Colorado Rep. Brianna Titone sits in the wheel of a tractor on April 25, during a ceremony outside the State Capitol in downtown Denver.David Zalubowski/The Associated Press
It seems unlikely that a technology policy could unite iPhone users and tractor drivers in common cause. But there is one: the right to repair. That’s the term for a growing pro-consumer movement that says if you own something, you ought to be able to fix it.
Ottawa has taken some good early steps to create such a right. But it must do more, and the provinces should join in, to benefit both consumers and businesses.
At first blush, it might not seem obvious that such a right needs to exist. After all, if your washer breaks, can’t you try to fix it or call in a repair person? Yes, but that’s easy to do when the only tool you need is a wrench. It’s harder when what’s broken is a line of code.
Increasingly, our physical belongings have become software as much as hardware. Think of cars with computers in the dashboards, or programmable refrigerators connected to the internet. Whether manufacturers have planned it this way or not – a matter of some debate – this technological shift has radically changed the nature of problems that can break a machine and the tools required to fix them.
For consumers, this means some problems can only be solved by bringing a device back to a manufacturer. With few or no options from independent repair shops, consumers face higher repair bills and pressure to buy new devices.
The same thing can happen to businesses, at great harm to the economy, especially in agriculture.
At a Parliamentary committee hearing earlier this year, Ian Boxall, president of the Agricultural Producers Association of Saskatchewan, said farmers need to be able to do repair work on their farms. Any time taken to drive out to a dealership in another city, or to wait for a delivery of a replacement part, is money lost by leaving crops to rot in the fields. “Being able to repair a piece of machinery in a prompt manner is extremely important,” he said.
If companies won’t provide the tools – literally and figuratively – then government must step in.
In Ottawa, recent debate has centered on private member’s bill C-244, from Liberal MP Wilson Miao. It would amend the Copyright Act to permit a consumer to fix a device without being considered to have infringed on the manufacturer’s intellectual property – for example, by circumventing a digital lock. The bill passed the House of Commons unanimously in October and is now before the Senate.
The bill is a good first step, but it is limited because it does nothing for repair shops or the makers of replacement parts. They, too, need to be covered.
The right to repair goes beyond copyright – it is also about competition in the repair market. Ottawa suggested it understood this in the fall economic statement, where it said it would amend the Competition Act to prevent manufacturers from refusing to provide the means of fixing its products.
The statement does not say how Ottawa could do this, but Anthony Rosborough, an assistant law professor at Dalhousie University who studies the right-to-repair movement, said such a policy could require manufacturers to license their designs for replacement parts to third parties at a reasonable price.
Given that most major consumer-goods manufacturers are not based in Canada, Ottawa will have to be careful to not run afoul of trade agreements, as it threatens to do on the Digital Services Tax.
Thankfully, some of our closest allies are ahead of us. On the related issue of interoperability, the European Union successfully pushed Apple to adopt industry-standard charging cables this year. In the U.S., President Joe Biden endorsed the right to repair in an executive order in 2021, and the Federal Trade Commission has stepped up enforcement against companies – such as makers of barbecues and motorcycles – who have made repairs difficult. The White House promoted the policy in a bipartisan roundtable in October.
Ottawa has clear authority on matters of intellectual property and competition. But consumer issues are a provincial concern, and so the provinces have a role to play, too. Quebec’s National Assembly recently passed a bill that could be a model for others. It contains measures such as a requirement that replacement parts be available at a reasonable price, and that they can be installed with commonly used tools.
Policy makers’ first steps have been promising, but attention to right-to-repair policy must continue. It would be a shame for the momentum to stall.