It would be almost funny if it weren’t so serious: the federal government is now promising to restore a privacy provision to the Online Streaming Act more than two years after it was accidentally deleted. Yes, accidentally. And yes, we’re talking about the privacy rights of millions of Canadians.
This saga is a perfect example of how sloppy legislative drafting, rushed timelines, and siloed departments can combine to create real-world consequences. The Online Streaming Act was introduced with big ambitions: to bring online giants like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney+ under Canada’s broadcasting framework. Whether people support the act or not, one thing everyone should agree on is that privacy protection must be airtight. Instead, it became a casualty of bureaucratic confusion.
Let’s recap the comedy of errors.
In 2023, the Senate thanks to an amendment championed by Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne and recommended by the federal privacy commissioner inserted a clear clause: make sure the law is interpreted in a way that respects individuals’ right to privacy. That should have been the end of the story.
But no. Two months later, the government passed an official languages bill, which quietly tweaked provisions in the Online Streaming Act. Instead of removing a duplicate clause about official language minority communities, the new bill deleted the privacy clause. The end result? Two almost identical clauses about linguistic communities, and zero mention of privacy.
This wasn’t discovered by internal review or government oversight. It was discovered by University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist, who pointed it out in a blog post this summer. After being publicly called out, the Heritage department admitted there had been “an inadvertent oversight.”
The phrase is telling. The government didn’t say it made an error; it said it was “recently made aware” of one. As though the law itself had quietly rearranged its own wording while nobody was looking.
Now the government is promising to fix it through a legislative amendment. Better late than never, but the whole affair raises legitimate concerns.
If a privacy clause can disappear without anyone noticing, what else slips through the cracks? How many other “oversights” are buried in omnibus bills, cross-referenced legislation, or politically rushed timelines? And when the subject at stake is privacy arguably one of the most important issues of the digital age the room for error should be zero.
This is not just a bureaucratic slip-up; it reflects a deeper issue with how federal legislation is drafted, reviewed, and coordinated. Canadians deserve transparency and competence both of which feel in short supply in moments like this.
The government should restore the privacy provision immediately, of course. But it also owes Canadians a broader conversation about legislative quality, accountability, and the consequences of treating privacy protections as afterthoughts.
