Category: Chairman’s Desk

Both are searching for organic growth, and looking to broaden their total available market — of users in the first instance and voters in the second.

And, both, have lost some of their lustre in recent years with heightened public scrutiny resulting from issues of ethics and values.

So, as panellists discussed topics like, “Move Slow and Fix Things: Can big tech bring back the shine to their fallen star?” and “From Darlings to Damaged: Managing tech’s reputation in an age of heightened scrutiny,” it was perhaps no surprise to see Trudeau and his Innovation Minister Navdeep Bains announce a digital charter: Ten principles designed not only to underpin all future legislation but to guide reforms to the existing patchwork of laws that govern our digital lives as well.

Bains and Trudeau say the rationale behind the charter is a desire to restore trust in our institutions and technology, giving Canadians confidence that their privacy is protected while also bolstering a nascent domestic tech industry.

The reality is that it will be impossible to pass meaningful legislation before the House rises in a couple of weeks.

Not that it bothers Team Trudeau. More than a real plan for regulation, the document is a statement of principles, a glimpse of a future Liberal campaign plank.

It is not hard to imagine Trudeau campaigning on this issue — he is young enough to be conversant in online issues. Remember the praise and adulation in 2016, when he stood in front of a chalkboard covered in math equations and handily explained quantum computing to an adoring media?

But he is not alone. His NDP counterpart Jagmeet Singh, who is himself a savvy user of Snapchat, could out flank him by calling for the immediate regulation of tech giants, like Facebook or Amazon.

Across the Western world, leftist political parties are following the lead of the Europeans in regulating tech companies, riding a public “techlash” driven by scandals such as Cambridge Analytica and an endless parade of hacks and data breaches.

In the United States, Democrats jostling for the 2020 presidential nomination are racing to out-do each other in their plans to trust-bust Facebook, the same way Teddy Roosevelt did Standard Oil or Clinton did Microsoft.

There is an audience for all of this because the public believes when it comes to privacy-protecting regulations, government is chronically running three steps behind the biggest, most advanced tech companies.

Consequently, governments now face the same challenge they did in regulating Bay Street. Those who really have the know-how and technical understanding to draft regulations find it much more enticing to work for industry than for government.

In his speech announcing the digital charter, Trudeau referred to the digital sphere as a “Wild West,” a fitting descriptor both because it can be a dangerous place — Trudeau’s remarks were delivered at a conference devoted to combating hate speech online — but also because there exists enormous financial opportunity.

The challenge with the digital charter is thus to strike the right balance between preserving the nascent but lucrative technology ecosystem (a $100 billion industry in Canada) and addressing the public’s sudden concerns.

To do so, the charter includes a number of principles about consumer protections. In addition to obvious privacy and safety rights, users should have control over what data to share, and the ability to transfer it from one company to another without “undue burden.”

This last idea, known as “data portability,” will be a boon to both users, and to startups, by making it easier to transfer personal information away from legacy companies.

The fact of the matter is most companies, operating in a sphere without strict borders, already comply with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation and realize more stringent regulation is on the horizon.

The digital charter is simply the opening salvo in a long war to come over the governance of technology in Canada.

As we head into what may well be one of the closest and most unpredictable election campaigns in recent years, his words that night could not be more prescient. This is Canada — and, especially in an election year, Canadians will be looking for something better from their politics.

Four years ago, polling showed that two-thirds of Canadians wanted a change in government. And it was that longing for something new, not just in policy but in style and approach, which Trudeau’s team so effectively harnessed and rode to their majority.

Their “Real Change” platform explicitly laid out the stark contrast between Tory present and Liberal future. Stephen Harper on the other hand concluded his foreword to the Conservative platform by claiming his Economic Action Plan was a success. “It’s working,” he said. “Let’s continue on with what we know works.”

In attack ads and campaign messaging, the Tories characterized Trudeau’s “celebrity” appearance — and especially his hair — as proof of style over substance. On social media, the Liberals responded by claiming that he had both and did so in a way that was charming, pithy and most importantly, viral.

From the new-found power of Instagram to the traditionally influential pages of Vogue, the prime minister managed to capture the attention of the digital age in a way few politicians, Canadian or otherwise, had.

And it worked. Trudeau came to be deemed Obama’s successor as the leader of the world’s progressives.

But what was clearly Trudeau’s greatest asset in 2015 may well be his undoing in 2019.

The problem with a campaign built on self-image and the optics of virtue is that people, inconveniently, expect it to be true. And what is fairly easy to execute in a campaign setting becomes near impossible to implement when governing.

What’s more, the gift social media gives, it also takes away. Unlike campaign advertising or stump speeches — which Canadians know is contrived — the power of social media lies in the sense that what you are seeing is, at least to some extent, genuine.

And so, when Canadians see their PM beaming with pride over his gender-balanced Cabinet or taking a selfie with a young couple while out for a jog, style becomes conflated with substance.

And now, after four years of governing, that conflation has become a collision. The chickens have come home to roost. In short, Trudeau is paying the price of the expectations he set when he promised to be a new and different kind of leader and began to practice the politics of political celebrity.

By dubbing himself the “feminist Prime Minister,” Trudeau opened himself up to the attacks that inevitably followed his expulsion of Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott from his caucus.

In trumpeting his commitment to Indigenous communities — not least of which being a visit to a teepee set up by activists on Parliament Hill — Trudeau set himself up to be pilloried not only for his slow progress on Indigenous files but for tone-deaf responses to Indigenous protestors.

And by claiming the mantle of Canada’s traditionally welcoming stance on immigration as his own, he has made himself vulnerable to the attacks of challengers who want to paint him as responsible for what they characterize as an unsustainable influx of irregular border crossers.

Many believe governments are not defeated, but rather that they defeat themselves. On the whole, I disagree. I think, in most cases, governments are elected to do a particular job, and when that job is done, another party is called up to bat.

For Trudeau, the job he was hired to do was to bring, in his own words, sunny ways to government.

Now that is done, Trudeau’s challenge is to rewrite his job description in a way that convinces Canadians he still has work to do and is still the best leader for the job.