Bill C-46 (Historical)

Investigative Powers for the 21st Century Act

An Act to amend the Criminal Code, the Competition Act and the Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Act

The enactment amends the Criminal Code to add new investigative powers in relation to computer crime and the use of new technologies in the commission of crimes. It provides, among other things, for
(a) the power to make preservation demands and orders to compel the preservation of electronic evidence;
(b) new production orders to compel the production of data relating to the transmission of communications and the location of transactions, individuals or things;
(c) a warrant to obtain transmission data that will extend to all means of telecommunication the investigative powers that are currently restricted to data associated with telephones; and
(d) warrants that will enable the tracking of transactions, individuals and things and that are subject to legal thresholds appropriate to the interests at stake.
The enactment amends offences in the Criminal Code relating to hate propaganda and its communication over the Internet, false information, indecent communications, harassing communications, devices used to obtain telecommunication services without payment and devices used to obtain the unauthorized use of computer systems or to commit mischief. It also creates an offence of agreeing or arranging with another person by a means of telecommunication to commit a sexual offence against a child.
The enactment amends the Competition Act to make applicable, for the purpose of enforcing certain provisions of that Act, the new provisions being added to the Criminal Code respecting demands and orders for the preservation of computer data and orders for the production of documents relating to the transmission of communications or financial data. It also modernizes the provisions of the Act relating to electronic evidence and provides for more effective enforcement in a technologically advanced environment.
The enactment also amends the Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Act to make some of the new investigative powers being added to the Criminal Code available to Canadian authorities executing incoming requests for assistance and to allow the Commissioner of Competition to execute search warrants under the Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Act.

Resumption of Debate on Address in Reply

[Brent Rathgeber, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

Madam Speaker, it is an honour to participate in the debate today on the Speech from the Throne.

I would remind the House that our government has repeatedly stated that jobs and economic growth is its top priority. This is a theme that was central throughout the throne speech.

Since July 2009, Canada has created 160,000 new jobs, tangible evidence, I would submit, that Canada's economic action plan is working. Statistics Canada reported that Canada's unemployment rate fell from 8.3% to 8.2% in February and that 21,000 new jobs had been created last month. That is the fifth month of job gains in the past seven months, but our determination remains unchanged. Our government will not be satisfied until every Canadian who has lost his or her job is working again.

In that regard, we are completing year two of our economic action plan with an additional $19 billion of stimulus spending to create and protect jobs. We will invest in new targeted initiatives and make Canada a destination of choice for new business investment. We continue to lower taxes to maintain Canada's competitive advantage and significantly we will establish the red tape reduction panel to reduce paperwork for business.

Many of my constituents in the riding of Edmonton—St. Albert are small business owners. It was with great enthusiasm that I told them that an advisory committee on small business and entrepreneurship made up of business persons would be created to provide advice on improving business access to federal programs and for information.

Small and medium-sized businesses are the lifeblood of our economy and sustain us in whatever economic situation we may currently be facing. I submit that the small and medium-sized enterprise innovation and commercialization program will allow small and medium-sized business to develop and promote innovative prototype products and technologies to federal departments and agencies.

However, Canadians want to know that their government will do everything possible to ensure the future economic stability and growth of this country. An integral part of our government's strategy is the reduction of the deficit and a return to balanced budgets. In that regard, we will follow a three-point plan: we will wind down temporary stimulus measures, restrain growth in spending and conduct an in-depth review of the government's administrative functions and overhead costs.

The economic recession has affected every corner of the globe. No country remains untouched but Canada has risen to lead the way with the soundest financial system in the world. The Speech from the Throne emphasizes our response as measured and responsible and makes it clear that Canada is well on its way to economic recovery and stability.

The focus of the throne speech may be the economy and job creation. However, our government remains just as committed to its safe streets and safe communities agenda. The government has addressed the issues of crime by bringing forward legislation mandating prison sentences and ensuring that criminals serve the sentences they have been given.

We will continue to focus on protecting the most vulnerable among us, our children, by increasing the penalties for sexual offences against children and strengthening the sex offender registry. We intend to introduce legislation to crack down on white collar crime and ensure that tougher sentences are issued. As recent high profile cases remind us, white collar crime is all too prevalent and affects many hard-working Canadians personally as they see a lifetime of savings disappear instantly.

The Speech from the Throne points out that our justice system must be made to be more effective. As a result, we will introduce legislation that would cut the number of protracted trials and offer tangible support to victims of crime and their families. The Canadian Resource Centre for Victims of Crime welcomed the government's additional funding of $6.6 million over two years as the way to build on its earlier investment in the federal victims' strategy and the creation of the federal Ombudsman for Victims of Crime.

The throne speech outlines the need to move forward on essential legislation, including the repeal of the long gun registry and the re-introduction in their original form of the then Bill C-6, the consumer safety law, and the then Bill C-15, the anti-drug crime law, some pivotal pieces of our government's crime agenda.

The former Bill C-15, An Act to amend the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, is designed to tackle drug crimes and would mandate two year prison sentences for dealing drugs, such as cocaine, heroin or methamphetamines, to youth. It would also increase penalties for trafficking in GHB and flunitrazepam, most commonly known as the date rape drugs. Mandatory minimum sentences would also be imposed for the production and sale of illicit drugs.

Significantly, it also would allow the drug treatment courts, such as the one in Edmonton, to suspend a sentence where the addicted accused person takes an appropriate treatment program. Drug treatment courts encourage the accused person to deal with the addiction that motivates his or her criminal behaviour and break the cycle of crime to further his or her drug addiction.

New offences would be created for gang-related drug offences, as well as drug offences that are specifically targeted toward children, such as selling drugs near our schools. The hon. Minister of Justice has said “these measures are a proportionate and measured response designed to disrupt criminal enterprise; drug producers and dealers who threaten the safety of our communities must face tougher penalties”.

In my view, these changes are long overdue. They would send a strong signal to criminals that it is unacceptable for them to put dangerous drugs onto our street. We must protect our children from drugs and other illicit behaviour and ensure that drug dealers end up where they belong: behind bars.

I look forward to the reintroduction of that bill.

The former Bill C-46, investigative powers for the 21st century act, would ensure law enforcement and national security agencies have the tools they need to fight crime and terrorism in today's high-tech environment. Legislation must be updated to reflect an ever-evolving technological world and to provide investigators with modern communication technologies to perform complex investigations.

When this bill is reintroduced, the amendments would address the constant struggle to keep up with the high-tech world. It would create a new offence, carrying a maximum penalty of 10 years, to prohibit anyone from using a computer system, such as the Internet, to agree or make arrangements with any other person for the purposes of sexually exploiting a child. This new offence would also be used in the context of undercover investigations. Police would also be able to obtain data from the telephone and the Internet by creating a new concept called “transmission data”.

Those and several other additional changes to help police obtain transmission data would allow law enforcement agencies to track domestic cybercrime and enhance international co-operation. Cybercrime has no borders and the transnational nature of organized criminal activity means that international co-operation is not a luxury but a necessity.

This proposed legislation, when reintroduced, aims to provide the police and other stakeholders with the tools they need to investigate computer and computer-related crimes while ensuring that the rights of Canadians are protected.

The Speech from the Throne highlights the decisive actions our government has taken to crack down on crime and ensure the safety and security of our communities, and we will move ahead with this critical crime legislation. We take the issue of law and order seriously to make this a stronger and safer Canada, both now and for the future.

The struggle to keep up with emerging criminal technologies and crime is a constant struggle, full of setbacks, both for law enforcement and for legislators, with sometimes minor and occasionally major advances. However, it is a pivotal struggle for lawmakers because the laws that we debate and pass in this House must be premised on preserving the safety and liberty of law-abiding citizens.

As indicated, it is a constant and pivotal struggle but, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, one of the authors of the U.S. constitution and defender of liberty, ”Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty”.

Child Protection Act (Online Sexual Exploitation)

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Madam Speaker, I rise to speak to Bill C-58 today with mixed emotions. We have been dealing with this issue in the justice committee since late 2006 or early 2007. It has been better than three years now. We actually had some consideration of it in Parliament in 2004 and 2006 as well, so it is going on five years.

I rise with mixed emotions because I am concerned. We are supportive of this legislation as far as it goes. Our major concern with Bill C-58 is that there are a number of other issues that should have been addressed long before this. Some of them have now been addressed in this bill, but there is a number that have not been addressed.

Addressing those issues and building a framework so that our police, prosecutors and judges would have greater ability to try to stamp out child porn on the Internet and the technological transmission of it would be a major step forward. We have not gone far enough on this and I am going to address at least some of those points.

I do want to set this in its historical context. When we were dealing with the legislation that dealt with the luring of children over the Internet, what came forward at that time was a good deal of evidence from various police forces, particularly from the Ontario Provincial Police and the Toronto Police Service. I do not want to disparage other forces, but at that period of time they were probably the most advanced forces in trying to combat child porn on the Internet.

The problem that we are now addressing came forward three to five years ago. We are addressing it to some lesser degree in Bill C-46 and Bill C-47, which are now before the public safety committee. The problem is getting at the service providers, which are in most cases the methodology, mechanism and technology by which the producers and traders of child porn are using to trade and sell this child porn.

What came out in the course of those hearings was that a number of service providers were refusing to co-operate with police forces both here in Canada and internationally. As a result of a number of fairly strong comments that came from members of that committee at the period of time when we had to deal with this, we have seen an increase in co-operation from the service providers in terms of giving police officers information, putting them on notice when they identify child porn on their service technology, and co-operating as fully as they can with the police.

That is not universally true to this day and that is why we are seeing this legislation. We really should have seen this legislation at least three years ago because it was very clear at that point that we had a problem. It was only because of some of the threats that came out of the justice committee at that time that we got greater co-operation from the service providers here in Canada.

It is still a major problem when we try to deal internationally. There are certain countries who are very co-operative with us and are actively engaged in trying to shut these sites down and to prosecute those who they trace the child pornography back to. However, there are other countries in the world that have no mechanisms at all to deal with this.

In that regard, I think it is worthwhile to note the assistance we got from Bill Gates and Microsoft. They assisted the police forces in developing a technology at quite a substantial expense to that corporation. It was in the range of about $10 million in human resources to develop the technology and the actual expenditure of funds to produce it.

It is important to note, both with regard to this bill and just generally, how child pornographers work. They put the information on one service provider and then skip it through a number of service providers. We have been told in some cases this material will go through up to as many as 50 service providers around the globe.

Through this technology, which was developed by Microsoft, through the Toronto police force's initiative, and funded by Mr. Gates, we are generally able to trace the material back to the source. So we may skip through a whole bunch of service providers, but we can eventually get back to the source and get the site shut down. We have seen at least several major busts in Canada as a result of this technology being deployed. A number of people were charged and in some cases convicted. Other cases are still working their way through the courts.

The technology was crucial and it was the first time it had been developed in the world. We are now sharing that technology with other countries with whom we are cooperating so they can use it to track things back to the child pornographers.

That was a major step forward. It was interesting to see in the media this week that some of the other technology that we have been working on in order to be able to register sites has not been developed. We had a five-year program that I think was initiated in the 2004-06 Parliament. We are close to the end of that. Under that program, people identify the site and advise the police, and then we have a registry of that.

That registry is still not up and running, because of technological problems. According to the article in the Chronicle Herald on November 25, as much as 40% of the budget that was allocated over that five-year period has not been spent because we do not have enough police officers actually working on this, and we do not seem to have been able to put enough resources into fully developing that technology.

That five-year period is just about up. I have no idea what the government is going to be doing in terms of continuing that funding until the service is up and running effectively. It is quite clear from the article that more police officers should have been specifically trained and designated to work in this area, and that has not happened.

With regard to the bill itself, one of the concerns I have is that, as is typical with the government, the government is out front, promulgating the notion that this is the be-all and the end-all. I am being a bit too harsh on them and I will admit that, but the reality is that the real work that needs to be done by government is to fund our police forces.

There are very few large police forces in this country that do not have at least one or two police officers specifically designated to deal with child pornography, mostly on the Internet but in print as well. We need more of those officers. We need a lot more of those officers in order to be able to deal with this problem.

This is a growth industry. It continues to grow because of the Internet. We have always had child pornography in print and even in paintings. We can go back hundreds and hundreds of years, maybe even millenniums. The explosion occurred with the Internet, which provided for easy transmission of this pornography, and it tapped into a substantial market that was unavailable before, crossing international boundaries and making it very difficult for national police forces to be able to deal with it.

I have to say this, and it is not just about the current government but also about the previous Liberal government and also about a lot of other countries. There are very few countries we can point to, England may be one of the exceptions, that have in fact dealt with this problem in an efficient manner, that is by moving enough human resources into combatting this.

We know that the province of Manitoba was one of the provinces that moved on this by establishing a snitch line. England has done the same thing and has funded it. It seems to be fairly effective in getting the public, when they are scanning various websites, to identify child pornography and to get that information to the police. The police can then deal with it in an efficient and rapid fashion, to shut the sites down and to try to track the producers of the sites.

It is working in that regard, in that we have a methodology, but we do not have enough resources. It is really a shame that our police forces are still struggling with that, because they have nowhere near the capacity to combat the sheer volume of what they have to deal with on the Internet.

In that respect, I urge the government in this coming budget to take another look at this area in particular. If we are really serious about protecting our children, we need to put more resources into doing that.

This legislation will help a little. I do not want to deny that completely, but it is a very small step in comparison with how much more effective we would be in combatting this scourge if there were more police officers working on it and also on developing technology. Police officers need training and they need companies like Microsoft to come into the field and cooperate with them to try to develop better technology to track this right back to its source. That is the only way we can effectively shut it down.

With regard to the bill itself, I have some concerns. There was a lot of debate before the bill got to the House over whether service providers would have a legislatively mandated responsibility to monitor their sites.

Going back to the bill on child Internet luring, the committee heard some evidence to the effect that it was going to be difficult for the smaller service providers to do that. On the other hand, it might, quite frankly, be possible to develop technology so that the computer would do the monitoring.

There are any number of other technologies and services that we use on computers that can do the search on a random basis. That technology needs to be developed and deployed. Maybe that is something we have to impose on the industry.

However, we have just given up. This bill does nothing to require the service providers to do any monitoring at all. All it requires is that if somebody tells them there is a site on their technology, the ISPs have to report it to the locator and a police force. They are under no affirmative obligation to monitor the websites using their technology.

I think the government backed down too much. At the very least, we should be looking at imposing some responsibility on them. It appears obvious that this bill is going to go to committee, and I am hoping that the committee can look at this again and perhaps strengthen the bill in a meaningful way to impose some responsibility.

I want to make a point about the penalties in the bill. The penalties assume that service providers are all corporate, so there are only fines in the bill. We need to take a look at that and see whether we should be pulling back the corporate veil.

I know the test will not be easy from a legal standpoint, but where we have been able to identify service providers that are abusing their responsibility to protect children, we should be pulling back the corporate veil, and police and prosecutors should have the ability to prosecute individual members, whether they are part of the executive or the board of directors, of those companies for these crimes.

We have been able to identify that in some cases it was quite clear that the corporate entity knew about the sites and did nothing about them, simply allowed them to continue on. If we have that kind of a scenario or that kind of conduct, then we in fact should be going after individuals and not just the corporations.

[Joy Smith, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased today to stand in the House of Commons with parliamentarians from all parties to talk about Bill C-58. In this Parliament probably one of the most important things we are doing is addressing the protection of our most vulnerable citizens, our children.

Bill C-58 would provide a level of certainty for all those who supply an Internet service to the public that they would be held to the same reporting standard with regard to child pornography. We have heard in the House that child pornography is on the increase. The images that are displayed are becoming more and more violent. Our government recognizes the efforts of major Internet service providers in voluntarily reporting this type of material.

However, creating a uniform mandatory reporting requirement with respect to Internet child pornography on all who supply Internet services to the public across Canada will strengthen our ability to protect children from sexual exploitation.

As I have listened to the speeches, there has been a thread throughout and this thread has been that all members feel that this is a horrendous crime against children. Mr. Speaker, you have small children and I know that it must touch your heart because our children are our most precious gift.

The bill would improve the law and improve law enforcement's ability to detect potential child pornography offences and help reduce the availability of online child pornography. It would also facilitate the identification of victims so they may be rescued and help identify and apprehend offenders. This is a very important piece of legislation. We have heard in the speeches that there are 1,400 police reported child pornography incidents of which 440 resulted in charges, and that is not even up to date. There are more today in the year 2009 going into 2010.

Many good people across this nation are watching and putting the lens on what Parliament is doing in terms of protecting our children. Traditionally speaking, Parliament is a place that sometimes can go wonky. Even though a good bill is presented, sometimes it does not get passed. We have a lot of unnamed people making a lot of unnamed speeches that sound good, but in the end the laws sometimes do not get passed.

As we know, after we deal with the laws here in the House of Commons, they then go into the Senate where they must be examined before they can receive passage.

I want to talk about people across the country who have made a big difference and who are watching what our government is doing in terms of child pornography. I am proud that our government also introduced related bills that have supported Bill C-58. So there is a concerted effort with our government to address our most vulnerable citizens and to protect our children.

Our government recently produced three hard-hitting related bills and one is Bill C-46 which was brought forward on June 18. That bill would require Internet service providers to provide police with email and ISP addresses of those viewing child pornography. It also would require ISPs to freeze child pornographic data for 21 days. It also would require cell phone companies to assist police in tracking child porn on cell phones and BlackBerries.

Again, Bill C-47, which was passed on June 18, was a bill that permitted police to obtain information about clients from ISPs and requires companies to acquire the technical ability to allow police to intercept information. Bill C-58 is just another building block on this foundation that helps protect our children.

In my travels over the past decade, I have met many of the people working on this issue of human trafficking and child porn in our country. As a mother of six children and the mother of an RCMP officer who used to be in the integrated child exploitation unit, I have seen first-hand the cost that a lot of these police officer have paid. They sat there and viewed those images. They went out and tried to get the bad guys. I pay honour and respect to all the police officers who have done that.

Many of the projects across the country outside of Parliament Hill have really put pressure on all of us as members of Parliament to stop this horrific crime. When we talk about child porn over the Internet, it brings to mind Mr. Brian McConaghy who was the founding director of the Ratanak Foundation. He is a forensic scientist with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and has served with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for 22 years. He worked tirelessly to help build the case against Donald Baker. For 19 of those 22 years, he performed his duties with the RCMP while setting up and running this foundation. After that, he continued on.

I was talking to Mr. McConaghy yesterday. He and I work on different things.

When we are talking about the Olympics, human trafficking or child porn, they are all connected. What makes these police officers and front line workers who work with the victims of Internet child porn so special is their heart.

The Baker file has been forgotten in some cases but other files keep coming up. They come and go. They are horrendous and yet they are forgotten. I know everybody remembers the Willie Pickton file in B.C., which was a horrendous case that hit the front pages. The RCMP officers and the police vice officers who were working on Internet child porn and on these cases were deeply touched by the victims of this crime.

When we have people watching these images on the Internet and when they go across the ocean and act on those images and fantasies, they come back and continue that appetite for acting on the fantasies because they have allowed themselves to go into that dark place that human beings often have with child pornography.

We talk about the front line officers and we talk about the victims but I want to talk about one victim just to impact our Parliament today so that we understand.

Serena Abbotsway was killed by Willie Pickton. She was a kind young girl who was on the streets helping young people who were victims of human trafficking and child pornography. She underwent many beatings in trying to rescue people because she herself was a street person.

Mr. McConaghy is off to Cambodia right now but when I was talking to him the day before yesterday, he was telling me, as a forensic scientist, how he became attached not only to the cases but also attached to the victims.

He told me what it felt like to look at the skull of Ms. Serena Abbotsway and to look at the picture he had of her. She was baptized at a church on the east side. She worked on the streets and was involved in all kinds of different things. There, before him, was her remains.

He treated her remains with respect as he went through her particular case. When he finished doing his forensic science work, he put her skull away and said goodbye to her. He told her that he would never forget her and that he would do the best he could to ensure that other victims were not hurt.

We can talk about people like Matt Logan. In Parliament the public needs to know about these unsung heroes who work so hard every day. Matt Logan is a recently retired RCMP officer. He has penetrated the psyches of countless psychopaths, pedophiles and hostage-takers. He has spent time in the jail system assessing predatory sex offenders. He is one of only seventeen people in North America who are both police officers and qualified psychologists, and one of even fewer who specialize in the criminal mind.

The member opposite mentioned the toll it took on the police officers. I know many police officers who have taken that toll because of their work. Matt Logan knows an awful lot about pedophiles and about their minds. He knows how to get into those minds and how to rescue the victims.

Staff Sergeant Logan has done so much to bring this issue to the forefront on our national scene. He said that he had a hard time believing that, given an opportunity, the child predators, when after watching victims, would not act on their fantasies. He said, “Child pornography exists primarily for the consumption of predatory child molesters”.

It is the beginning of something that can grow. Logan, who is a criminal psychologist in the RCMP's behavioural science group, has done extensive work with sex offenders. He has been called on more and more to consult on child exploitation cases.

RCMP Matt Logan describes two types of child molesters, the situational and the preferential. He says that most molesters fit into the situational category. He says that means most are male and are indiscriminate with victims, committing sexual assault based on accessibility to a victim. If they have a pornography collection, child porn is usually a small portion of it. He says that the preferential child molester can be of any age, driven by fantasies centred on a specific age, gender or even the look of a child. Most gravitate to prepubescent. Is that not shocking?

RCMP Logan said that although he had worked with some whose fetish was newborns, preferential child molesters also had a long-term pattern of behaviour and almost certainly collect child porn. He says, “The images and erotic stories fuel the fantasies that “drive the bus” to hunting and molesting a child”. This is a statement from a seasoned 22-year RCMP officer who worked in this area.

Bill C-58 is extremely important.

Talking about close to home, my son is an RCMP officer and is in the ICE unit. On his days off, he goes all over the country, talking to associations and groups about how to protect their children against child molesters. In fact, next Friday night he and I will do a joint presentation at one of those locations.

There are other people, like Lianna McDonald, who is the head of the Canadian Centre for Child Protection. She does so much to try to get the cybertip lines up and running. She works hand-in-hand with Beyond Borders, with Roz Prober.

For the first time, businesses across the country are putting money toward organizations that are fighting child trafficking and child porn. One of those organizations is The Body Shop. It has recently launched a huge initiative about hand cream. My Christmas baskets are going to be filled with its hand cream because of its support for the protection of child victims from human trafficking and from child porn.

I want to talk about Paul Gillespie. Paul Gillespie was on the streets protecting children, victims of child abuse. He worked on the ground with many of these young women. I have met some of the young women whom he has rescued. Now he is with KINSA, the Kids Internet Safety Alliance. He works with Canadian law enforcement and other partners to deliver training and build capacity among the police of developing nations to help them find and rescue victims of child abuse, whose images are shared on the Internet. Once rescued, he helps the victims and their families receive support to help them heal through the Mothers Online Movement, MOM. It is a powerful community network. These are the unsung heroes who are listening today to what is going on in Parliament.

Paul Gillespie, a former police officer, built and led the child exploitation section of the Toronto Police Service Sex Crimes Unit. He has become widely known as a world leader on this issue. I consider him a very good friend of mine and someone who is one of those unsung heroes. He has never been brought to the forefront for his work. Today I want to do that and to thank him.

Then we have the small groups that are springing up all over our nation, those groups that do not receive any money from anyone, but they find out about human trafficking and child porn. They go out and educate people. I have always said that education is our greatest tool.

We can talk about Naomi Baker from Canada Fights Human Trafficking. She has brought so many people together and educated many of them on how to protect their children.

We can talk about Natasha Falle. She is my hero because she was a victim of trafficking and was the daughter of a cop. She is off the streets now. She has helped so many people. She now runs Youth Unlimited. We will never find a more articulate, more beautiful, more grounded person than Natasha Falle. She is the poster girl for getting programs in place that will protect and help these victims because they can be rehabilitated.

We can talk about the beautiful Temple Committee Against Human Trafficking in Montreal, started by Rabbi Lerner.

Many people are working so hard to ensure that this horrendous crime is suppressed. Even today in the other chamber, Bill C-268 is awaiting the passage by the Senate. We look forward to all senators supporting that bill.

Over and over we hear in Parliament that this issue has to be a non-partisan one. When it comes to the protection of our children, parliamentarians have to work together. It is so important.

The Olympics are coming upon us in a very short time. I happen to know the bad guys now are getting all the girls together. I know some towns from where they have taken some of these girls.

We cannot sit and wait. This is Canada's hidden secret. This is one of our darkest spots in history when child sex slavery is allowed and when child porn has become something of a joke to some of the people in our country. We have to take this seriously. We have to speak out. As parliamentarians, we cannot afford the luxury of in house bickering. We can only afford the luxury of the privilege of putting laws forward that will protect our most vulnerable victims.

[Pierre Lemieux, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Agriculture]

Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Leeds—Grenville.

I am proud to rise in the House today to speak to this important piece of legislation which would enhance Canada's existing measures to better protect children against sexual exploitation through child pornography.

As the father of five children aged from six to 20 years of age, I can tell the House there is nothing more important to a parent than ensuring the safety of our children and protecting them from dangerous Internet predators. That is one of the top priorities for parents in this new digital era.

Bill C-58 would do so by creating a new national statutory requirement for providers of Internet services to report online child pornography to designated authorities. Ultimately, this new reporting requirement would improve the ability of law enforcement to detect potential child pornography offences, thereby helping to reduce the availability of online child pornography. It would facilitate the identification and rescue of child victims, and help identify offenders for the purpose of investigation and prosecution.

Although Canada's criminal law has specifically prohibited child pornography since 1993 and strengthened these prohibitions in 2002 and 2005, the full impact of the role of the Internet in facilitating the demand for and distribution of this material is really only now becoming better understood. The anonymity and instantaneous worldwide access to such despicable material offered by the Internet are real challenges.

Bill C-58 would apply to those who provide Internet services to the public, requiring them to report to a designated agency tips they receive regarding websites where child pornography may be available to the public. It would also require them to notify police and safeguard evidence if they believed that a child pornography offence had been committed using their Internet service.

Failure to comply with these duties would constitute an offence punishable by graduated fines up to $1,000 for a first offence, $5,000 for a second offence and for subsequent offences the possibility of a fine up to $10,000 or six months' imprisonment or both, for individual offenders. If the offender were a corporation the graduated fines would be up to $10,000, $50,000 and $100,000.

I would highlight that nothing in the legislation would either require or authorize any individual or company to actively seek out incidents of child pornography. In other words, providers of Internet services will not be required to monitor their networks for this type of material.

Our government recognizes the efforts of Canada's major Internet service providers, or ISPs, as they are known, in addressing this serious problem. Most Canadian ISPs have adopted acceptable use policies that outline the rules for using Internet accounts, the conditions for access privileges and the consequences for violating those rules and conditions. Most of these policies allow the ISPs to terminate accounts in cases of unacceptable online behaviour.

Organizations such as the Canadian Association of Internet Providers have also helped to develop standards for the industry, including a code of conduct. In 2003 some Canadian ISPs and police agencies formed the Canadian Coalition Against Internet Child Exploitation to assist law enforcement in addressing online child pornography. One important initiative to come out of such collaboration with ISPs is Project Cleanfeed Canada, which aims to block access to websites that host child pornography. Because the focus of Cleanfeed Canada is on limiting accidental exposure to such images, Cybertip.ca provides to participating ISPs a regularly updated list of Internet addresses associated with images of child sexual abuse.

Most of the major ISPs providing service to almost 90% of all Canadian Internet subscribers are participating in Cleanfeed Canada under a memorandum of understanding with Cybertip.ca. Efforts are being made to expand Cleanfeed Canada to the ISPs that service the other 10% of Canadians. Requiring all providers of Internet services to report child pornography websites will undoubtedly enhance the efficiency of the Cleanfeed Canada program.

Bill C-58 also ensures that all those who provide Internet services to the public are be held to the same reporting standard when it comes to reporting online Internet child pornography.

I would highlight that we anticipate that this new legislation should have a limited impact on the business practices of providers of Internet services who already voluntarily report cases of online child pornography. Bill C-58 was drafted in a manner that closely reflects the current practices of Canada's major ISPs.

Bill C-58, however, covers more than just a typical ISP. The term ISP, or Internet service provider, usually refers to someone who provides access to the Internet. This act applies to all those who provide an Internet service to the public. While this does include access providers, it also includes those who provide electronic mail services such as webmail, Internet content hosting services and social networking sites.

This legislation complements our existing comprehensive strategy to combat child sexual exploitation in Canada. This strategy includes an impressive array of existing Criminal Code provisions as well as recent legislative initiatives currently before the House such as Bill C-46, An Act to amend the Criminal Code, the Competition Act and the Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Act, and Bill C-47, An Act regulating telecommunications facilities to support investigations.

If adopted, these proposed pieces of legislation would help ensure that law enforcement and national security agencies have the tools they need to fight crimes such as child pornography in today's high tech environment. This government also recognizes that more is needed to combat this scourge than just strong criminal laws.

That is why, in December 2008, we renewed the federal government's national strategy to protect children from sexual exploitation on the Internet. Initially launched in 2004, this national strategy is providing $42.1 million over five years to the RCMP's National Child Exploitation Coordination Centre to provide law enforcement with better tools and resources to address Internet-based child sexual exploitation, enhance public education and awareness and support the 2005 national launch and ongoing operation of Cybertip.ca as a national 24/7 tipline for reporting the sexual exploitation of children on the Internet.

As announced in budget 2007 and rolled out in 2008, our Conservative government has allocated an additional $6 million per year to strengthen initiatives to combat the sexual exploitation and trafficking of children. These funds are being used to augment the overall capacity of the NCECC as well as to specifically enhance its ability to identify and ultimately rescue child victims through the analysis of images seized from sex offenders that are captured on the Internet or received from international law enforcement agencies.

I hope the House understands just how important this legislation is. Bill C-58 will further enhance collaboration between the Internet service industry and law enforcement, resulting in greater protection for our children from online sexual exploitation in today's technological environment. I urge the House to give this bill its full support.

[Jennifer Stoddart]

Thank you.

On Tuesday, Assistant Commissioner Bernier and I had the privilege of presenting to Parliament our latest annual report on the Privacy Act. I believe it is an important document for all Canadians because it highlights some vital developments and future trends in public sector privacy. Through the lens of the audit and review and the complaints investigation work of my office during the 2008-09 fiscal year, the report explores the privacy challenges posed by two broad societal influences: national security initiatives and technology.

I will touch on key highlights of the report in a moment, and then I propose to share a few thoughts on the unresolved matter of Privacy Act reforms. First, though, I would like to underscore the principal message that emerged from our annual report.

That message is that privacy rights should not be at odds either with public security or with the use of information technology. On the contrary, we contend that measures to respect privacy must be integral to all these new developments.

First of all, I'd like to talk briefly about the FINTRAC audit. In this annual report, my office reports on what we discovered in privacy audits of two major national security initiatives: the passenger protect program, better known to Canadians as the no-fly list; and FINTRAC, the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada. Our FINTRAC audit found that the agency generally has a robust and comprehensive approach to securing the personal information of Canadians. However, our examination of the sample of files in FINTRAC's database turned up personal information that the centre did not need, use, or have the legislative authority to collect. In some cases, in fact, reports existed absent even a shred of evidence of money laundering or terrorist financing. Clearly, excess personal information should not be making its way into the FINTRAC database.

One of our key recommendations was that FINTRAC do more work with reporting organizations to ensure that it does not acquire personal data beyond its mandate. After all, it is a bedrock privacy principle that you collect only the personal information you need for a specific purpose.

Aside from the recommendation on data collection, we also called on FINTRAC to delete permanently from its holdings all information that it did not have the statutory authority to receive. We recommended that FINTRAC analyze all Proceeds of Crime (Money Laundering) and Terrorist Financing Act guidance issued by its federal and provincial regulatory partners to ensure that such guidance does not promote client identification, record keeping, or reporting obligations that extend beyond the requirements of the act.

We were very pleased that FINTRAC accepted 10 of our 11 recommendations. We had recommended that it strengthen its information sharing agreements with foreign financial intelligence partners by including mandatory breach notification and audit provisions, but the centre maintained that its efforts in this area were sufficient.

I am now going to discuss our Passenger Protect Program audit. A second audit summarized in the annual report relates to our examination of the Passenger Protect program. In general, we found that Transport Canada collects, uses and discloses personal information related to the program in a way that safeguards privacy. We did, however, identify a few gaps.

One related to the information that officials supply to the deputy minister, who is ultimately responsible for adding to or removing people's names from the no-fly list or Specified Persons List.

In light of the serious consequences flowing from every one of these decisions, we found that officials have not always provided the deputy minister with all the relevant information on which to base a sound decision.

Our audit also revealed that Transport Canada had not verified that airlines were complying with federal regulations related to the handling of the Specified Persons List. The risk of a breach was especially high for the handful of air carriers that relied on paper copies of the list. Further, we found that air carriers were not obliged to report to Transport Canada security breaches involving personal information related to the no-fly list.

The audit also found that the computer application used to provide air carriers with information on the no-fly list was not subjected to a formal certification and accreditation process designed to ensure the security of sensitive personal information.

We were, however, pleased that Transport Canada responded positively to all our recommendations.

We'd like to now turn to investigations and inquiries.

The annual report we presented to you this week also includes details of our engagement with Canadians through our public inquiries and complaints work.

Over the 2008-09 fiscal year, my office received more than 12,000 calls and letters from Canadians concerned about privacy issues.

With respect to concerns focused on the public sector, we received 748 complaints in 2008-09, down slightly from the previous year. The most common complaints related to problems people encountered in accessing their personal information in the hands of the federal government and to the length of time it was taking departments and agencies to respond to access requests.

In analyzing our caseload, we noted that technological glitches can have an extraordinary impact on the privacy of Canadians. For instance, we found that a hacker, using amateurish off-the-shelf software, was able to penetrate a computer at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, exposing about 60,000 personal data records of farmers using a federal loan guarantee program. But we were equally disturbed to discover, 26 years after the passage of the Privacy Act, that too many data breaches could still be traced to decidedly low-tech origins, from a briefcase left on an airplane to the careless mishandling of sensitive documents.

That said, I want to underline that the vast majority of public servants we have worked with across the government do take privacy issues very seriously.

I will now talk about the challenge the backlog presents. In all, our office was able to close 990 complaints files related to the Privacy Act during the fiscal year, up almost 13% from the previous year.

You will notice that we closed more files than we opened. That is due to a concerted effort to tackle a significant backlog of cases, which had driven up our treatment times from an average of about 14 months in 2007-2008 to 19.5 months in 2008-2009.

Our backlog challenge was exacerbated over the past fiscal year when we decided to redefine when a file is deemed to be in backlog, to more accurately reflect how long Canadians actually have to wait for service.

As a result of the redefinition, 575 files were backlogged in April 2008. Fortunately, through a significant re-engineering of our systems and processes, we managed by the end of the fiscal year to cut that number down by 42% to 333 cases. We are on track to eliminate it altogether by next March.

I will now discuss the Privacy Act reform. Over the past year, my office and this committee have also continued to work toward the modernization of the Privacy Act, to ensure it properly protects the fundamental right to privacy in the digital age. Reform of this statute is essential to meet the modern privacy needs of Canadians. And yet, despite our efforts and those of this committee, I confess to a measure of disappointment when it comes to the government's response to this committee's report of last June.

As we all know, Mr. Chair, updating antiquated privacy legislation and ensuring that privacy principles apply uniformly to the public and private sectors is becoming increasingly urgent in this globally interconnected era. Indeed, other industrialized democracies have already recognized this imperative. Australia, for instance, is rewriting its federal privacy laws so as to create a single set of principles covering government agencies and businesses alike, address emerging technologies, and introduce consistent new provisions on cross-border data flows.

The European Commission has announced that it will be re-examining its 1995 directive to see whether it is still capable of fostering the level of data protection required for the modern technological era. In light of the fact that our own Privacy Act is 12 years older, we can no longer ignore the need to make significant updates to our own law in order not to be left behind.

In summary, Mr. Chairman, I would like to end with a few words about the work of my office as we continue to move through 2009 and 2010.

I can tell you that we're already deeply engaged in several key files, all of them with significant impacts on the privacy of Canadians. Notably, with the 2010 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games just around the corner, the challenge of integrating privacy and security will come to a head in an unprecedented way. We have already engaged security officials in a constructive dialogue to build privacy considerations into their security measures.

At the same time, we are taking a close look at Citizenship and Immigration Canada's plans to roll out initiatives using biometric information. For example, CIC is collecting fingerprint data from refugee claimants and is sharing it with other countries.

And we will continue to make known our views about Bill C-46 and Bill C-47, legislation to oblige wireless, Internet, and other telecommunications companies to make subscriber data available to authorities, even without a warrant.

Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Canada has seen a proliferation of new national security programs, many involving the collection, analysis, and storage of personal information. We fully appreciate that the underlying aim of many security programs is to protect Canadians. But as we will continue to remind Parliament and Canadians at every opportunity that it is critical that privacy protections be integrated into all such initiatives at the outset.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee. My colleague and I welcome your questions.

Business of the House

[Jay Hill, Conservative, Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, in relation to what day the House will be doing its annual tributes to the sacrifices of our veterans and those in the Canadian Forces currently serving, that will be under negotiation. I suspect that is something that will be discussed among all House leaders in the days ahead. We will decide, obviously, collectively and co-operatively on the appropriate time to make that important tribute.

In regard to our ongoing justice program, obviously we are going to continue along, as we have last week and this week, for the remainder of the week with our justice legislation. I would note that since my last statement, we introduced Bill C-53, Protecting Canadians by Ending Early Release for Criminals Act, and Bill C-54, Protecting Canadians by Ending Sentence Discounts for Multiple Murders Act. Both of those additional bills are a key part of our ongoing efforts to reform the justice system in our country.

We sent to committee this week Bill C-42, Ending Conditional Sentences for Property and other Serious Crimes Act; Bill C-52, Retribution on Behalf of Victims of White Collar Crime Act; Bill C-46, Investigative Powers for the 21st Century Act; and Bill C-47, Technical Assistance for Law Enforcement in the 21st Century Act.

By the day's end, we hope to conclude debate on Bill C-43, Strengthening Canada's Corrections System Act. If we do that, I intend to call Bill C-31, the modernizing criminal procedure bill, and Bill C-19, the anti-terrorism bill.

Tomorrow we will continue with yet another justice bill, Bill C-35, Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act, followed by the remainder of the justice bills that I noted if they have not been completed.

Next week I intend to call Bill C-50, the employment insurance for long tenured workers' bill, which is at report stage, having had it returned from committee.

Following Bill C-50, we will call for debate the report and third reading stage of Bill C-27, Electronic Commerce Protection Act, and second reading of Bill C-44, An Act to amend the Canada Post Corporation Act,

Finally, Wednesday, November 4, will be an allotted day.

Technical Assistance for Law Enforcement in the 21st Century Act

[Jim Maloway, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to speak today to Bill C-47. Once again, I compliment the previous speaker for his excellent presentation.

Bill C-47 is an act regulating telecommunications facilities to support investigations. The short title is “The Technical Assistance for Law Enforcement in the 21st Century Act”. The bill was introduced in the House of Commons on June 18 by the Minister of Public Safety. It deals with very specific aspects of the rules governing lawful access.

Lawful access is an investigative technique used by law enforcement agencies and national security agencies that involves intercepting communications and seizing information where authorized by law. Rules related to lawful access are set out in a number of federal statutes, in particular the Criminal Code, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service Act and the National Defence Act. For greater certainty, the bill provides that law enforcement agencies retain the powers conferred by those acts.

The bill complements the current lawful access regime. It addresses the same two issues as the former Bill C-74, the technical interception capabilities of telecommunications service providers and requests for subscriber information. Other aspects of the lawful access regime are addressed in Bill C-46, investigative powers for the 21st century act, which was introduced on the same day as Bill C-47.

Bill C-47 addresses a concern expressed by law enforcement agencies, which contend that new technologies, particularly Internet communications, often present obstacles to lawful communications interception.

The proposed bill permits the following.

It will compel telecommunications service providers to have the capability to intercept communications made by their networks, regardless of the transmission technology used. We heard comments earlier from one of the government members about how we had to get the bill passed as soon as possible to get up to speed with our allies and other countries around the world that had legislation like this in place for some time.

It will also provide law enforcement agencies with access under an accelerated administrative process without a warrant or court order. That is a big issue with the NDP and it concerns us a lot. On that basis, we want to make certain that in committee we can make some changes to the bill that will further protect the privacy of citizens in this country.

It is somehow acceptable to the government that other countries do not have this provision in their legislation. Other countries' law enforcement officers can get the information without a warrant. This seems to be fully acceptable to the members of the Conservative government.

However, the NDP and I think other members in the opposition want to see the provision of warrants to continue to protect the privacy of the public. Furthermore, I think there is support for that argument from the Privacy Commissioner, who has written a six-page letter on the subject, which I will deal with at a later point in the presentation.

The proposed bill provides law enforcement agencies with access under an accelerated administrative process, as I said, without a warrant or court order to basic information about telecommunications subscribers. I have a list which I will read later. Members will draw their own conclusions that the list might be a little broad. At the same time, the bill provides for certain protection measures.

In terms of consultations, since 1995 the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police have called for legislation requiring that all telecommunication service providers have the technical means in place to enable police services to carry out lawful interceptions on their networks. Following the development of a strategic framework in 2000, representatives at Justice Canada, Industry Canada and the Solicitor General of Canada held public consultations in 2002. After having received more than 300 submissions from police services, industry, civil rights groups and individuals, Justice Canada released a summary of the results of the consultations in 2003.

Throughout the consultations, protection of privacy was one of the central issues in the debate on lawful access. Other significant elements included technical interception standards, costs related to interception capability and the need for new lawful access rules. The consultations led to the introduction in November 2005 of Bill C-74, which would have created the modernization of investigative techniques act, but the bill died on the order paper before second reading in the House when the general election was called.

Since then, provincial governments, including British Columbia and various Canadian law enforcement agencies, have made submissions urging the federal government to adopt lawful access measures. After consulting a broad range of stakeholders, including those from the telecommunications industry, civil liberty groups and victims rights groups, the federal Minister of Public Safety introduced Bill C-47, which duplicates the fundamental provisions of the former Bill C-74.

Our almost two-year election cycle has caused bills to progress through a certain path. Because they not only have go through the House, committees and the Senate, it is very difficult to get bills through this process, particularly in a minority Parliament, within a two-year range. The government, after setting a fixed election date, carving it in stone, turned around, abrogated its own law and called an election one year earlier than it should have. The election was actually supposed to be right now. Because of that, all the bills in place at that time had to be started from scratch.

Then we have the spectacle of the Liberal opposition demanding, almost on a weekly basis, that we get involved in another $300 million boondoggle election, which would produce, I submit, the very same results we have right now and we would all be back to square one again, starting this process over. In our speeches we will be talking about bills that were introduced so long ago that decades will go by at the rate we are going. I have to smile when I see we are going back three or four successive governments and basically dealing essentially with the very same bill, just with a different number.

In terms of the international context, which I spoke about before, Bill C-47 is a key step in the harmonization of legislation at the international level, particularly concerning requirements regarding the interception capabilities of telecommunications service providers. This type of requirement is already found in the legislation of a number of other countries, including the United States, United Kingdom and Australia. Canada signed the Council of Europe's convention on cybercrime in November 2001, as well as an additional protocol on hate crime in July 2005.

The convention makes it an offence to commit certain crimes using computer systems and creates legal tools adapted to new technology, such as orders to produce subscriber information, which are similar to the request for subscriber information set out in Bill C-47. The injunction in the convention does not specify whether subscriber information can be obtained without a warrant. This is a big difference because it is allowed in the legislation of the other countries. However, we feel we should not go that far. There should be some judicial oversight and police forces should go before a judge or justice of the peace to present the information to obtain a warrant to get the information they want.

That is the way the system has operated now for many years. It is a fair process. It is a process that the public demands in terms of privacy issues and it is just the right thing to do. In fact, the other countries mentioned actually have gone a little too far at the expense of the privacy of their citizens. I believe there is some evidence to show that there have been examples of misuse and abuse.

I know our justice critic mentioned earlier that he did not anticipate this would be a problem, even if we did not have the warrant system, but we want to be sure about this. The one way of having certainty about this is to require a warrant to be taken. It works well. It has worked for many years. I would prefer to err on the side of caution. If we find evidence over time that it does not work, we have provisions under this bill for a five year review.

I have suggested that perhaps the government may want to look at a sunset clause on the bill. Given the way technology changes in a very rapid manner, who knows what sort of technology picture we will see in five years. Perhaps we want to sunset the bill and then after the five years we start over with a new bill with a new context and new environment at that time.

Complementary legislation in Bill C-46 includes other provisions such as those concerning preservation and production orders and the modernization of offences related to computer viruses and hate propaganda, which will enable Canada to ratify the convention on cybercrime and the additional protocol.

I also want to point out that while Bill C-47 has provisions for the five year review, Bill C-46, a very integral part of these two bills, connected in fact, does not require a review. I wonder why this happened that way and whether at committee the parties could get together and deal with this.

Our critic has indicated that we would vote against the bill at second reading, but he left the door open very wide for improvements at committee that will satisfy him in terms of judicial oversight and the whole issue of the warrants. If the government wants to make some overtures and some moves, we will not hold the process up. We can be convinced if the government is prepared to make some movement in this regard.

I know members were speaking just yesterday about another committee of the House and were relating how happy they were that the committee was co-operating like it had never co-operated before. I am not certain which committee that was. I know, for example, the transport committee of the House has in fact operated on a very consensual basis for a number of years now, in spite of the fact that other committees of the House were basically in virtual meltdown in the last couple of years. The transport committee was the one committee with the reputation of the parties working together and getting this done.

I heard members saying yesterday that they had never seen the level of co-operation in that committee. They thought something was wrong with the committee because it did not even function properly in past years. Now, not only is it functioning properly but we are getting concessions and getting things done, which we never saw possible before.

This is a positive sign, that a minority government can work. I have worked in minority governments before and they have worked well. There is no guarantee that we have to plunge ourselves into a needless $300 million expense of an election in February or spring, or fall of the coming year, or even the next year.

If the minority government is doing what it should do, cooperating and getting things done, there is no particular reason why it cannot survive its entire term, provided it is reasonable and shows concern for people, shows consideration for the opposition parties and does a total about-face to what it did last year, and provided that it has learned something from its fundamental mistakes of the first few months of last year.

I did want to talk about the interception capabilities of the bill. When we speak about bills, sometimes we plan our speeches to last the 10 minutes, 20 minutes or time that we have. I just find, on a consistent basis over the last 23, 24 years now, that I am rarely ever able to fit all that I want to say within my timeframe. Fortunately, in this environment, I really like this environment a lot, there is a question and answer period provided, which allows us to present some of our missing points.

In terms of the interception capabilities in the current situation, at present no Canadian legislation compels all telecommunications service providers to use apparatus capable of intercepting communications. Only licensees that use radio frequencies for wireless-voice-telephony services have been required since 1996 to have equipment that permits such interceptions. There is no similar requirement for other telecommunications service providers.

This particular bill is designed to remedy the absence of standards for the interception capability of telecommunications service providers. It will require all service providers, including, for example, ISPs, which are Internet service providers, to possess apparatus enabling law enforcement agencies, once they have obtained a judicial authorization, to intercept communications sent by the service provider. Within six months of the date on which the bill comes into force, telecommunications service providers will have to submit a report to the minister, stating their capability to respond to the interception requirements set out in the bill. We deal with that in clauses 30 and 69.

In terms of the obligations of the telecommunications service providers in the capacity to intercept telecommunications, the requirement for interception capabilities relates both to the telecommunications data and the actual content of the communication. The telecommunications service providers must use apparatus that enable law enforcement agencies to intercept, for example: subscriber emails; IP addresses, and that is a very controversial point; the date and time of the communications; the types of files transmitted; and the substance of the messages.

In terms of the provision of requested information, once a law enforcement agency has obtained a judicial authorization, the telecommunications service provider must provide all communications that have been intercepted. If possible, the telecommunications service provider must provide the intercepted communications in the form specified by the law enforcement agency and the service provider must also be required to give law enforcement agencies, on request, information relating to its facilities and the telecommunications services offered.

In addition, in terms of confidentiality, all intercepted processes must be kept confidential. Telecommunications service providers are thus required to comply with the regulations and to guarantee the security of the contents of the intercepted communication, the telecommunications data, and the identity of the individuals and organizations involved.

Clearly, I will not be able to finish the full content of my speech because I have many more pages. I want to deal with the whole issue of the penalties in the bill, but I will skip ahead to the list of information that I promised to talk about, the information covered by the special rules and strictly limited.

The bill lists information associated with subscribers services and equipment that can be obtained without warrant, and here is what they want: name, address, telephone number, email address, Internet protocol address, mobile identification number, electronic serial number, local service provider identifier, international mobile equipment identification number, international mobile subscriber identity number and, last but not least, subscriber identity module and card number. We can see there are many pieces of information being required.

[Jim Maloway, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the member for a well researched and well thought-out presentation as usual. He takes a very well thought-out approach to all of his speeches, in fact.

The Privacy Commissioner has written a six-page letter detailing a number of concerns that she has. One of the questions that I have deals with the whole issue of the five year review. As the member knows, there is a five year review process in this particular bill, while not in Bill C-46, which is basically a companion bill.

I would like to ask him how he sees the five year review being developed. Second, I would like to know what his thoughts are on perhaps having a sunset clause to this bill. Given that technology can change a lot over a year, let alone a five year period, a sunset clause might be the answer here.

When the time comes, the government would have to take another look at the whole bill as opposed to doing the five year review, which could possibly just be forgotten by the government in power at the time.

[Mario Laframboise, Bloc, Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak to Bill C-47, An Act regulating telecommunications facilities to support investigations, or the Technical Assistance for Law Enforcement in the 21st Century Act. This bill was introduced on June 18, 2009. It deals with very specific aspects of the rules governing lawful access. Lawful access is an investigative technique used by law enforcement agencies and national security agencies that involves intercepting communications and seizing information where authorized by law.

Rules relating to lawful access are set out in a number of federal statutes, in particular the Criminal Code, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service Act and the National Defence Act. This bill therefore complements the current lawful access regime. In fact, it addresses the same two issues as the former Bill C-71: technical interception capabilities of telecommunications service providers and requests for subscriber information.

Other aspects of the lawful access regime are addressed in Bill C-46, which was introduced on the same day as Bill C-47.

Bill C-47 addresses a concern expressed by law enforcement agencies, which contend that new technologies, particularly Internet communications, often present obstacles to lawful communications interception. The bill compels telecommunications service providers to have the capability to intercept communications made using their networks, regardless of the transmission technology used. It also provides law enforcement agencies with access, under an accelerated administrative process without a warrant or court order, to basic information about telecommunications service subscribers. At the same time, the bill provides for certain protection measures in clauses 16 to 23.

The Bloc Québécois will support this bill in principle, because it is designed to enable the police to adapt their investigative techniques to modern technological realities, such as the widespread use of cellphones and the Internet. Facilitating police work, where it does not unduly interfere with fundamental rights, is an avenue the Bloc Québécois has always advocated for fighting crime. Our party feels that increasing the likelihood of getting caught is a much greater deterrent than increasing punishments, which often seem remote and abstract.

This campaign that the Conservative Party has been running for the past three years is merely an attempt to show the public that it is tough on crime. It is always amusing to see the Conservative members acting like sheep, repeating over and over again that they are tough on crime, when the Bloc Québécois was the first party in this House to really tackle organized crime groups. The House will recall the whole debate raised by the Bloc Québécois to bring in real legislation to fight organized crime. This has produced solid results in Quebec with the operations conducted by the Government of Quebec and the Sûreté du Québec against organized crime groups.

Of course all this legislation is needed. Just trying to manipulate public opinion, as the Conservatives are doing, is not enough. We must really achieve our objectives. That is what the Bloc Québécois has always set out to do. One way of doing so is by helping police forces when they ask us to make certain changes, and this bill is the result of one such request.

The same was true for the fight against organized crime groups. The Bloc Québécois proposed reversing the burden of proof. Before that amendment to the Criminal Code, it was up to the Crown to prove that the money used or the goods acquired by criminal groups really were the proceeds of criminal activity, which was more difficult. Now, the burden of proof is reversed, so when an individual is part of a criminal organization and is charged, all of the goods acquired are automatically assumed to have been acquired through criminal activity.

Accused persons now have to prove that they acquired certain goods through legal means. This has helped break up major organized crime networks. That is how to go about things. We have to try to get to the heart of the problem.

The Bloc Québécois has always been critical of the Conservative Party for wanting to stir up the public's imagination when a crime has been committed and the media blow it out of proportion. The Conservative Party members immediately try to show that the judges are not doing their jobs and that we need minimum sentences. In reality, the judges are doing their jobs. Every case is unique.

In the case of white collar criminals, what the Bloc introduced in this House was simple. We asked the House to unanimously pass a bill that would prevent white collar criminals from getting parole after serving one-sixth of their sentence. Two white collar criminals, Vincent Lacroix and Earl Jones, were getting ready to plead guilty. They were both planning to plead guilty so that they could be released on parole after serving one-sixth of their sentences. The Conservatives want to be the only ones who are truly tough on crime. Like good little sheep, they have chosen that for their slogan.

In all of this, there are two criminals experts do not agree on. Vincent Lacroix pleaded guilty. Experts say that even if the Conservatives introduce their bill and it is passed by this House, those people, given that they have already pleaded guilty, would be eligible for parole after one-sixth of their sentences. The Conservatives just want to score political points. That is the Conservative way of doing things, an approach inspired by the Republicans in the United States.

In Quebec, people are not fooled. We have been through this and we want to address the real problem. That is what the Bloc Québécois has always defended in the House. The Bloc feels that it is important to study Bill C-47, which the police have called for. The Bloc is in favour of passing this bill.

Earlier, I heard my NDP colleagues say that they will be opposing this bill and that is probably because it is not in keeping with their political ideology. Personally, I believe that this bill should be studied in committee in order to make improvements. That is the objective. That is the advantage we have when considering bills. We can send them to committee and call witnesses. Police representatives will tell us what they need. In this way, those opposed to certain aspects of this bill can be heard. The Bloc Québécois realizes that the bill raises a number of concerns about privacy issues and the justifications for breaches of privacy.

This bill will make it possible to obtain information from cellphones and Internet networks. In short, the police want cellphone or Internet service providers to capture messages and deliver them to the police when needed for investigations. That directly affects privacy. The Bloc Québécois is aware of this. We want to strengthen police powers so they can deal with organized criminals and their complex networks. At the same time, we must prevent serious intrusions into the private lives of citizens. One way to do this is to vote for Bill C-47 at this stage and send it to committee. We will then be able to call various witnesses to shed light on the issues. That is simple logic.

I am a notary by training. In Quebec, notaries deal primarily with real estate law and personal law in connection with wills and the lives of individuals. But the law is often a matter of simple logic. All too often, for partisan purposes, attempts are made to force the logic. That is not a good thing in the long term.

The Americans have filled their prisons with criminals. They have invented new sentences. In a statement made a few months ago, President Obama said there were 25,000 too many prisoners in the prisons and the country had no money to supervise them. Inevitably, those are the facts. The Conservatives have been introducing bills dealing with the justice system virtually every other day lately, for purely partisan purposes. Those are the facts. They are trying to box their Liberal opponents in. They say the Liberals are soft on crime and they are tough on crime.

That is a lot of work to manipulate public opinion, because that is all they want to do. The Conservatives are experts at that. To justify their tough on crime reputation, they have to create new crimes. They have to be able to constantly attack the justice system, to keep saying it is not enough. Inevitably, the result is the one the Americans have achieved. Crime has not declined, because they have simply created new crimes. The number of criminals is going up.

That means more criminals at large or behind bars. It means more criminals at large because the ones who are non-violent inevitably have to be released. When they are sent to prison, there is not enough staff to be able to give them adequate support, to try to prepare them for reintegration into society. But when they return to society, they are returning from spending time in the crime industry. They went to prison and met criminals, who recruited them. They get out of prison and commit more crimes.

That is the circle the Republicans created in the United States. It is easy to understand. There are no analyses to prove that the tougher you are on crime, the fewer criminals there are. The opposite is true: the tougher you are on crime, the more criminals there are getting out because we are simply not able to provide support for them. We would have to invest too much to try to staff the prisons adequately, to be able to provide psychological and other support for all these criminals. Inevitably, that is the result we achieve. The criminals are left to their own devices when they get out of these crime factories, the prisons. They commit more crimes. Every country that has adopted policies like that has more criminals at large and more crimes are committed. Those are the facts.

It is paying off politically for the Conservatives in the short term. They are determined to win their election. But we can see that it has the opposite effect. The tougher they are on crime, the more they try to manipulate public opinion, the fewer people want to give them a majority. Once again, after the next election campaign, we will probably have another minority government.

The bills that have been introduced this week all related to the justice system. There was nothing introduced in this House that dealt with any subject other than the justice system. The Conservatives have seen that the next political opening for an election will probably be in the spring. They want to try to score points with their base, with voters who are very disappointed with how they are managing the economy.

We have reached a deficit of nearly $50 billion. Looking at the quality of the hon. members and government ministers opposite, I do not think that this figure will come down. There are no experts there to counter this astronomical shortfall. History shows that every time the Conservatives have been in power, they have run a deficit. That is the reality and it will not change. They managed to turn an annual surplus of about $15 billion into a $50 billion deficit. They try to tell us it was because of the international economic crisis. They are the ones, though, who decided to reduce the GST, which deprived us of $14 billion. That was a choice. They chose to take a surplus and turn it into a deficit. I do not see how they will be able to return to a surplus position. Under their regime, it is impossible. We will need a change of government to do that.

In the meantime, we will have to be very vigilant. Bill C-47 is a good example.

The police forces are asking us to take action. They want to employ new investigative techniques and use electronic surveillance to monitor cellphone conversations and discussions on the Internet.

I think this is a reasonable thing for the police to do, provided there is a framework to protect privacy. Quebeckers and all citizens are entitled to think that their government will respect their private lives. A balance has to be found.

I am sure that in this matter Quebeckers can have confidence in the members of the Bloc Québécois, who have always stood up in the House to find a balance. I often say that the Bloc Québécois and Quebeckers are the conscience of America because we have seen all kinds of abuses and Quebec society has managed through its history to counter abuses.

One fine example is the investment that Quebec and Quebeckers made in their hydroelectric system, without any help from the federal government. I like to remind people of this because colleagues from all parties in the House forget all too often that Quebec’s hydroelectric system was paid for entirely with the money of Quebeckers. There was no assistance from the federal government, which never gave a red cent. Nothing. Zero.

We have learned recently that an agreement is being discussed and will probably be signed today between the Government of Quebec and the Government of New Brunswick giving Hydro-Québec control over the New Brunswick hydroelectric grid. Once again, there is not one cent of federal money involved. It all came from Quebeckers, who have been real visionaries in this regard.

As a well-balanced society, Quebeckers did not want, even 25 years ago, to focus on polluting energies like oil, coal or nuclear power. That is the reality. It was a choice that Quebeckers made because their social conscience was more advanced than that of the rest of America. Quebeckers decided to invest. We have to give them that. Insofar as fighting poverty is concerned, Quebec is probably the best society and nation in the Americas for distributing wealth between rich and poor. That is a societal choice.

In North America, Quebeckers would be the ones most prepared to fight climate change. They would have been prepared to sign the Kyoto protocol and to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 6%, using 1992 as the reference year.

Quebec was prepared to do that. It could now be negotiating directly with the states of the European Union and participating in an international carbon exchange. Its companies could now be selling credits for huge amounts of money. But Quebec is once again trapped by the Canadian solution. Perhaps one day there will be a carbon exchange in Canada, but once again, Quebec will not be able to sell at reasonable prices because the European Union is a much larger society than Canada.

I had the chance to meet the mayor of Rivière-du-Loup last fall. He told us that if Quebec and Canada had participated in an international carbon exchange, he could have sold his emission credits because he was able to cut $1 million worth of emissions. As a result, the city of Rivière-du-Loup lost $1 million.

Once again, the Bloc Québécois believes we should be balanced, as Quebec always is, when it comes to Bill C-47. I repeat that we must allow police forces to adapt their investigative techniques. The police must have the ability to force cellphone and Internet providers to allow them to listen to conversations or read Internet communications, while still respecting privacy.

As I explained earlier, the Bloc Québécois is in favour of Bill C-47. But obviously, what we want and will demand is to hear from witnesses both from police forces and from people who are worried about the invasion of their privacy. That will happen in committee.

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I again thank my colleague for the question. I had heard him ask a similar one to our friends from the Bloc, and I was hoping he would do that.

On the five-year review versus the sunset clause, I guess the difficulty I have is that on both sides there are problems. I do not know how many bills have been passed in this House in the last 15 years or so, because for about that long it has been relatively common for this House to provide mandatory reviews.

I know from my work on the justice committee and before that on the natural resources and environment committees, as well as the public safety and national security committees--I have spent a lot of time on all of those committees--that a lot of the bills that have gone through those committees and through this House have had mandatory reviews of a variety of natures in terms of their timing.

According to the way the process is supposed to work, those reviews are done in a timely fashion, and in fact are done before the mandated time is over. That is the way it is supposed to work. We could go back and look at the debate that went on around the time we first provided those reviews. The understanding was that a review would be done by the standing committee that was responsible for that area, and in fact it would do the review before the time was up.

When the time limit was up, the standing committee would be able to present to the House recommendations as to whether the bill was okay or the law was okay as it was or if it needed amendments, and if it needed amendments they would recommend the type.

The reality is that rarely happens. I once had a reporter come to me, and this was two or three years ago, and say she had been doing an analysis of a number of bills, crime bills or justice bills, and had found a huge number of them for which the review had never been done. I believe the same was true in the environment field, that the reviews were never done.

I have conducted some reviews in both those areas, justice and the environment, but I would have to say those were the exception. We were doing fewer than 50% of the reviews that had been legislated and mandated. There is no reproof, no penalty to this House for not doing the reviews, so we continue on this way.

The obvious alternative is, then, to put in a sunset clause. The difficulty I have with a sunset clause in this area is that I know how badly these tools we are providing in both Bill C-46 and Bill C-47 are needed.

I recognize that technology will develop and will probably overcome some of the provisions we have made here, and we will need to pass further laws down the road so that we can again be up to date with the criminal element in the use of technology.

I am really fearful that if we put in a sunset clause and the government of day does not pay attention, this will collapse and it will not be available to our police forces. I think that is too much of a risk. I know it is tempting to do so, because that would impose greater pressure on the government of the day to make sure it got done.

We saw it happen with the government. We had this situation with the anti-terrorism legislation. There were several clauses in there, the use of which I have to say I opposed, and in fact they collapsed because the government did not move quickly enough to deal with them.

This experience shows us that we cannot depend on them even in a sunset clause situation to respond appropriately with regard to time.

[Jim Maloway, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I think that was a well-answered question.

However, I do want to go a little further here, because the Privacy Commissioner of Canada did write a six-page letter dealing with both Bill C-47 and Bill C-46. She had even more wide-ranging concerns about the bill. Having done a lot of consulting with eminent people and organizations regarding the bill, she has come up with many suggestions as to things that should be changed here. Perhaps they can be changed at committee.

One of them involves the five-year review. While there is a five-year review for this bill, there is not one for Bill C-46. As we know, they are intertwined.

Also, I would like to ask the member what sort of form he thinks the review should take, and how we would mandate that to make certain it did not fall through the cracks. Perhaps a sunset clause should be looked at for this particular bill given that technology changes quite radically over even a year let alone a five-year period.

I would ask the member what he thinks of some of the Privacy Commissioner's observations about how this bill is deficient and how it needs to be improved.

[Jim Maloway, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Mr. Speaker, as the member knows there is a provision in Bill C-47 for a five year review, whereas there is no provision for a five year review in Bill C-46, which is a very similar and connected bill.

What form does the member think this five year review should take or if in fact the government should be looking at a sunset clause, given that technology changes radically even over a year, let alone a five year period. Perhaps a sunset clause would be more appropriate.

I would ask the member to comment on those particular areas.

[Guy André, Bloc, Berthier—Maskinongé, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I rise in the House this morning to talk about Bill C-47, a bill that deals with very specific aspects of the rules governing lawful access. As some of my colleagues have already mentioned, the Bloc Québécois supports Bill C-47 in principle, but we do have reservations and would like to see an amendment to guarantee the protection of people's privacy.

Bill C-47 seeks to enable the police to adapt their investigative techniques to contemporary technological realities, such as the widespread use of cellphones and the Internet. Facilitating police work, where it does not unduly interfere with fundamental rights, is an avenue the Bloc Québécois has always advocated for fighting crime. Our party feels that increasing the likelihood of getting caught is a much greater deterrent than increasing punishments, which often seem remote and abstract.

However, this bill raises a number of concerns about respect for privacy because the reasons for invading privacy are not necessarily defined. The Bloc Québécois supports this bill in principle because it is important to strengthen police powers to deal with the most complex forms of organized crime. Nonetheless, it will work in committee to ensure that invasions of privacy occur as rarely as possible, only when necessary, and always according to strict guidelines.

I hope that the Conservative Party will welcome the Bloc Québécois' amendments to Bill C-47 to protect individual privacy rights and ensure that this bill is implemented as quickly as possible. It is important, critical even, to take action against crimes committed using the Internet. I hope that the Conservative Party will not use this bill merely to spread political and partisan propaganda about how tough it is on crime. As we all know, the Bloc Québécois usually supports initiatives to curb criminal activity, as long as they are sensible, which we do not always find to be the case.

Somewhat similar to Bill C-46, Bill C-47 would allow police forces to adapt their investigative techniques to modern technologies. Of course I am talking about the increasingly widespread use of the Internet and cellphones. Indeed, Bill C-47 and Bill C-46 complement each other. We believe that they could have been combined into one bill. They both have many of the same objectives. They could have very easily been presented in another way. However, based on how they have been presented, we would of course like to debate them.

Basically, these bills seek to give the appropriate authorities additional tools that are adapted to modern technologies in order to prevent crimes before they are committed, by gathering information on the Internet and through other means of communication. This bill is crucial, considering the new types of organized crime that are carried out over the Internet.

For instance, in my riding recently—just two weeks ago—a man of Moroccan origin was arrested and convicted. He was found guilty of a series of terrorism-related charges.

This bill also aims to address cyber-terrorism, to control it and prevent such crimes from being committed.

In the case I mentioned, the evidence was based primarily on the contents of the defendant's computer, in Maskinongé, and on the violent content he created and transmitted over the Internet.

The purpose of Bill C-47 is to improve investigative techniques. It responds to concerns expressed by law enforcement agencies regarding the fact that new technologies, particularly Internet communications, often represent obstacles that are very difficult to overcome.

Thus, Bill C-47 seeks to facilitate police investigations by compelling telecommunications service providers to acquire technology that would allow them to intercept electronic data and, more importantly, allows police forces to access that data. We are talking about data that could indicate, for example, the origin, destination, date, time, duration, type and volume of a telecommunication.

The Bloc Québécois is in favour of effective and smart ways to fight crime, but as we have said many times in this House, we do not always share the Conservative government's vision regarding certain bills, especially when it comes to incarceration measures. Incarceration and minimum sentences have been tried, most notably in the United States, with disastrous results. Yes, incarceration is valid for serious crimes, but it should not always be used automatically and especially not with the principle of minimum sentences.

The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, but that has not necessarily led to a reduction in crime. We have to be very careful about the sort of measures we introduce to fight crime. They must always be aimed at reducing the crime rate. I do not believe that we should be adopting the American model in this area. We still feel that the Conservative Party looks to the Americans for inspiration when it introduces bills that, often, do not reduce crime.

To come back to Bill C-47, no federal law currently requires or compels all telecommunications companies to use equipment that allows communications to be intercepted. The bill seeks to make up for the fact that there is no standard covering the interception capabilities of telecommunications companies.

As I said earlier, Bill C-47 seeks to clarify certain aspects of the lawful access regime. Currently, the police need a warrant in order to compel telecommunications companies to provide them with personal information about their clients. With this bill, certain designated people within law enforcement agencies could, without a warrant or court order, compel a company to provide them with basic information about one of their subscribers.

Obviously, protection measures governing this request for information have been provided in the legislation. Only a very limited type of information is covered by this new system. The bill clearly indicates that the information could be obtained without a warrant. Only designated persons could request information under this bill.

The police can obtain this information without a warrant, but the bill nonetheless puts in place certain extrajudicial protection measures such as the creation of records to trace every request for information.

It is also important to add that although the legislation will apply to businesses that operate a telecommunications facility in Canada, private networks, services for the sale or purchase of goods, and certain specified institutions are exempt from the legislation. I am talking here about registered charities, hospitals and retirement homes. All the exceptions are in the bill.

What concerns me about Bill C-46 is the privacy and freedom of people who use the Internet or other forms of communication.

This bill must not lead to an intrusion into people's private lives or the exchanges between individuals. Honest people have to be able to surf the Internet in a safe and private manner. They must be able to have conversations and conduct financial transactions safely. Honest people must not be taken hostage by criminals in this society, and hence, we need to protect privacy. We have to approach this bill carefully.

In a democratic society, the government's actions have to be transparent and citizens need to know that their privacy is protected. Children need to be protected from pedophile rings and all the other sex offenders on the Internet. We have to protect our economic assets so that we can conduct our transactions and deal with the financial aspects of organized crime. We have to protect our societies from cyber-terrorism, as I mentioned in my speech. This is a situation that people in my riding experienced not so long ago.

Organizations that defend human rights, in this case the right to privacy and confidentiality of communications, have raised a number of points that must be examined when we study this bill in committee. They are definitely important witnesses and should be invited to appear before the committee. The work must be done and it will naturally take time.

The bill introduced today has many complex provisions. Moreover, the impact of certain provisions on other laws is also very difficult to gauge.

We want to take the time to study the bill thoroughly, but we must also act quickly, examine all aspects and especially hear from police organizations and human rights organizations as they have also undertaken the arduous task of studying this bill.

These people must be heard in committee. You can rest assured that the Bloc Québécois will recommend many witnesses.

They must be given, as must we, the time to reflect and to ensure that this legislation strikes a true balance between the need of police to investigate—which is important because we are all familiar with today's growing cybercrime and they have to be able to do their job—and protecting privacy rights. We cannot choose between the two. this bill must clearly respect both issues.

I would also like to touch on the aspect of prevention in an effective strategy to fight cybercrime. This strategy must, of necessity, be based on a multi-pronged approach, whether implemented by the public or the private sector.

It is important to give the public, and especially younger people, the tools and the means to protect themselves against this new type of cybercrime which, unfortunately, is becoming increasingly prevalent.

Therefore, we have to encourage individuals and business people to adopt safe computer practices. At present, Internet users are often careless. Many people start up their computers and store important information in them without giving any thought to the potential, unfortunate consequences.

We need to change how people think, and in order to do so, we need make them more aware. We need to educate and inform the public, and give them the tools they need to protect themselves against cybercrime. This is important. We must invest money into educating the public.

In order to continue our fight against cybercrime and to defend the right to digital privacy, our primary goal, as I mentioned, must be to protect individuals, organizations and governments while taking fundamental democratic principles into account. Obviously, the tools to fight computer crime could potentially violate human rights and compromise the confidentiality of personal information. Securing information requires surveillance, controls and filters. Safeguards must be put in place to avoid allowing people to abuse their power or to dominate, and to avoid Big Brother type situations. We must ensure that fundamental rights are respected—I cannot stress that enough in this speech. In particular, we must ensure that the digital privacy and the confidential personal information of people who use these telecommunications networks are protected.

National legislation regarding the protection of personal information has been around for a long time. We also know that security is the result of a compromise.

I see that I have only two minutes remaining. We must ensure that cyberspace does not become a virtual smorgasbord for cybercriminals, or a dangerous place, or a place with an excessive police presence, or a place controlled by an ultra-powerful entity. We must bring democratic values and the human aspect back into the debate on new technologies. We must find ways to become informed Internet users and not vulnerable and dependent consumers.

In conclusion, I would like to thank the House for allowing me to speak. I want to say that we will support this bill with some reservations. We will examine it in committee.

[Sukh Dhaliwal, Liberal, Newton—North Delta, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to stand in the House today to offer my thoughts on Bill C-47.

This morning I had the opportunity to speak to Bill C-46, which specifically compels the release of electronic data and documents from telecommunications and Internet service providers when there are reasonable grounds to suspect that this data relates to a crime.

Before I begin to tackle the specific issues that Bill C-47 deals with, it is important to note that the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police has been calling for this kind of legislation since 1995. Namely, the police have wanted telecommunications service providers to have the technical capability to allow police services to carry out lawful interceptions on their networks.

While I understand that due diligence, consultation and the drafting of any legislation requires proper care and consideration, this should be a wake-up call to all members of the House. In other words, the broader lesson to be learned is that we as parliamentarians have a responsibility to work together in the best interests of the country to ensure that laws are designed to respond to modern realities in a timely fashion.

Bill C-47 is simple in its intent. It has been constructed to prevent criminals from using telecommunication service providers to commit their crimes anonymously. Shockingly, there is nothing that currently compels these companies to make communication details available to law enforcement, including email and IP addresses, dates, times and content related data. What I find even more surprising is that many of these companies do not even have the appropriate tools to allow these kinds of interceptions. This is an indication of how unregulated and open for abuse the Internet still remains in this country.

If Bill C-47 passes, telecommunication service providers will have six months to update their technology to allow for compliance with law enforcement investigations. These kinds of upgrades are at the heart of this legislation and, quite frankly, with the speed and international scope of Canadian criminals, they are absolutely essential to being able to work with other countries like the U.S., the U.K. and Australia where similar pieces of legislation have been in place for several years now. Furthermore, Canada has agreed to join several international protocols dealing with cyber and hate crimes that make this legislation an obligation as a signatory.

I have listened carefully to several of my colleagues speak today about privacy concerns relating to Bill C-47. They are very important to consider and I would like to share my thoughts. It is true that under this bill the police will no longer need to go before a judge and demonstrate reasonable grounds to suspect wrongdoing. They will merely have to ask companies for basic subscriber data.

This must be considered with the provision that the police are not given total freedom to infiltrate and tap the Internet and wireless networks, as accessing the content of emails, cell phone calls and all other digital data would continue to require court approval. I am being honest when I say that I do not have a problem with providing police with the ability to access this kind of subscriber data quickly.

A number of high profile crimes in my own community of Newton--North Delta were aided or covered up directly as a result of wireless technologies and electronic communications. The speed by which these criminals operate is lightning quick and law enforcement needs to match this speed with investigative practices that are not weighed down by process and bureaucracy. The name, address or telephone number accessed through an IP address could make the difference between capturing a dangerous offender in the context of the act or allowing that individual to slip through the cracks and avoid justice.

However, complaints have filtered in that these kinds of powers have no oversight, no real accountability and have the possibility to avoid logical determinations because of an errant hunch. Furthermore, people have complained that there are no filters nor criteria that would classify these powers as overstepping reasonable investigative techniques.

Those are all valid concerns. There most definitely could be situations where the reasonable expectations for the personal privacy of subscribers are compromised. At the end of the day, however, I firmly believe that this comes down to appropriate governance of such intrusions so that the principles of our free and democratic society are preserved.

This is where I believe that the committee stage will be a vital source of input in how to strengthen Bill C-47. I know that we cannot allow abuse to occur and I and my colleagues on the justice committee will be vocal and strong in our proposed amendments to ensure that does not happen.

However, with such important legislation in the fight against a criminal element that is technically sophisticated and global in its expertise and resources, I do not believe we should throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Once again, I want to point out that we must target the tools of modern crime, and that arsenal has dramatically been expanded beyond weapons or vehicles. We should make no mistake about it, but a gangster's BlackBerry, cellphone and Internet access have all become vital to facilitating crimes to be committed.

Those are the realities of what our brave law enforcement professionals are encountering and we must update our entire approach to ensure the safety of all our communities.

I offer my support for Bill C-47 with the exception that the contributions made at the committee stage will allow the legislation to address many of the fears that have been raised today and over the past few months.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I am surprised that my colleague would act that way. I respect his work in the public safety committee and have seen him act with courage and independence on many occasions, as I did today. I am surprised that such a facile and unfair question would be put.

How does he get out of anything I have said that by any preponderance of imagination we would be soft on luring children on the Internet? That has nothing to do with this bill.

Bill C-46, which we supported earlier today, makes it a crime in the Criminal Code for anyone to lure people over the digital media. We do not have to talk about that in terms of this bill because this bill does not have anything to do with luring children. This bill has to do with making telecommunications companies have equipment to preserve data, which we support . It has to do with getting basic subscriber information to the police. The only question is whether or not we should do that with judicial oversight.

I am surprised that my hon. colleague, who I know is a lawyer, would not understand and support that very important concept of privacy and civil rights in this country.