OTTAWA—Canada’s privacy watchdog says there’s an urgent need for stronger laws to protect personal information — and for more money to help his office enforce them.

In his annual report tabled Thursday, privacy commissioner Daniel Therrien said Canadians cannot afford to wait several years until well-known shortcomings in the privacy laws are fixed.

Canada’s privacy legislation “is quite permissive” and gives companies wide latitude to use personal information for their own benefit, he said, adding “the time of self-regulation is over.”

“To be clear, it is not enough to ask companies to live up to their responsibilities. Canadians need stronger privacy laws that will protect them when organizations fail to do so,” the report says.

“Respect for those laws must be enforced by a regulator, independent from industry and the government, with sufficient powers to ensure compliance.”

On one key issue, Therrien said he plans to ask the courts whether federal laws require Google to remove web pages from its mammoth search engine.

The move is aimed at providing clarity over the legality in Canada of what advocates call “the right to be forgotten.”

Therrien’s office takes the position that existing Canadian law gives people the right to ask search engines like Google to de-index web pages and to ask websites to remove or update content that contains inaccurate, incomplete or outdated information.

Google argues the privacy law for private-sector actors doesn’t apply to its search engine and that requiring it to de-index web pages would be unconstitutional.

To settle the matter, Therrien says he plans to file a reference with the Federal Court to clarify whether Google’s search engine is subject to the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act before delving deeper into complaints about search results.

Peter Fleischer, Google’s global privacy counsel, says removing lawful information from search engines limits access and he suggests a right to be forgotten would infringe on freedom of expression.

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