When it comes to holding social media giants like Facebook to account, Canada’s privacy laws are a bad joke.

The federal privacy commissioner, Daniel Therrien, admitted as much last week. He and his counterpart in British Columbia, Michael McEvoy, issued a stern rebuke to Facebook for violating the privacy of about 620,000 Canadians — and then pretty much acknowledged that they’re impotent to do anything about it.

Facebook refuses to accept it did anything wrong when it let a third-party app harvest Canadians’ personal information, exposing it to potential misuse by Cambridge Analytica, the consulting company at the centre of attempts to influence political campaigns in Britain and the United States.

Facebook rejects the commissioners’ recommendations on fixing the problem. It even disputes that they have jurisdiction over its activities. It’s basically telling them to pound sand.

But Therrien’s hands are tied. Canadian law doesn’t give him the power to actually tell Facebook to do anything. So he was left to sputter his frustration and announce that he’s going to Federal Court to try and get some legal leverage over the company.

Good luck with that. If, and it’s a big if, Facebook is actually found to have violated Canadian privacy law, the maximum fine it could face in this country is $100,000.

That’s less than a pittance for a company with annual revenues of $56 billion U.S. and profits of $6.88 billion U.S. last year. A Conservative MP, John Brassard, calculated that the company makes $100,000 every 60 seconds. It’s actually a fair bit more than that.

Compare that with the type of fines that are being levied on the big tech companies these days in the United States and Europe, which have woken up to the challenges posed by the likes of Facebook, Google and Apple in the areas of competition, copyright, taxation and privacy.

Facebook announced last week that it expects to be fined between $3 billion and $5 billion by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission for privacy violations going back to 2011.

If the fine ends up at the top end of that range, it will be paying out 50,000 times more than the maximum penalty in Canada. But even that seemingly impressive number is being brushed off as a slap on the wrist for the social network behemoth. Its stock price actually went up last week when it revealed how much it may have to pay out; the markets know Facebook can easily handle it.

Authorities in Europe are also taking a much harder line. In 2016 Apple was fined $15.3 billion for taking advantage of illegal tax benefits from the Irish government. And last year Google was fined $5 billion for abusing its market dominance in Android cellphones and breaking antitrust laws.

These are significant fines, on a scale commensurate with the tech firms’ vast revenues and power in the marketplace. But the fact that the companies can pay them and continue to rack up record profits unfazed shows they are far from crippling.

Canada, by contrast, is limping along with laws that have no teeth. Therrien’s frustration was obvious in the statement he put out last week as he announced the results of an investigation into the Canadian dimension of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which affected 87 million people worldwide.

“Facebook’s refusal to act responsibly is deeply troubling given the vast amount of sensitive personal information users have entrusted to this company,” he said. “The stark contradiction between Facebook’s public promises to mend its ways on privacy and its refusal to address the serious problems we’ve identified — or even acknowledge that it broke the law — is extremely concerning.”

McEvoy, the B.C. privacy commissioner, identified one obvious remedy: give privacy regulators the power to do more than just scold those who flout our laws. “The ability to levy meaningful fines would be an important starting point,” he said.

Just so. Therrien and McEvoy can only document violations of privacy, make recommendations to companies to clean up their act, and lament the fact that they lack the legal tools to take things further. Only the government can address the shortcomings of our laws.

In Ottawa, the Trudeau government is at long last making noises about moving in this direction.

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Democratic Institutions Minister Karina Gould said last week that she isn’t satisfied with what Facebook and Twitter have done so far to make sure this fall’s federal election isn’t compromised, and she told the Star that when it comes to possible new regulations “all options” are on the table. She and Innovation Minister Navdeep Bains promised an announcement on digital privacy in the coming weeks.

These are complicated issues, so we shouldn’t expect a full overhaul quickly. But the government has been dithering for far too long in the face of the multiple issues raised by the dominance of the tech giants.

In the area of privacy, in particular, our laws are now clearly inadequate. They need to be made tougher, and they need to be backed by penalties severe enough to make Facebook and company stop brushing them off.

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