The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - How Data Collection Undermines Our Humanity

Episode Date: May 24, 2025

The Agenda's week in review looks at how big tech undermines human rights by collecting our data, the state of Ontario's college system 60 years to the day after its creation, and The Globe and Mail's Andrew Coyne on what he calls Canada's democracy crisis.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, OnPoly people, it's John Michael McGrath. Join Steve Paken and I for a special live taping of the OnPoly podcast at the Isabel Bader Theatre in Toronto on May 28th at 6.30pm. Visit onpoly-live.eventbrite.ca for tickets. You say data are sticky. What does that mean? I really mean like gum at the bottom of your shoe, you know, how it gets stuck and really crammed in there because we often don't know that the gum has been stepped on until it's too late. So this is kind of how I think about data about people as well, which is that we're living our lives, we're doing our thing with our devices and trying to coordinate our activities.

And this whole time we are, we are creating data and those data are about things that are everyday. They're not necessarily extraordinary. Those things can't, those data can endure for a long time. They're used across all kinds of different other analytical databases. And it's a process that we are involved in, but we're not the only ones involved, right? There are these companies most of the time which are actually interested in collecting those data. So I talk about the stickiness also as co-creation because it's not just about what we individually choose to do.

Now you said data and I said data. Do you know which one is right? I think we're both right. Well, let's just pack up and go home right now then. That's a good- I think we solved it, we fixed it. No, no, we do have more things to discuss here. Datification, datafication, however you want to pronounce it,

that's another term you use, what does that mean? It really just means how our lives are really becoming very much both analog and digital. So it's really hard to separate the difference between what you're doing physically versus what's being recorded or analyzed about you digitally. And so it's sort of thinking about life as both digital and physical.

The other way to really define it, as others have done, is to say that a lot of human behaviors have become digital data, right? Stored in a database somewhere for analysis by a computer or human being. Let's do an excerpt from the book here. and this is right off the top where you talk about Ring, this thing where you can look into your phone and see a camera that takes a picture of your front door or whatever.

And here we go. Sheldon, you want to bring this graphic up here? The video doorbell, it seemed, was the answer to the new problems created by online commerce and the solution to answering the doorbell when multiple packages arrive throughout the day. But video doorbells are not the only digital devices made for our convenience or increased productivity. There are also smart phones, smart thermostats, smart TVs, smart speakers, smart refrigerators, you name it.

These smart devices form the ecosystem of the Internet of Things and have fundamentally changed many aspects of our lives and perhaps even who we are. Okay, I got to ask you about that last line. They've changed who we are. Meaning what? Meaning, you know, humans have, since they've figured out how to write things down, we've kept records about people and events for a very long time. So this is not a new technology.

But what digital devices, so the ones that you just read out of the excerpt, those are all kinds of things that are in our everyday that are tracking our behaviors, that are monitoring what we're doing and also operating as a result of the sort of analysis that are provided by the data that are created. So this way that we can track people's activities, we can create data about what we're doing and what we're thinking on a second-by-second basis,

this is new. This is fundamentally a big shift from how we used to live our lives, not just comparing centuries ago, but I'm thinking even 20 years ago before the advent of what's called big data, right? Where we had all this information from all these new sensors we were putting into our devices, whether that's phones, cameras,

refrigerators, cars, you name it, any sort of digital technology that's out there has really become a data collection device as well. People are seeing things happening right now in the college system that is causing them a great deal of concern. Tell us what your first-hand sort of frontline experience is with what perhaps you might have been able to do 10 years ago, 12 years ago when you started teaching versus today. What's the difference? The students are different. So we have the issue of the international student cap and after the pandemic, it became even more acute, the number of international students

who had come into the system. And it's safe to say, I believe, that there were abuses. There were abuses in terms of recruiters in countries getting those students to the colleges here. Some students used the college system and education as a way to get immigration status in Canada and their commitment to education may not have been as strong as it should have been. Colleges encouraged international students because of the funding gap. They pay more.

They pay much more. And there is a significant funding gap. Anywhere from when the colleges started and Bill Davis's brilliant vision for colleges, which I think is brilliant, colleges were being funded around 80% of their budget dollars. Today it's in the 20% range. So think about that 80% gap that exists. And so the international students were fueling that financial gap. The problem was that they weren't that interested. And so some of them weren't that interested. Some of them were terrific. Some of them, many of them are extraordinary students and want to do well and want to stay in Canada and contribute, but others just saw it as a pass to the immigration system.

Do you think it has been, and look at, I appreciate that three of you here today make your living in this system, you love this system, you are champions of this system, but I wonder whether or not the reliance on foreign students and the triple or quadruple tuitions that they have paid in order to be in this system have allowed certain distortions and either distortions to happen or problems unmet to take place. Maureen, what do you think? Well, I have to say I think it's pretty broad sweeping statement to say that students came here to abuse the system for strictly certain reasons.

I'm sure there are always those exceptions. But colleges have a very robust quality framework around the kinds of education, the kinds of standards that students have to comply with to be approved to come to a college in Ontario and in Canada for that matter. And I think, you know, that was very robust. Have colleges had to rely on international revenue? Absolutely. Because? In the absence of other funding through the province, there are only several revenue streams that we can rely on,

and international is definitely one. Well, let me pick up with that new. So the spigot of international students has been turned off by the federal government, so you don up with that. So the spigot of international students has been turned off by the federal government, so you don't have that revenue. The province has frozen tuition for seven years, the progressive conservative government, so you don't have that revenue. How strapped are you right now?

Well Humber may be a bit of an anomaly here. We didn't have a drop in international students from last year to this year. We do expect we'll see a drop this year simply because of the approval rates for visas coming from the government but we were not one of the institutions that had over 50% international enrollment. We had 38% correct? So what I would say to you is that international students had a higher retention rate, they had a higher graduation rate, so these students were actually performing quite well. They came here with a mission in mind, the vast majority, and they excelled in our system

and filling much needed jobs in the labor force. When you look at our graduation, our employment rates, they're well over 80 percent six months out of graduation, and our employer satisfaction rates are well over 90 percent. I like the question you asked fairly close to the beginning which is what if we had a Parliament that mattered? What doesn't matter about our Parliament today that we need to fix? Well, virtually everything. And that you know when we think about what we send MPs to do to Parliament, what do we think? Well we

think they're going to propose legislation, we think they're going to debate legislation, they're going to scrutinize it, carefully make amendments, and ultimately they're going to vote on it. And when they do all these things they're going to be representing us in our right. That's I think you know when we're thinking good thoughts about our democracy that's what we think they're going to do. Well go through each of them in turn. MPs don't propose legislation. The number of private members' bills

that get through in a year is maybe two or three in a given year. Most MPs will never pass one at all. Scrutinize legislation. Well, yeah, that's great. But when you have bills coming through in these omnibus bills with dozens of separate pieces of legislation yoked together into one thing where they have to vote up

or down them at all, very little actual scrutiny relevant to the size of the package actually goes on. Sometimes they get passed in a few days. So that is increasingly a misnomer. Voting on legislation. We have the tightest system of party discipline in the democratic world. The Samara Center did a study they found MPs vote with their party 99.6 percent of the time. And even the biggest mavericks? The biggest mavericks, maybe two or three percent, and there's only a

couple of them. That they're offside with the party. They're offside with the party. And of course, as experts will tell you, it's not even about voting discipline anymore. It's about message discipline. So even the idea of MPs standing up and asking questions in the House or making statements in the House, they only do so if they are approved by the party leadership to ask those questions,

to make those statements. As often as not, they're written for them. These days, everything they say publicly is written for them. Their tweets are written for them. So all the things that we think we send MPs to do they're not really doing. So let's come back to the question. What if we had a Parliament that mattered? How would our lives be better? Well why do we have a Parliament? Why do we send people to Ottawa to hold governments to account, to call them out when they have either put bad legislation forward or misbehaved or their employees have done so. Again, we have very little ability to

do so. We've had scandal after scandal under both the liberals and the conservatives over the last 10-20 years where essentially nothing happened. We had the Mike Duffy thing. No real price was paid by anybody in government by that. We had the SNC lab one. We had the Wee charity. We had all these things, one after another, where the committees that were supposed to look at these things were basically stonewalled,

couldn't even get the documents they were demanding. And if there's one power, ancient power parliament that everyone agrees is undoubted, it's the right to demand documents, well, apparently, governments can get away with just telling them we're not giving them to you. So those are some of the functions.

But ultimately, it's to decide whether or not the government has the confidence of the House. You cannot, under our system, you're not supposed to be able to govern unless you have the support of the majority of the members of the House. We've seen governments even get away with basically ignoring the confidence of the House.

Either there have been actual votes that scholars will say were confidence votes, as with Paul Martin in 2005, where they just kind of hum and haw and spend a few days trying to trolling for votes on the opposition benches so they can get somebody to cross over. Which they got. Which they got in the end.

Belinda Stronach. Or what we've seen under both the Harper and the Trudeau governments, you prorogue when you look like you're about to lose a confidence vote. Proroguing in itself is not a scandal, but if you're using prorogation to basically escape accountability to Parliament, something's seriously wrong. We are six, not even six months into this year, and we've had in the province of Ontario anyway, two general elections already, a provincial and a federal. Do we not have free and fair

elections in this province and country? We do, and so some of the, you know, by some standards we do very well. We, you know, our paper balloting system proves it's worth time and time again. There's no funny business, it's hard. You can't game it, you can't scam it, you can't hack it. Yeah, nobody is prevented from voting by physical force or fraud, all these sort of baseline things. But we need to ask, how representative is the parliament that elects? We've talked about the degree to which it can't represent us

in a rise, but how representative of us, even in totality, the parliaments that we elect look nothing like what we voted for, whether in the aggregate or at the sub-regional level. So for example, the liberals were having a big to-do now about a potential separatist uprising in Alberta because, my goodness, we elected the liberals again and nobody votes for the liberals in Alberta.

Well, actually, 30%, or close to 30% of the public voted for the liberals in Alberta this time. And got two seats to show for it. Yeah, best they've done since 1968 in the popular vote, they got two seats. This happens time and time again. It creates this absolutely distorted picture of who we are as a country. It exacerbates and exaggerates our differences.