Prince George-Peace River-Northern Rockies MP Bob Zimmer believes Facebook will start to clean up its act following a showdown between politicians from eight countries and the social media giant.
Zimmer was among three Canadian MPs in the United Kingdom this week as part of a "grand committee" coined to investigate Facebook's effect on the world's democratic systems.
The proceedings got off on the wrong foot when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg declined to appear, sending vice-president for policy solutions, Richard Allan, in his stead.
Zimmer said Allan was knowledgeable but unable to provide answers to all of the committee's questions and maintained Zuckerberg would still have been the better option.
Prime among Zimmer's concerns is the possibility that third parties could skirt federal election laws by advertising on Facebook. As it stands, third party advertising is banned during election periods in Canada and the parties are limited on how much they can spend during that time.
The federal Liberals have introduced a bill, C-76, aimed at stopping foreign attempts to influence how Canadians vote but it has been criticized as too weak in terms of the administrative penalties it would impose.
Liberal independent Sen. Serge Joyal has expressed disappointment that it does not include provisions to seize the assets of any foreign entity that attempts to influence a Canadian election.
Zimmer said the parliamentary committee he chairs will be working to give the bill more teeth but in the meantime, he would like to see a "best practices" drafted for social media that Facebook could adopt.
"We can still cause them to change, hopefully, just by some pressure, to do the right thing," he said and added Facebook seems willing to listen.
Zimmer conceded he never thought he'd be sitting on an international committee meeting in London grilling a key representative of one of the most influential companies on the planet. He came to the position as chair of the Canadian Parliament's standing committee on access to information, privacy and ethics which is meant to keep an eye out for ethics breaches by this nation's government.
"But we had all come to an agreement that we need to be pursuing this," Zimmer said.
NDP MP Charlie Angus and Liberal MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith were also in London.
Zimmer said the international committee came into being as a Canada-UK initiative in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal with a handful of other democratic countries joining on.
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