Canada's Digital Charter lacks sufficient legal enforcement power to effectively protect privacy and regulate use of personal data, according to critics worried that a smart city project in Toronto by Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs unit could be misused for mass surveillance.

The international grand committee on big data, privacy and democracy is meeting in Ottawa for three days starting Monday.

Innovation Minister Navdeep Bains says the federal government will look to update the Privacy Act as part of an effort to build greater trust in the digital world.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said social platforms were "failing their users" on Thursday, while speaking at the Viva Technology conference in Paris.