The new Act will not prohibit surveillance pricing outright, as does the Manitoba legislation.

It’s very easy to say just ban using personal information to give personal pricing, because we have to be super careful that we don’t want to penalize people who are members of a rewards program.

We’re not going outlaw people who say, ‘Hey, I do get a discount because I’m a loyal shopper.’

The new privacy bill is pretty explicit that if in collecting information, the harms outweigh the benefits, then it will contravene the act.

“When this bill passes, I’ll be asking the regulator for guidance, to publish guidance as one of my first acts on surveillance pricing, to clarify exactly what that will be.”

“If the harms outweigh the benefits, as in the case with surveillance pricing, the regulator could take charge,” he said.

Our primary purpose here is to give control back to Canadians over their own personal information and to require by law — with enforcement — that companies treat the information very sensitively.

The legislation proposes giving Canadians the ability to request that a company delete their personal information, including AI and other electronically generated 'deepfakes,' made in an individual’s likeness.

We think Canada needs that kind of independent regulator.

Canada’s consumer privacy laws are 25 years old. They were written before the iPhone. It was a different time, before AI, before deep fakes.

“Protection is not the opposite of innovation.”