Carney moves to fast-track federal AI privacy bill before summer recess

The Prime Minister has told caucus he wants Bill C-31, which would create a new federal oversight body for algorithmic decision-making, through second reading before the House rises on Friday.

Prime Minister Mark Carney has instructed Liberal House leader Karina Gould to use every available procedural lever to push the government's long-promised artificial intelligence privacy bill through second reading before the Commons rises for the summer on Friday, two senior officials confirmed on Tuesday.

Bill C-31, formally the Algorithmic Decision Transparency Act, would create a new federal oversight body modelled loosely on the Privacy Commissioner's office but with binding order-making powers over how federal departments deploy automated systems. It would also extend, for the first time, a statutory right for Canadians to demand a human review of any consequential federal decision taken by an algorithm — from Service Canada benefit assessments to CBSA risk-flagging at the border.

“The Prime Minister was unambiguous in caucus,” said one Liberal MP granted anonymity to discuss the closed-door meeting. “He wants this through second reading before we go home. He does not want to come back in September and watch the Conservatives turn the whole summer into a privacy-and-surveillance attack ad.”

The push comes a week after Privacy Commissioner Philippe Dufresne told the standing committee on access to information that the federal government was using at least nineteen separate automated decision systems whose source code, training data and accuracy thresholds had never been disclosed to his office. Mr Dufresne called the bill “overdue” and urged Parliament not to let it lapse a third time.

Bill C-31 is a substantially redrafted version of Bill C-27, which died on the order paper in the dying days of the Trudeau government, and of an earlier private member's bill brought forward by NDP MP Matthew Green. Officials in the Privy Council Office say the new draft was rewritten to remove the most contentious section — the carve-out for national security agencies — in an effort to win NDP support on confidence-tied votes.

NDP leader Jagmeet Singh declined to commit his caucus on Tuesday, saying only that his MPs were “reading the bill carefully” and that he wanted to see whether the Carney government would accept committee amendments narrowing the ministerial discretion in clause 14. The Bloc Québécois, whose support is not required for second reading, has signalled it will vote in favour, citing Quebec's own Law 25 as a model.

Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, by contrast, dismissed the bill as “another layer of paperwork for a government that can't even run its own pension cheques on time,” pointing to the Phoenix-style outages at Service Canada earlier this spring. He has whipped his caucus to vote against second reading.

The headline provisions of Bill C-31 are a public registry of every federal algorithmic decision system, mandatory algorithmic impact assessments for any system that affects benefits, immigration, taxation or border processing, and a new statutory right for affected Canadians to request a human reviewer within fourteen days. The Treasury Board Secretariat would administer the registry; the new oversight office would handle complaints and binding orders.

The bill stops short of regulating private-sector AI — that file is being kept for a separate, slower bill which industry officials expect in the autumn — but it does set a federal procurement standard that any vendor selling AI tools into the Government of Canada must meet from 2027.

If the government holds the floor for the rest of the week, MPs will sit until 10pm Thursday on extended hours, with a vote on second reading expected around 8pm. Senate sources say the upper chamber is prepared to take up the bill in the autumn rather than rush it through before the recess.

One government official put the political logic bluntly: “Second reading is the signal we care. The rest is for September. We just need to be the party that moved.”