Can the Carney government keep up with evolving technology?
Can the Carney government keep up with evolving technology?
Publish Date: 2026-07-04 07:00:00
Source Domain: www.thestar.com
OTTAWA — Sometime in the future, a powerful new federal regulator could decide whether your child can open a social media account, how artificial intelligence interacts with Canadians, and what companies can do with reams of your personal information.
Ottawa’s plan to rein in the online world — and the technologies and data that sustain it — is a departure from Prime Minister Mark Carney’s early promises to spur digital adoption by pursuing a lighter regulatory touch.
But as a data sovereignty race ignited, consensus on social media harms grew, and a horrific B.C. shooting thrust the potential dangers of AI into the national spotlight, the Carney government had to respond to a new reality: keeping children safe, getting Canadians to trust the technology, and cracking down on American tech giants in the midst of delicate trade negotiations.
The creation of a sweeping Digital Safety and Data Protection Commission that will fold online harms and consumer privacy issues into a single regulator, overseen by five people with vast decision-making powers.
No other country has done something quite like it.
“This will be, I think, one of the first merged privacy and online safety regulators, which is both an opportunity to do something innovative, but also means there’s no precedent for it,” said Taylor Owen, the founding director of McGill University’s Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy.
The commission was first hinted at in the Carney government’s AI strategy released in early June, and officially unveiled as the backbone of two long-awaited bills introduced soon after.
One proposed law would launch the commission and task it with potentially banning young people from social media platforms, imposing safety standards on AI chatbots, and levying steep fines on big tech for failing to address harmful content and practices online.
The second bill would broaden the regulator by tasking it with overseeing modernized privacy rules…
