Overview
- The government says it will introduce an amendment to return privacy language to the Act’s interpretation section and to strike a duplicative official-languages clause.
- The privacy wording vanished when a later official languages statute mistakenly replaced it through a coordinating amendment.
- The clause originally came from a Senate change led by Sen. Julie Miville-Dechêne after a recommendation from the federal privacy commissioner.
- Heritage officials acknowledged an inadvertent oversight once University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist highlighted the deletion in a summer blog post.
- The fix has been announced but not yet enacted, as the 2023 law already brought online streamers such as Netflix under the Broadcasting Act.