Everyone is familiar with the tired joke about Canadians: that if you bump into us, we apologize. Last month Facebook bumped into Canada in a big way — but rather than say sorry, we responded by issuing a subpoena. Our parliamentary Ethics and Privacy Committee issued a formal summons to Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg to appear before a special session at the end of this month.

On Monday, an extraordinary international gathering of legislators will come together in Ottawa to conduct hearings into the impact of the platform data-opolies, such as Facebook and Google, on the privacy and democratic rights of their citizens.

This hearing will include legislators from 14 countries, including France, the U.K., Germany, Ireland, Argentina, and Chile. This will be the International Grand Committee’s second gathering, after convening last year in London, where key witness Zuckerberg was a notorious no-show.

Zuckerberg has recently expressed a desire to work with politicians on finding a compromise on regulations for the digital realm. The subpoena to appear in Ottawa is his chance. In addition to Zuckerberg, key representatives from Google, Amazon and Twitter will testify, along with a number of international experts on the platforms, including early Facebook investor Roger McNamee, and author and Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff.

The international grand committee is a virtually unprecedented venue for legislators to come together to get answers for their citizens directly. It is a unique solution to a unique challenge — we are dealing with the unprecedented power of a few data giants, who seem to think that national laws are outmoded relics that don’t apply to them.

The wake-up call for Canada was the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The possibility of seeing elections upended by the clever manipulation of these platforms by political data mercenaries exploiting fundamental weaknesses in their business models presents a serious challenge to democracies worldwide.

This brings me back to the subpoena for Zuckerberg and Sandberg. Facebook was recently deemed by a Canadian regulator to have failed to protect the privacy rights of 622,000 Canadians whose data was swallowed up in the Cambridge Analytica breach. Facebook has responded to the ruling by saying it does not believe Canada has the jurisdiction to protect the privacy rights of its own citizens and that compliance would be too expensive anyway.

Those arguments are worth pausing to think about. After a year of overwhelmingly negative international press coverage, Facebook’s response to Canadian legislators is that it does not recognize our jurisdiction over our citizens. That’s not an acceptable answer in 2019.

We’ve come a long way from the friendly, cool tech platforms of yesteryear. When I was first elected as an MP in 2004, I bought the Silicon Valley talking points. The open internet would connect everyone, fix democracy’s ills, and turbocharge the economy.

We are now in a completely different world. We’ve gone from a digital commons to a series of gated communities ringed with security cameras watching us at all times.

As we move into the Internet of Things and the rise of AI, the unfettered power of the data-opolies is positively chilling. Legislators must grapple with the need restore the rights of citizens and protect the integrity of democracies.

On the economic front, we need a hard look and decisive action on protecting competitive markets and long-term growth, as these data giants have created a “kill zone” for investment, quashing potential competition and innovative alternatives.

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The grand committee hearing in Ottawa will be a tremendous opportunity to refocus on the rights of citizens to use the internet free of corporate surveillance.

If Mr. Zuckerberg decides to blow the hearings off, he will be sending a powerful message to legislators who are becoming much less amused by the antics of the golden boy of Silicon Valley.

Charlie Angus is NDP Member of Parliament for Timmins — James Bay.

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