Twice in the past 10 weeks, Big Tech has told Ottawa to get lost.

First, Google refused to play along with new election rules on advertising, saying it didn’t have time to prepare. Then, Facebook refused to implement recommendations of the federal privacy commissioner, ignoring his findings of breach of trust.

Now, like parents who have nurtured their high-tech children in the name of economic development only to watch them grow up and take over the house without heed for consequences, policy-makers don’t quite know what to do.

The most powerful companies in the world, whose market value is growing exponentially, are meeting their day of reckoning in Europe, where lawmakers are introducing regulations, taxes and fines to curtail their power.

In the United States, one of the co-founders of Facebook called last week for the breakup of the company through antitrust laws. Democratic presidential contender Sen. Elizabeth Warren has suggested she wants to break up not just Facebook, but Google and Amazon, too.

But in Canada, we are only months away from the prime minister posing for ribbon-cutting with the likes of Google, Facebook and Amazon, welcoming them to expand their footprints in Canada so they can hire handfuls of people.

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“The economic development frame has been the driver in this space,” observes Amanda Clarke, an assistant professor at Carleton University.

Meanwhile, small businesses, especially in the retail sector, find it harder and harder to expand unless they’re on Amazon’s good side. Music producers and the news industry are seeing their revenues melt away to the massive advertising and publishing power of Google and Facebook, which take little responsibility for curating quality or adhering to copyright, let alone truth. And alarm bells are ringing about children of all ages, so attached to social media that they no longer know how to conduct face-to-face friendships, let alone romance.

Big Tech’s effects on democracy are only a sliver of the ground-shifting effects of these U.S.-based companies and their giant tentacles.

It’s clear that federal policy-makers want to take action. There has been a notable change in attitude in the past few months, with the photo ops and fawning over Big Tech replaced by a growing mortification at the breaches of privacy, the blind eyes to election interference, and the rapid spread of insidious extremism.

But the will to take action has not yet turned into a full-fledged plan. Democratic Institutions Minister Karina Gould rolled out a package of measures in January to take aim at foreign influence in elections. The government has passed legislation to reform rules around election advertising. And last week, MPs on the ethics committee took the extraordinary step of issuing a formal summons to Facebook executives, telling them they must appear before international hearings on data and democracy at the end of the month.

If they don’t come, they could be held in contempt of Parliament — a deterrent for some, perhaps, but probably not for a company facing the likelihood of a $5-billion U.S. fine for privacy breaches. And we wonder why they won’t listen to Canada’s privacy commissioner, with his lack of power to levy financial penalties.

Galvanized by the mosque attacks in Christchurch, New Zealand in mid-March, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is heading to France this week to meet with other leaders to sign on to a “Christchurch call” list of principles that they hope all governments will follow, and that Big Tech will endorse.

Trudeau will up the ante in a speech on Thursday at a Big Tech conference, challenging the firms to take responsibility for hatred and extremism. With an election in the offing, he will aim to show strong leadership.

But at this point, he has a narrow definition of the problems, focused on public safety, privacy and electioneering — and leaving the corporate power issues to another day. Taxation, monopolistic power in advertising, copyright, distortion of markets such as transportation and accommodation — none of those, or other unforeseen disruptions, are on the front burner.

He also has limited policy options. Canada will work with allies through the G7 and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to develop “best practices.” But it also has to decide whether it will follow the European Union’s hardball regulatory approach to disruption or the more voluntary approach of the United States.

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Here’s a quick idea from Clarke: use government procurement to demand higher standards. Governments, she says, have spent years cosying up to technology providers and spending billions on their services. Now is the time to use that purchasing power to at least try to impose some rules around privacy and misinformation.

Whether Canadian policy-makers can make up for lost time is another question.

“We are patching it up,” Clarke says, “trying to regain some of that control.”

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