When a government claims it accidentally deleted Canadians’ right to privacy from a major piece of legislation, it’s hard not to raise an eyebrow. Yet that’s exactly what happened with the Liberal government’s Online Streaming Act, and only now more than two years later are they moving to fix it.
The Online Streaming Act, passed in 2023, was supposed to modernize Canada’s broadcasting rules and bring online giants like Netflix under Canadian regulations. During the Senate debates, an important privacy clause was added thanks to Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne and a nudge from the federal privacy commissioner to ensure that individuals’ right to privacy would be respected. It was a small but meaningful protection in an age when online surveillance and data collection are rampant.
Then, in a twist that sounds almost like satire, that clause vanished. When the government passed a separate official languages bill a few months later, it somehow overwrote the privacy section instead of the language provision it was meant to update. The result? The law ended up with two nearly identical references to linguistic communities and zero mention of privacy.
It took a law professor Michael Geist from the University of Ottawa to point out the embarrassing error. Only after his blog post this summer did the Heritage department admit it had “recently been made aware” of the oversight. Recently? Two years after the fact? That’s not just a typo it’s a troubling sign of how carelessly our lawmakers are managing digital rights.
Now, the federal budget promises to restore the privacy clause and clean up the duplication. That’s good, but the fix raises bigger questions: How many other “oversights” are buried in our laws? And if no one outside government had noticed, would anyone inside have cared enough to correct it?
In the digital age, privacy isn’t a footnote it’s a cornerstone of individual freedom. Losing it by accident is one thing; taking two years to notice is another. The government owes Canadians not just a legislative patch, but an explanation and a renewed commitment to treating privacy like the fundamental right it is, not a clerical error waiting to happen.
