's year one report, Angkasa said they hosted a speaker series featuring in-house experts at each agency and outside academics. She said that many of the emerging AI technologies are "still hampered by limits regarding compute power" and a "dearth of high-quality training data."
"With generative and foundational AI, it is still a bit unclear to what extent that would impact our sectors and how it would do so," Angkasa said. "We’re seeing an outsourcing of AI recommendations from government to things like third-party institutions and industry players. A lot of AI governance either starts off with software tools and is voluntary from industry and lots of the major players are the ones pushing for these kinds of standards."
As the CDRF looks to build off its work from its first year, OPC Strategic Policy and Research Analyst David Stenton, CIPP/C, said the top priority for year two is to identify a subtopic of AI to issue a joint-policy recommendation that intersects with each of the agency’s respective jurisdictional authority in some way, which has yet to be determined.
"There is an eagerness to delve into a particular (AI) topic examining from various regulatory and policy perspectives," Stenton said. "To tie into last year's work on strengthening relationships and collaboration, we're looking to have a second work stream, which identifies other policy issues the cut across regulatory mandates. This could take the form of a mapping exercise to highlight trends and agency activities, for instance."
Alex LaCasse is a staff writer for the IAPP.
