Mitchell Beer
The Advocate

The next threat to your ability to manage your own farm as you see fit may be looming as close as your nearest field or equipment shed. But help is on the way, as long as the Canadian Senate gets its act together.

A bill now making its way through Parliament would allow producers to override the digital locks on farm machinery that can stop them from making best use of equipment they have purchased from competing manufacturers. The locks prevent the computerized systems in the machines from “talking” to each other. Breaking the code can net you a hefty fine under the federal Copyright Act, CBC reported last month.

In other words, it’s a clear-cut case of equipment makers’ copyright over their software (and proprietary approach to their hardware) impeding farmers from mixing and matching the machinery that best suits their operations and their budget.

Interoperability, or the lack thereof, is not quite everyday language. But for better and for worse, it’s getting there. For computer users, it’s the power cord from a PC that won’t connect to a Mac. This is, more or less, the way CBC explained the issue for a mainly urban audience.

Years ago, toll road operators in the United States had to put in a monumental effort to coordinate the five or six different electronic toll systems in different regions of the country so that truckers and other long-distance drivers could navigate the country without filling their windshields with multiple transponders.

Now, the same issue is landing in farm country, with equipment manufacturers claiming they need the digital locks to protect their proprietary technology and prevent hacking. And, really, how can we not take them at their word? They couldn’t possibly be trying to lock in their customers to buying their products forever  – could they?

How interoperability affects farms

You would think that a conversation about digital locks and handshakes between technologies would belong in Silicon Valley. And on some level, you would be right. But in 2021, a policy analyst at Western Economic Diversification Canada looked into the issue from the perspective of farm implement manufacturers who were already facing an “accelerated lockdown” of the software on combines and tractors.

The policy analyst, Gordon Cherwoniak, was particularly concerned about a $4-billion Canadian farm equipment sector, two-thirds of it located on the Prairies, that included 64 companies in Quebec.

Cherwoniak’s 11-page paper called on federal and provincial governments to work together to address a problem that spans several policy areas, including copyright, competition, consumer protection labelling, privacy, environmental policy related to e-waste and contract law. But three years ago, he was already warning that “the pace of technological change and the high business costs they add create challenges for many (small and medium enterprises) and puts them at a disadvantage.”

He found that:

• Digital companies that reach a certain size have a business incentive to lock in customers by limiting interoperability and raising the cost of switching to a competing technology.

• Patent owners can control access to a technology standard and make it unavailable to entire markets or segments.

• On the other hand, interoperability “facilitates interaction between different digital applications and platforms, which contributes to ease of market entry, promotes overall competitiveness and strengthens innovation,” all things we say we want in Canadian agriculture policies and practices.

Parliament to the rescue?

It looks like our elected representatives are trying to do the right thing.

Bill C-294, a private member’s bill sponsored by Saskatchewan Conservative MP Jerry Patzer, passed third reading in the House of Commons nearly a year ago with unanimous support from other parties. It lays out limited conditions under which an individual can circumvent the technological protection measure on a piece of software to make it operable with another system.

It’s a minor miracle that the bill has travelled this far. Private member’s bills are only rarely adopted – in Parliament or in provincial legislatures. But the next test lies ahead. Before a bill becomes law, it must be adopted by both the House and the Senate. Bill C-294 received its first of three readings in the Senate on June 15, 2023. And since then – crickets.

Now, the clock is running. The next federal election is expected in 2025, and any pending legislation that isn’t passed by then will die on the order paper. This means that it will have to be reintroduced in the next Parliament and start the review process from scratch. Meanwhile, farmers will be left to scratch out what solutions they can with equipment manufacturers who are maybe a bit too eager to protect their patents and their markets.

It isn’t impossible that the Senators will get this done. But there are no guarantees.

I’ve been following another Senate bill, the Climate-Aligned Finance Act, over the two years since it was first introduced. It finally received some perfunctory attention last fall, then in mid-April. But for the most part, all it has taken is one hostile, recalcitrant committee chair to stall an essential piece of legislation in its tracks.

So we’ll see how things do with interoperability, copyright infringement, and farmers’ right and ability to direct their own operations. It’s a good start that, at least in the House of Commons, MPs of all political stripes voted in favour of common sense.