Welcome to TfD Weekly

Technologists for Democracy (TfD) is a Toronto-based civic tech organisation working at the intersection of technology, privacy, and democratic accountability. Each week we recap what's happening at Civic Tech Toronto, share updates on our campaigns, and keep an eye on legislation that affects Canadians' digital rights.

Our active campaigns include:

• Stop Cineplex from Facial Detection: pushing back on Cineplex's use of facial recognition technology at Union Station and beyond
• People's Consultation on AI: a civil society response to the federal government's National AI Strategy, co-hosted with Tech Workers Coalition Canada

New here? You can learn more about us at techfordemocracy.ca.

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TfD at Civic Tech Brampton

TfD team members will be presenting at Civic Tech Brampton tomorrow. If you'd like to join us, you can find details and RSVP at the Civic Tech Brampton Meetup.

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Civic Tech Toronto Recap

This week's talk was by Ghazaleh Mohseni, R&D Director at Interactive-OR, where she leads the design and development of decision-support systems for urban mobility and transportation operations. Her work combines optimisation, machine learning, and large-scale data to build practical tools that help cities improve network design, reliability, and operational efficiency.

Ghazaleh presented a data-driven framework for tackling bus bunching and gapping using real-time transit data, machine learning, and optimisation models. The system supports proactive headway management by evaluating and recommending operational control strategies that improve service regularity and network performance, all using open data.

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People's Consultation on AI: Our Joint Submission

On March 23rd, TfD submitted a report to the People's Consultation on AI, based on a hybrid event we co-hosted with Tech Workers Coalition Canada on March 9th. The submission captures what participants said they want from the Government of Canada's National AI Strategy — including community co-development of regulations, publicly-owned AI infrastructure, a ban on AI surveillance, stronger labour protections, and enforcement of existing laws.

Read the full submission and participants' demands

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Privacy & Legislation Watch

An open source investigative effort has revealed Meta's massive global push to enact age verification bills. Through Meta's network and funding, the authors of Trump's Project 2025 pushed for invasive surveillance technologies to be passed under the guise of childhood safety mechanisms. Age-verification software campaigns run counter to digital privacy and safety.

Bill C-4 has passed with royal assent without repealing its backsliding of privacy laws. Parliament is now moving on to Bill C-22, which will give the government backdoors to all Electronic Service Providers (ESP) which includes ISPs, email providers, and social media companies. In a time when Canadians are increasingly worried about data privacy, federal parties are busy legislating away the last privacy protections afforded to us.

Say NO to Bill C-22!

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Until next time, The TfD Team