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.

Technical Assistance for Law Enforcement in the 21st Century Act

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Mr. Speaker, the short answer with respect to this bill is, no. Why? Because this bill is fundamentally flawed.

On the face of this bill it asks parliamentarians to vote in favour of a serious and direct incursion into people's privacy rights. There is no room to go forward with a bill like this, to see how many thousands of Canadians' rights are violated in five years and then come back. We know the bill is flawed now. That is different than Bill C-46 where that is a very intelligent suggestion.

My colleague mentioned the Privacy Commissioner. She asked some really trenchant questions for all parliamentarians to ask as we consider this bill. What law enforcement or national security duty justifies access without a warrant by authorities to personal information? Why are some of these powers unrestricted when the spirit of Canadian law clearly reflects the view that access or seizure without court authorization should be exceptional? Are the mechanisms for accountability commensurate to the unprecedented powers envisioned?

To ask those questions is to answer them. This bill fails in those three questions at this point. That is why no review is necessary. Parliamentarians should send this bill back for further study by the minister right now.

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

Mr. Speaker, I too would like to thank our member for making an excellent presentation today.

The member knows that the Privacy Commissioner did request a five year parliamentary review for Bill C-46, so I wonder whether he would agree with that as far as having a parliamentary review for Bill C-47. What form would he suggest the parliamentary review take?

Perhaps he would examine also the possibility of a sunset clause so that after five years the bill would simply expire and would have to be reintroduced given that technology does change radically even over a one year period. Perhaps in five years things will look totally different to us at that point in time.

I would ask him whether he would consider either one of those options?

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I rise with pride to speak on behalf of the New Democrats in Parliament in the debate on Bill C-47, the technical assistance for law enforcement in the 21st century act.

A number of people in the House have commented, as I did this morning when I spoke to Bill C-46, that Bill C-46 and Bill C-47 represent a combined legislative measure that purports to deal with the modernization of our laws with respect to Internet and digital activity of crimes in those areas, as well as to deal with telecommunication companies and the challenges that those new providers present in enforcing the laws of our country. It is critically important to understand that these bills do different things.

People in the House and all Canadians may know that the New Democrats spoke strongly in support of Bill C-46 this morning and in the days previous for the simple reason that New Democrats believe it is important to modernize our laws to deal with the digital age. We also think it is important to send a strong message that crimes committed over the Internet, whether they be commercial or fraud related or whether they be sexual in nature or the most heinous of all, targeted at children, are dealt with adequately by Parliament.

Having said that, there are also very important privacy interests at stake in these areas. New Democrats are scrutinizing these pieces of legislation to ensure that Canadians' privacy rights are respected.

Bill C-46 which we spoke about earlier, in the New Democrats' view, maintains that balance, by and large. We had some serious reservations about some of the tests that are being proposed by that legislation with respect to the getting of warrants, but every piece of private information that is to be turned over to police forces of whatever type in Bill C-46 is subject to judicial oversight and requires that police get a search warrant prior to that information being turned over.

Bill C-47 is different. The purpose of the bill in colloquial terms is lawful access. This bill 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, including the Criminal Code, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service Act and the National Defence Act.

The bill complements the current lawful access regime and it addresses the same two issues as former Bill C-74, technical interception capabilities of telecommunications service providers and request for subscriber information. I will put that in terms that are easy to understand.

The bill does two things. It essentially requires telecommunications companies to install equipment that would allow it to preserve digital data in all of its forms so that the data may be obtainable by the police in a criminal investigation. It also does a second thing. It provides law enforcement agencies with access, under an administrative process without a warrant or court order, to basic information about telecommunications service subscribers. As will be seen a little later, that basic information about Canadian subscribers is quite a long list and one that is causing great concern among a lot of Canadians.

Bill C-47 is a key step in the harmonization of legislation at the international level, according to the government, particularly concerning requirements regarding interception capabilities of telecommunications service providers. This type of requirement in general form is already found in other countries, including the United States, Britain and Australia. Canada signed on to the Council of Europe's Convention on Cybercrime in November 2001 as well as additional protocols. This makes it an offence to commit certain crimes using computer systems, and it creates legal tools adapted to new technologies, such as orders to produce subscriber information to which I just referred. However, there is one key difference. There is no international consensus on whether or not that basic subscriber information has to be obtained through judicial order, in other words, a warrant. As I will describe further in my remarks later on, that is a key deficiency in this bill.

I want to state clearly what New Democrats support when we talk about combatting crimes committed over the digital media and the need to modernize our systems. The NDP supports efforts to combat cybercrime completely. We support efforts to combat child pornographers, others who use the Internet to exploit children or anybody in any manner. New Democrats support efforts to crack down on gangs and organized criminals, including white collar criminals who use technology to organize their activities. New Democrats support modernizing laws to ensure that police can keep up with criminals who use technology.

Those are the reasons we supported Bill C-46 earlier today, because that is what Bill C-46 did. However, New Democrats do not support violating the privacy rights of law-abiding Canadians.

When this bill was introduced in the House in June of this year by the Minister of Public Safety, there was a groundswell of concern raised by ordinary Canadians across the country about the idea of Internet service providers having to deliver to police basic information about them without any kind of warrant or judicial oversight.

A very great thinker who was steeped in western democracy some decades ago said that those who would sacrifice liberty in the name of security deserve neither. That is a particularly appropriate comment in the context of this bill because this bill does not strike that balance and it does sacrifice liberty in the name of security. New Democrats cannot support a bill that provides for warrantless access to Canadians' private information.

We have consulted broadly with a number of experts. I will talk about their input later. They told us that no compelling evidence has been provided by any police force in this country when directly asked on numerous occasions for a single instance where a police investigation somehow had been interfered with or truncated because they could not get information from an Internet service provider. No compelling evidence has been presented that the current provisions in the Criminal Code and other pieces of legislation are insufficient for police to do their jobs. I will pause here.

This is not a hole in the Criminal Code. There are currently provisions in the Criminal Code that allow police, the RCMP, CSIS, any policing agencies, municipal or otherwise, in this country to obtain warrants when they want to either wiretap or seize information or material that is in the custody of anyone. I will speak more about this later.

There is the concept of telewarrants. If there is an urgency to a matter, police can get a judge on the phone 24 hours a day and usually obtain a warrant within 30 minutes. We heard nothing from any police forces as to any problem in that regard. There is the concept of hot pursuit. If any police officer believes that a crime is being committed currently, in real time, they do not have to obtain a warrant from anybody. They are able to interfere and investigate that matter immediately.

Since the government introduced this bill, experts in the field of digital law, privacy advocates, media commentators and ordinary law-abiding Canadians have spoken out against the provisions contained in the bill.

Bill C-47, as I have said, would provide police with access to a substantial array of private information. This information goes well beyond an individual's name and address. Police would be given access to Canadians' phone numbers, email addresses and a vast array of unique digital serial numbers.

This legislation, if passed, would compel telecommunications companies to provide the following information to the police upon request with no judicial oversight: IP addresses, mobile identification numbers, electronic serial numbers, local service provider identifiers, international mobile equipment identity numbers, international mobile subscriber identity numbers, and subscriber identity module card numbers, commonly known as SIM card numbers which are in cellphones.

These digital identifiers are considered to be private information for good reason. When someone's Internet protocol address falls into the wrong hands, great damage can be done to his or her online identity and personal privacy. In fact, someone with the right skills and the right combination of the above information could perpetrate serious identity crimes and even take remote control of a person's computer.

The government, it is fair to say, has demonstrated what can fairly be described as a consistent disregard and disrespect for both the rule of law and for our judicial system.

We have Omar Khadr, a person who has been the subject of torture down in Cuba, whom the government does not deem fit to bring back here. It does not care about his international rights.

We have the Prime Minister's comments about left-wing judges and how they interfere, in his view, with the administration of justice.

We have CSIS misleading the courts in the Harkat case on multiple occasions, failing to disclose information after being ordered by the court to do so with no reaction from the Minister of Public Safety. And as my colleague from the Bloc said, we had the spectre of our government breaking its very own fixed election law, that the Minister of Justice crowed about when it was brought in. It violated its own law with absolute impunity and had the audacity to not even be embarrassed about it.

It is unsurprising then that the government would seek to cast aside a fundamental tenet of our justice system, which is this. Canadians have the right to privacy, except to be deprived of that through due process of law. We do not have to justify to the government why we have the right to be private, why we have the right to be safe and secure in our information, why we do not have to let the government read our mail or read our emails or seize our property or kick down our door. We do not have to justify that to anybody. Those are the rights of Canadians.

What the government has to do, what the state has to do, is justify when it seeks to abrogate those rights, not the other way around.

It is 2009 and I am absolutely aghast that I have to stand in this chamber, hundreds of years after these rights had been fought for, where people died for these rights, and actually explain, as the only person in this chamber whom I have heard speak so far, that the state has to justify and go before a judge, and at least put forward some reasonable evidence, some compelling reason, before any private information is turned over to the state. This bill does not do that and that is a shame.

The government would have us believe that judicial oversight is some sort of outdated luxury or some sort of impediment that it cannot move quickly enough. Let me tell members something. Rights do not depend upon speed. Rights do not depend upon exigencies. Rights do not depend upon convenience. Rights are rights, and as I said earlier, it has not even been demonstrated by a single person in this country that the present telewarrant system or hot pursuit concept has proved insufficient in any manner.

Let me stop and say that the New Democrats agree, as we did in Bill C-46, that there should be preservation orders of data and production orders of telecommunications companies so that the data is preserved and can be the subject of warrants and seizure. That is very important and we support the modernization of our laws to make that possible.

What we do not and will not agree with, however, is that that is a decision only of a police officer. That is a decision that must always be subject to judicial oversight.

Last week I was in this chamber when I saw the spectre of the Liberals and the Conservatives joining together to gut climate change action. Now I see the Liberals and the Conservatives joining together this week to gut privacy rights and civil liberties, and that is not a pretty thing to see.

The government, in this legislation, would have us believe that requiring police officers to get warrants before accessing deeply private digital data is hindering their ability to investigate crimes. The fact is that our current system provides a number of tools to give police officers swift access to help them combat crime.

It is extremely important that the police forces of this country demonstrate the requirement to get a warrant before accessing this data. That judicial oversight of police actions is an important, critical aspect of our cherished western democratic legal system, and only in that regard will Canadians be willing to surrender their valued rights to privacy.

I want to mention, as well, that just today we received a letter from the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, Jennifer Stoddart. I just want to quote a bit from this letter. She states:

--we recognize the concerns of law enforcement and national security authorities with the speed of developments in information technology and the anonymity they afford. Bills C-46 and C-47 seek to address the consequent public safety challenges and that objective is valid. [New Democrats agree] That said, whenever new surveillance powers or programs are proposed, it is my view that there must be demonstrated necessity, proportionality and effectiveness...It is a matter of protecting human rights and assuring public trust.

Ms. Stoddart goes on, over a five-page letter, to say that, in her view, these bills are seriously flawed; at least Bill C-47 is.

Now, the minister was asked a little while ago about examples in the real world as to why this bill is necessary.

I have spoken with a number of experts in the field of digital law and privacy, for instance, Professor Michael Geist, professor of law at University of Ottawa and Vince Gogolek, from the British Columbia Freedom of Information and Privacy Association. I spoke this morning with David Fewer and other academics. They documented a very disturbing fact with regard to the government's attempt to convince Canadians that police need these powers; that is, the government comes up with examples that are not actually true.

The Minister of Public Safety, on numerous occasions, in the media and elsewhere, has used the example of a high-profile Vancouver kidnapping case as an instance where police were hindered by the existing laws. In a number of interviews, the minister has claimed that he witnessed this emergency situation and that Vancouver police officers had to wait 36 hours to get the information they needed in order to obtain a warrant for a customer name and address information.

What is troubling about this is that it is not true. Professor Geist filed access to information requests with the Department of Public Safety, the RCMP and the Vancouver Police Department. A legal adviser to the Vancouver Police Department disclosed to Professor Geist that no Internet service provider records were ever sought, at all, during the investigation of this terrible crime.

If the only example that our own minister can put forward to this House as to why he thinks it is necessary to trample Canadians' privacy rights in the name of security is one which due diligence shows never even occurred, that is somewhat troubling.

Now, one other thing. The previous minister of public safety, the current Minister of International Trade, has made comments in this area before. This idea of floating a warrantless search has come up before. I think the Liberals keep boasting that they brought forward this legislation before. I wonder if they also thought that it was necessary for Canadians to give up their rights to digital privacy without a warrant. If that is the case, then I think they have been wrong for years.

The response from the digital community, from privacy experts and from ordinary law-abiding Canadians, was overwhelming. The government, the previous minister, was forced to back off when it tried to introduced this legislation. What the previous minister said was that the government would never bring in any kind of disclosure requirements without a warrant. He made that comment publicly.

I do not know what has changed in the government. We heard some interesting comments from my colleagues in the Bloc, and even in the Liberal Party, about the way the government uses crime as a weapon to prey on people's fears and to dodge weighty important political issues that are going on when it throws out hastily conceived, poorly thought out and rights-violating legislation, and then it pretends that anybody who is not in favour of it is not against crime.

What a simplistic argument. What an argument that offends any Canadian's sense of right thinkingness and sense of justice and respect for civil rights; particularly when we are on the eve of November 11, when all Canadians are going to be taking a moment of silence to think of all those veterans who fought in wars. For what? For democracy and for civil rights, for the right to not have the state seize our information without judicial oversight. And here, these people in this chamber, the ones who care about public safety and security, they are going go attend those celebrations and they are going to pretend that they value the sacrifices of our veterans.

If they do, and I will give them the benefit of the doubt, they can show that by going back to their minister and saying, “Minister, we will not support this legislation if it requires Canadians to deliver public information without a warrant”.

New Democrats will work with this bill, but we cannot and we will not sacrifice Canadians' rights to privacy in the name of security. Canadians deserve both. We can have both. We can have security. We can have civil rights. That is what Canada is about.

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

Mr. Speaker, I would note that with respect to Bill C-46 the Privacy Commissioner did ask for effective oversight. I would like to ask the member whether he agrees with that idea and what sort of oversight he would recommend. Would a minister be in charge of it or would Parliament be in charge of it?

She also called for a five year parliamentary review of Bill C-46. I wonder whether he supports that idea with regard to Bill C-47 either by way of a sunset clause where we would start over after five years given that technology changes so rapidly anyway. What form of mechanism would he suggest that we develop for a review after a five year period?

[Serge Ménard, Bloc, Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC]

Mr. Speaker, we have here a bill that complements the one we debated this week, namely Bill C-46. In fact, together, bills C-46 and C-47 seem to make up former Bill C-74, introduced by the Liberals in 2004.

This bill is in fact designed to provide police with capabilities to intercept electronic communications, using modern means of communication. As long as there is agreement on the fact that telephone interception greatly contributed to the dismantling of criminal networks and the gathering of evidence with respect to numerous conspiracies, and that it made it possible to apprehend offenders and sentence them for the right amount of time, short of making the argument that all telephone interception ought to be abolished, I do not think that anyone can seriously object to modernizing police capabilities for intercepting communications using modern technologies such as the Internet and electronic means.

People started talking about the Convention on Cybercrime in 1995. Canada met with European nations, Japan and South Africa, among others. These meetings led to an agreement in 2001, which is a significant date. The agreement was signed soon after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York. Long before that, we had seen plenty of evidence here at home that exceptional investigative powers were critical to fighting organized crime.

Just last week, the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights met with witnesses in Montreal and Halifax as part of its study of major criminal organizations. In both cities, police officers said much the same thing about how difficult it is for them to conduct electronic surveillance of organized crime groups. Among other things, they said that cell phones are so cheap, people can buy one, make a few calls, and then throw it away, sometimes on the same day it was purchased, then switch to a new one. It takes a long time for police officers to get the legal warrants they need, and in the meantime, they cannot monitor transactions between the gangs and cartels they are trying to catch.

Bloc members support effective measures to fight crime, but they completely disagree with the current government's policies on incarceration because excessive incarceration and mandatory minimum sentences have already been tried in places like the United States. These measures have produced terrible results in the United States, which has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Some 25% of all prisoners in the world are in American prisons, yet this approach has not put a dent in the crime rate. Naturally, we oppose such measures.

We would not want Canada and Quebec to take the same route, which leads to increasingly violent crime and results in a portion of the population whose lives have been broken by excessive sentences and who are discouraged from getting an education or taking training to get a job. We do not want that in Canada. We know that that is what will happen. That is not what the government is announcing. That is not what it talked about.

We understand from the government's arguments that the only reason it is pursuing its policies is because they are popular with voters. Last week, it was appalling to hear them explain what had been the benefits of conditional sentences, which allowed judges to avoid sending an offender to crime school for a first offence, but instead to let the offender continue holding a job and therefore have stability in order to live an honest life, get an education for that purpose and, in the case of drug problems, go through addiction treatment under threat of serving time in prison if the offender did not attend treatment. Now, the government wants to eliminate this tool that judges had.

I may be getting a little off track. I have already talked quite a bit about Bill C-46. We support this bill. Why is it being introduced now? Certainly not because the opposition obstructed the government. When measures are introduced that help fight crime or will reduce the crime rate, the Bloc supports them. But we oppose measures than will have no effect on the crime rate. In this case, these are necessary measures.

However, these bills still have to be looked at carefully. Some things are needed to combat major criminal organizations. But most of the population, which is made up of honest people, is worried and would not want Canada to become a society where the government can easily look into all aspects of their personal lives. Honest people expect some parts of their private lives to remain confidential.

We need solid guidelines for accessing the information that can be obtained by intercepting all communications that involve modern information technology, such as computers and the Internet.

I believe that most citizens are honest and law abiding, as the Conservatives have said so often. However, I wonder if the Prime Minister falls into that category of law abiding citizens. I know of one law—we are all familiar with it—that he broke, the one concerning fixed election dates. He called the last election.

In my opinion, we must be very careful and realize that the majority of Canadians believe that they have the right to a private life and that the state should not have access to all their communications for frivolous reasons. I believe that the bill was designed with this in mind. However, that does not mean that it is perfect.

We are surprised, and we will certainly want to discuss this, by the complexity of this bill, which must be studied in detail. What is striking is the amount of information that can be obtained without a legal warrant and solely on the basis of suspicions or with a warrant obtained solely on the basis of suspicions. When electronic surveillance was permitted, legal warrants were required and there had to be reasonable grounds for believing that information could be obtained to prove an offence had taken place or even to prevent certain criminal activities from occurring. Furthermore, other means of investigation had to have been attempted without providing results.

We seem to have readily accepted it now that electronic surveillance has proved its worth in police investigations and given many results that have pleased citizens. I can personally say that had we not had the means to conduct electronic surveillance, we would never have broken up the Hells Angels in Quebec, as we did in 2001 after three years of hard work. I think that citizens appreciate what we accomplished.

There no longer seems to be a reluctance to use electronic surveillance. In this regard, I think that police forces that come before the committee should be prepared. I am not saying from the outset, in the four categories of measures to obtain certain warrants, that it is always necessary to prove that other means of investigation would be impossible to undertake or not very useful. However, I am saying that at least once they must shoulder the burden of proof.

It should be noted that can be obtained without a court order is more or less what I would call the telephone book of IP addresses. Furthermore, it took me a while to understand the purpose of these IP addresses, despite the fact that I consider myself rather computer savvy. I was also glad to learn what they do. My understanding is that they help safeguard access to my computer in a way. Of course, I would be very worried to hear that other people can find out these IP numbers without my authorization. Yes, it is more complicated, but really, it is nearly the same as the phone book. However, in the case of the phone book, we can ask for an unlisted number.

I also noted another important point that must definitely stay in the bill. Access to this information is limited to certain people, either police officers or national security officials, and those individuals must answer to someone in their organization. They must keep records regarding requests and the information they are seeking, and they must be able to justify them.

When an individual police officer needs to quickly access this kind of information, he or she must bring it to a superior officer. All of these records are kept in police organizations and security organizations. In addition— something that is very important for us—a copy must be sent to the Privacy Commissioner, which gives me greater confidence. At least there will be one public official whose primary desire is not to unduly increase police powers. Furthermore, based on the positions that these organizations generally take, there is no doubt that they really are dedicated to their duty to protect privacy. I find that reassuring. I also think an in-depth study is needed, which should include the views of two people in particular, Chantal Bernier and Jennifer Stoddart. The name of Ms. Stoddart's organization escapes me at the moment.

Ms. Bernier's agency handles privacy protection. I believe that we should certainly listen to them. We should also certainly listen to volunteer agencies such as the Commission des droits et libertés de la personne du Québec that have done so much to help achieve a balance between investigation methods and the protection of individual rights.

That is the role the Bloc Québécois has taken on in these circumstances. We want to modernize measures that can truly have an impact on crime. We are prepared to support them. However, we believe there needs to be a balance.

The Conservatives keep proposing minimum sentences and are always pushing their tough on crime policy, which, in their case, has become a stupid on crime policy. We agree that something has to be done, but we believe that there has to be a balance in protecting individual freedoms. Protecting individual freedoms is the foundation of the societies we are proud of and want to uphold. It is the foundation of democratic societies.

I believe that Kofi Annan was thinking along the same lines when he said that the terrorists will have won if they force democratic societies to unduly increase the powers of the state. That is what I noticed when we studied the Anti-terrorism Act in detail. I am not saying the Act was not justified, on the contrary, but there was no way to show the government, not even with concrete examples, that some of the provisions of that legislation were unjustified.

Fortunately, we managed to convince the person who was Liberal leader for a short period of time, the hon. member for Saint-Laurent—Cartierville. When he refused to renew the sunset clauses, I heard him repeating the same arguments we used to show that these measures were not necessary.

The purpose of Bill C-47 is to allow police forces to adapt their investigative techniques to contemporary technological realities such as the widespread use of cellphones or the Internet. Making police work easier without unduly infringing on fundamental rights is one of the routes the Bloc Québécois has always preferred for fighting crime.

The government can count on us not to obstruct this bill. We hope it will pass, but that it will be improved by the criticism we will make and that it will strike a better balance between the tools police need to fight modern criminal organizations and the privacy Quebeckers and Canadians are entitled to and want to enjoy for a long time to come.

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak again on this matter.

Before I came to this House, I was a member of the Durham Regional Police Services Board. When I was there, I had the opportunity obviously on a regular basis to talk with officers around the changing technologies and the fact that our laws simply had not kept pace. People were committing fraud online or hiding behind anonymity on Internet service providers and performing serious crimes, and the police simply could not follow them.

I was first elected in 2004 and when I came to Parliament, I was pleased to support the work of the then Liberal government to create what was the modernization of investigative techniques act. That bill which was introduced in 2005 is ostensibly what is before the House today in both bills, Bill C-46 and Bill C-47, which is now being debated. Unfortunately, in 2005 the Conservatives precipitated an election and that killed the bill.

The member for Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine then reintroduced that as a private member's bill in the next session and again that bill was killed when the Prime Minister walked to the Governor General's office and then killed that legislation.

In this session of Parliament that same Liberal member of Parliament introduced that Liberal legislation yet again. We had to wait until the end of the last session before the Conservatives finally introduced it.

As I said, just before we began question period, it is a little rich to me that the Conservatives would be going on about the imperative need to pass the bill and how much it is needed for police and how critical it is when they in fact have had four years to introduce it and are the ones responsible for killing it in various stages at various moments in time.

When they finally did introduce it, they introduced it in the last week the House was sitting before summer when there was no opportunity to debate it, there was no opportunity to move it forward. Now, it has been left until the end of October before we are finally dealing with the bill.

It shows that the Conservatives' commitment to the bill is fragile at best. In fact, we have seen what they do on criminal justice matters. They introduce bills and let them languish on the order paper. Then they wait for a scandal or a problem to hit and then they seek refuge in those same crime bills, suddenly bringing them back with great urgency saying they need to be dealt with immediately and any opposition party that dares to ask a question on them is somehow soft on crime.

The facts do not measure up. The facts are that they have allowed these things to languish for years and something that should have been dealt with, the Liberal legislation that was introduced so long ago, has meant that those people are committing online fraud and the police officers who need those additional investigative techniques and tools have been left without them as the government has completely failed them.

I think it is important to note as well that this is not the only area where we have seen this problem with the government. I spoke a great deal yesterday about the importance of these new investigative techniques for police. My intention is not today to repeat all of those comments but to make a comment more generally on the direction the Conservatives are heading on crime.

Today, in the public safety and national security committee we had a couple of different witnesses. One of the witnesses was Dr. Craig Jones who is the executive director of the John Howard Society of Canada. His insights into the direction in which the government is heading on crime I think is very telling. I will quote from his comments today. He said at the beginning of his statement:

My second audience is the future. I suffer no illusions that I will be able to alter the course of this government’s crime agenda--which legislative components contradict evidence, logic, effectiveness, justice and humanity. The government has repeatedly signalled that its crime agenda will not be influenced by evidence of what does and does not actually reduce crime and create safer communities.

What we heard as well from Mr. Stewart along with Michael Jackson, who wrote a report about the government's broken direction on corrections and crime, is that we are walking down the same road that the Americans embarked on in the early 1980s, when Republicans came forward and presented the same type of one-type solution for crime, which is incarceration, more incarceration and only incarceration.

If we did not have that example and the example that was in the United Kingdom, perhaps the Conservatives would be forgiven for thinking that would work. The reality of the United States is that this is a catastrophic disaster. In fact, the governor of California is now saying the state is being crushed under the weight of the mistake of these decisions, that the prisons are literally overflowing. The supreme court of California had to release thousands of offenders into the streets because the prisons simply had no room for them.

We also see that these prisons become crime factories. Minor criminals go in often for drug-related crimes, break and enters or smaller but still serious crimes, but instead of getting help for the addiction or mental health issues they face, they get sent into prison environments where they learn to be much worse criminals. We could make the analogy of putting in a butter knife and getting out a machine gun.

In fact, in committee today the director of the John Howard Society quoted an individual who deals with aboriginal inmates and said that our prison systems are turning into “gladiator schools”. He stated:

So our federal prisons have become “gladiator schools” where we train young men in the art of extreme violence or where we warehouse mentally ill people. All of this was foreseeable by anyone who cared to examine the historical experience of alcohol prohibition, but since we refuse to learn from history we are condemned to repeat it.

Everyone can imagine that as we continually overpopulate these prisons and do not provide the services to rehabilitate people, it has to come out somewhere. Where it comes out is in a system that continually degenerates.

In California the rate of recidivism, the rate at which people reoffend, is now 70%. Imagine that, 7 out of every 10 criminals who go into that system come out and reoffend, and those offences are often more serious than the ones they went in for first. In other words, people are going into the system and then coming out much worse.

We have to remember that even when we increase sentences, over 90% of offenders will get out. We can extend the length of time they are staying in there, but at a certain time they are going to get out, and it is the concern of anybody who wants a safe country or community that when people come out of these facilities, they come out ready to be reintegrated, to contribute to society and not reoffend.

The other fundamental problem with the Conservative approach to crime is that it waits for victims. Conservatives think the only way to deal with crime is to wait until somebody has been victimized and a crime has occurred, and then to punish the person.

Of course, we believe in serious sentences. We have to have serious sentences for serious crimes, but that is not nearly enough. If it were enough, if simply having tough sentences were enough to stop crime, then places like Detroit, Houston and Los Angeles would be the safest cities in North America. We know that is certainly not the case.

What the Conservatives are doing is slashing crime prevention budgets. Actual spending in crime prevention has been slashed by more than 50% since the Conservatives came into power. They have cut programs.

I have gone to communities like Summerside and talked to the Boys and Girls Clubs or the Salvation Army in different communities. They said they have either lost funding for community projects to help youth at risk or, instead of being given the power to decide how to stop crime in their own communities, they are prescribed solutions from on high in Ottawa, which is disconnected and often does not work in those local communities.

The net result is that the community, which has the greatest capacity to stop crime, has its ability removed of stopping that crime from happening in the first place, which means even more people go to these prisons, continually feeding this factory of crime the Conservatives are marching forward with.

When we look at the costs of all of this, not only does it not provide a benefit, not only does it make our communities less safe, as has been proven in the United States, but there is a staggering cost to these policies. Pursuing a failed Republican agenda on crime that not even the Republicans would subscribe to any more in most states and most quarters in the United States comes with a staggering cost.

The Conservatives are refusing to release those figures. The minister has been refusing to tell us what exactly the price tag is for all of these measures they are putting on the table. That is why I have asked the Parliamentary Budget Officer to take a look at all of these measures and their approach on crime, and tell us just what the cost is.

That bears some important questions to be asked. Where are the Conservatives going to get the money to build these new super prisons that they are talking about? Where are they going to get the money to house all of these additional inmates? Presumably, they would provide programs and services to make these inmates better. Where is that money going to come from?

If the example in the United States is any evidence, or if the example of the Conservatives' own action in slashing crime prevention budgets is any example, then we know that they will cut from the very things that stop crime from happening in the first place. Imagine the irony of that. To pay for prisons, they are going to cut the very things that stop people from going to prison. It is a backward philosophy under any logic. Upon examination of more than a minute or two, one would recognize that it is a recipe for disaster.

If that were not bad enough, and I think that it speaks directly to this bill, the Conservatives have also betrayed police. I have talked with the Canadian Police Association about the government's commitment to put 2,500 new officers on the street. That association has called that broken promise a betrayal. However, we also know that, with respect to the RCMP, the Prime Minister went out to Vancouver where he made a solemn commitment to RCMP officers that they would get the same wage as other police officers and that they would receive parity with other police officers.

Right after making that promise and signing a contract, he ripped that contract up and broke the promise. Worse, as if that was not enough of an insult to the men and women who are our national police force, the government then challenged in court the right of RCMP officers to have the choice of whether or not they wanted to have collective bargaining. The government decided to challenge a right that is enjoyed by every other police force in the country.

At the same time, the government has ignored call after call by public inquiry after public inquiry for proper and adequate oversight. The reports and conclusions of Justice Iacobucci and Justice O'Connor made it clear that new oversight mechanisms were critical to ensure that public confidence remained in our national security institutions and our national police force, yet the government ignored it. In this example, it ignored for four years Liberal legislation that had been put forward to give officers the tools that they needed to do the job of keeping our communities safe.

In all of this, the government's response is to skew the Liberal record and be dishonest about what exactly Liberals have done on crime. Here is an inconvenient fact that it does not like to talk about. For every year the Liberal government was in power, crime rates went down. Every single year that we were in power, Canada became a safer place. The communities were safer and that is because we took a balanced approach to crime.

However, the government also says that we have blocked its crime bills. That is incredibly disingenuous. Here is the reality. Maybe I will go over a couple of bills just from this session. These are bills that the Liberal Patry not only supported but moved to accelerate and tried to find a way to get passed as expediently as possible in the House.

The government caused an election, so it killed all of its own bill. When it brought back Bill C-2, it included Bill C-10, Bill C-32, Bill C-35, Bill C-27 and Bill C-22, all of which we supported. We supported and looked to accelerate Bill C-14, Bill C-15, Bill C-25 and C-26.

That is the record of Liberals in this session of Parliament on crime, not to mention the Liberal record of reducing crime every year that we were in office previously.

Today I was doing an Atlantic radio talk show with a Conservative member of Parliament who ascribed the motive to the Liberal Party that we did not care about crime, that we are soft on criminals, and that we like to let people get away with things. I will say one thing about the Conservatives. I think that they believe what they say. I think that they honestly believe that these policies will work, even though they have failed. Even though Republicans have tried them and they have been utter disasters, I do believe that the Conservatives think they will work.

However, to ascribe motive to this side of the House and to say that we somehow care less about the safety of our communities is disingenuous. To say that I care less about the safety of my children, family or community is unacceptable. This debate needs to be about who has the best approach to crime.

I would suggest that we have the best approach to stop crime before it happens, to build safe communities, to ensure we strike the right balance between being tough on those who commit serious crimes, but, most important, working with every ounce of our bodies to ensure those who begin to turn down dark paths have people who step in and intervene to ensure they do not commit those crimes in the first place. That is the type of approach we advocate on crime and it is one that I am proud of.

Investigative Powers for the 21st Century Act

[Nicolas Dufour, Bloc, Repentigny, QC]

Madam Speaker, it is my pleasure to rise today to address Bill C-46 on investigations and the Internet.

This is an interesting bill for a very specific reason. For the past little while, the government side has been introducing legislation to deal with crime, cybercrime and new technology used by criminals. One can think, for instance, of the identity theft bill, which the Bloc Québécois supports, and Bill C-46, which the Bloc Québécois will also be supporting. I will outline later our reasons for supporting this bill, but I will also mention the contraindications to this bill; it is a matter of dosage.

I must say that what is being proposed by the government side is interesting for a change. We can sense a desire to modernize, which is something of a novelty on the part of a Reform-Conservative Party. They should normally be acting like dinosaurs, but all of a sudden, we can see an increased effort to try and modernize some pieces of legislation. The problem is that subtlety is not their forte. Complications might happen, which they may not know what to do about. Hence the importance of thorough debate.

We cannot pass a bill as important as this one that quickly. A few short days are not enough to conclude debate, close the matter and immediately pass the bill. We will need time to examine the bill and consider its consequences. If this bill can be referred to the Standing Committee on Justice or the Standing Committee on Public Safety, for example, we will have to take the time to speak with witnesses and see whether some valuable amendments could be made.

I will confess that the Bloc is supporting this bill because of its importance and because of the fact that, increasingly, the world is turning to the Internet. More and more banking is done on the Internet, which could attract fraudsters to the net. There is another major problem, that of pedophilia. There is the risk of having to deal with the exploitation of minors and children. That sort of thing happens on the Internet. At least, with new legislation, there will be new equipment to go after sexual offenders, these predators—if I can put it that way—and catch them as quickly as possible and clean up the Internet a little.

We are all aware of the meteoric rise in the use of the Internet since the mid-1990s. Its use is constantly growing. I provided a couple of examples about pedophilia on the Internet, which can be and is misused. There is Internet fraud as well. I will establish a link with what we were debating last week regarding identity theft. With the arrival of sites such as Facebook, more and more information is available on the Internet. It can of course be improperly used. With this bill, we will at least have the means to deal with this sort of crime all the more vigorously.

On the subject of problems, we must not go to the other extreme. It is in this regard that I have some fears about the Conservatives, and perhaps more about the Reform and Alliance wing of the Conservatives. It would be easy to get carried away with this bill. The Ligue des droits et libertés in Quebec has expressed serious concerns regarding this bill, since confidential information obtained on people could be misused. The league says the government has to be transparent and the private life of people has to be protected.

So already there is a problem with this bill, which will have to be debated in committee. Witnesses will have to be heard and serious work must be done, as the Bloc has done each time in legal matters. To echo what my NDP colleague said earlier, we in the Bloc have always been smart on crime. I think we have one of the best critics on the subject in our colleague, the hon. member for Marc-Aurèle-Fortin. He was minister of public security in Quebec for many years and it was he who fought the hardest against crime, among other things. The Hell's Angels at the time, are an example.

All of the knowledge and intellect of the hon. member for Marc-Aurèle-Fortin could shed fantastic light in committee, where witnesses could be called and amendments worked out. This bill is consistent, but needs fine tuning. I am known to be a perfectionist. We will have to make improvements in committee.

I have been listening to my other colleagues’ speeches since the beginning of the day. I am not just a perfectionist, I also have a good ear and am a good listener. One of the areas that could be tackled most easily with this bill is cyberpedophilia. Unfortunately, people do not use the Internet only for good purposes. I was surprised recently when I read statistics about Internet usage. Nearly 90% of Internet sites and Internet pages are related to pornography. This is shocking. Obviously cyberpedophiles have no qualms about using the Internet to distribute child pornography files. We have a duty to combat this vigorously, to make sure that we eliminate this atrocity to the extent possible; we are all in agreement. This is the example that came up most often in the case of this bill.

My colleague from Abitibi—Témiscamingue has done just as good a job as my colleague from Marc-Aurèle-Fortin when it comes to justice and public safety issues. He was just saying that we could put chips in cars. Very often, when a car is stolen, it is broken down into parts that are sent to the four corners of the world, and this makes tracing a difficult task. It is very hard to find the car or the parts intact.

At least, we are seeing modernization of some laws, as I was just saying. This is no longer the era of highway robbery and of trains being derailed so the cars could be robbed. The Jesse James's of this world belong to the past. But it was a somewhat more romantic era, if I may say so. Nonetheless, we are seeing bandits making wide use of the Internet, in our day, to achieve their ends. Bank thefts are becoming increasingly complex. These people have an extraordinary ability to reinvent themselves. I have always been told that government reacts rather than acting, but it is clear that the government has finally decided to act, and to introduce this bill.

As I said, it will be extremely important to move this debate to committee so we can examine all facets of the bill. My fear is that the Conservatives want to pass it too quickly. We have seen this in far too many justice-related files. They say they are tough on crime. I will not say what I think of this tough on crime analogy, but in some cases we can very clearly see that it is completely bizarre.

Just now, my colleague drew comparisons with the United States. In particular, I am thinking of the minimum sentences the Conservatives are trying to shove down the opposition parties’ throats. We can see that the American Republicans have tried such sentences, and where it has got them.

Bill C-46 amends the Criminal Code. Among other things creates a new concept called “transmission data,” which would extend to all means of telecommunication the investigative powers that are currently restricted to data associated with telephones.

As I said, this is no longer the era of mere telephone wiretapping. We have to look at all information exchanged on the Internet. I will draw a parallel. I certainly would not want to get involved in the election about to be held at the municipal level in Quebec, but when there is collusion, we often see that the Internet has been used to exchange information about price fixing.

It is apparent, therefore, that these kinds of dishonest, fraudulent conversations are not carried out solely on the telephone any more or in dark little rooms. We have reached the point now where people can easily commit fraud from their offices over the Internet.

This bill also creates, therefore, the power to compel the production of data relating to the transmission of communications; it creates the power to require the production of data on the location from which individuals operate; it creates the power to make preservation demands and orders to compel the preservation of electronic evidence; it allows for warrants to be issued, subject of course to legal thresholds appropriate to the interests at stake; and it makes it possible to track transactions, individuals and things. The police will be able to remotely activate tracking devices. These are exactly the kind of things that can become problematic and should be considered in the implementation of the bill.

As I have been saying and as the Ligue des droits et libertés said, we must be careful that the government itself does not use the legislation at some point for the wrong reasons. Far be it from me to suggest that the government might currently have some nefarious ideas. We have seen, though, what they are sometimes capable of. The bill will also create a new offence with a maximum punishment of ten years in prison for the use of computer systems like the Internet to agree or arrange with another person to commit a sexual offence against a child.

The bill also amends the Competition Act—this is ironic because it is precisely what I was just talking about in regard to the collusion on Montreal Island—to make applicable for certain provisions of the 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.

Finally, the bill 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.

As I said, the Bloc Québécois is in principle in favour of Bill C-46, whose purpose is to enable police forces to adapt their investigative techniques to contemporary technological realities, such as the widespread use of cellphones and the Internet.

I would like to draw another connection. Not only criminals use these kinds of communications but increasingly also terrorists, who use such things as the Internet and cellphones to carry out their plans. We can therefore fight on both fronts.

Facilitating police work, where it does not unduly interfere with fundamental rights, is an avenue the Bloc Québécois has always advocated for fighting crime. This approach has certainly proved itself in Quebec. The Bloc Québécois also thinks that increasing the likelihood of getting caught is a much greater deterrent than increasing the punishments, which often seem pretty remote and abstract.

I must say that when I see criminals, of whatever sort, who are warned that they will get a sentence of 15 or 20 years in prison for something like cocaine trafficking, they do not seem very worried about it because they are focused on what they stand to gain. Criminals may well think it would be pretty good to sell cocaine for a few years for the $10 million or so they would get.

So it is much more a question of increasing police presence and better equipping the police to fight crime. It is this that will really deter criminals rather than simply warning them they will get a 10-year sentence, because no criminal thinks they will be caught until the means are in place to catch them.

However, as I was saying, this bill raises a number of concerns regarding respect of privacy, whereas there has been no justification provided for such infringement. Given the importance of strengthening police powers to fight the most complex forms of organized crime, the Bloc supports the principle behind the bill.

I wish to reiterate my full confidence in my colleagues from Marc-Aurèle-Fortin and Abitibi—Témiscamingue. I am sure that they will do some extraordinary, meticulous and exemplary work in committee to ensure that there are as few intrusions into people's private lives as possible, and that those intrusions are always necessary and very well delineated.

If I am permitted a few minutes, I may perhaps put the whole thing in context and recall to some extent the origins of the spirit of the bill. It all comes from the Convention on Cybercrime, which underlies Bill C-46 and Bill C-47, which we will study a little later. The bill before us draws largely on it. The convention was formulated by the Council of Europe with the active involvement of Canada, the United States, Japan and South Africa.

Under the terms of its preamble, the convention aims to pursue a common criminal policy aimed at the protection of society against cybercrime, inter alia, by adopting appropriate legislation and fostering international co-operation. It is structured, more specifically, around three regulatory lines, that of harmonization of domestic laws, the establishment of appropriate means in order to facilitate the conduct of investigations and criminal proceedings on electronic networks and, finally, the establishment of a rapid and effective system of international cooperation.

On the subject of cybercrime and the Internet, the letters, www, stand for the World Wide Web. And we know why—because it is truly world wide. So, a criminal can easily be based in South Africa and commit crimes in Canada or Europe. Hence the importance of cooperating multilaterally with other countries to acquire the means and to work together to stop these criminals.

In order to harmonize domestic laws, international conventions on cybercrime set out the offences in four broad categories. First, there are offences relating to the security of networks, namely offences involving confidentiality, integrity, or data or system availability. There are also computer-related offences, namely falsification and fraud and then offences relating to content, namely child pornography, as I was saying earlier. Finally, there are offences relating to infringement of intellectual property and related rights, such as the illegal reproduction of protected works. In the case of offences relating to the dissemination of racist or xenophobic ideas and to trafficking in human beings over the networks, there is an additional protocol.

To facilitate investigations and prosecution in cyberspace, the convention contains a series of provisions that the signatories will have to approve. These provide, among other things, for the preservation, search and seizure, and interception of data stored on a computer system. Finally, to promote international cooperation, signatories will be permitted to act on behalf of others in acquiring electronic evidence. This will not give the signatories the authority to conduct transborder investigations, proceedings or searches, but a network of national contact points will be established to provide constant and immediate assistance with ongoing investigations. This goes to show the value, as I indicated, of multilateral cooperation in that regard.

I gave the example of a criminal who could very well send data—or commit a Criminal Code offence—from South Africa to Canada. The idea of going over there to arrest him is therefore far from our minds, but if we are at least able to provide information to local authorities, send them the data, we will be much more likely to catch him.

So, the cybercrime convention is the result of a lengthy process undertaken in 1995. The document underwent 27 drafts, because of the need to take into account reticence on the part of several consumer associations, warning against the serious danger of breaching privacy.

The Chair is signaling that I am running out of time. That is unfortunate, because I could have gone on for hours. My hon. colleagues will no doubt put very good questions to me, and I will gladly answer them.

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

Madam Speaker, I am very pleased to speak to Bill C-46 today.

At the outset, I note a quieter tone in the House today than when the debate began on this bill yesterday. We had a number of attack dogs from the government's side getting up and accusing members of the opposition, particularly the Liberal opposition, defenceless though it was, of trying to initiate an election, a $300 million waste of time, and blaming the Liberals for the fact that somehow this bill was finally getting debate when in fact this bill, in its previous incarnations, had been around for a number of years now, actually going into past Parliaments.

I thought it was something that the government should refrain from doing because the reality is that it is this government that actually passed legislation for fixed election dates some two or three years ago and then went about ignoring its own legislation. Just shortly after it passed the legislation, it desperately looked for ways to circumvent its own laws and called an election one year ahead of schedule last year, causing that same $300 million useless expense that it is blaming the Liberals for right now.

Given that today we are in a much calmer environment here, this is an example of all three parties working together and I believe this is yet another bill that the government is going to see action on. The NDP will be supporting this bill to get it to committee and I would say that as with any bill, there are questions about particular parts of the bill, interpretations of the bill, and those are issues that we will deal with at committee.

I firmly believe, after having a number of years in elected office, that it is always better, if possible, to support a bill at second reading to get it to committee, provided that one is voting for the principle of the bill at second reading. It has to be, in my view, a pretty bad bill not to get support at second reading.

When the bill gets to committee, that is the time to look at the clauses of the bill on a clause by clause basis, try to make amendments and changes that we want, and then at that point, when it comes back to the House, decide whether or not we can support the amended bill.

With regard to the general concept and the general principles involved in this bill, there is no question that this bill is one that merits support and that should be passed to committee.

Bill C-46 is an act to amend the Criminal Code, the Competition Act and the Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Act. The bill sets out to provide police with updated powers to investigate, execute warrants, and charge individuals who are using digital technology to commit crimes. Specifically, the bill addresses gaps in the Criminal Code dealing with search warrants and production orders to permit police to obtain transmission data, which include text messages, files and photographs from telephones.

As well, Bill C-46 proposes to broaden the scope of warrants to allow tracking warrants, which would permit police to remotely activate existing tracking devices found in certain types of technology such as cellphones and tracking devices in some cars, and would also continue to permit the police to install a separate device that would allow for tracking. One of the members from the Bloc, earlier this morning, talked about criminal gangs stealing expensive cars, that those cars could be tracked overseas and recovered through this legislation.

In addition, the bill would create a new preservation order that would require a telecommunications service provider to safeguard and not delete its data related to a specific communication or a subscriber when police believe that data will assist in an investigation.

The bill proposes modifications to the Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Act, and it widens the scope of assistance that Canada could provide to other countries in fighting cybercrime. Amendments to the Competition Act would provide the Competition Bureau and police with adequate tools to investigate computer-related crime.

Finally, Bill C-46 proposes the creation of two new Criminal Code offences. A new offence would be created to prohibit anyone from using a computer system such as the Internet to agree or make arrangements with another person for the purpose of sexually exploiting a child. Currently, the Criminal Code prohibits anyone from using the Internet to communicate directly with a child for the purpose of facilitating child sexual exploitation, but it does not prohibit people from agreeing or making arrangements with another person to sexually exploit a child.

As well, a new offence would be created making it a Criminal Code violation for possessing a computer virus for the purpose of committing mischief.

New Democrats agree that we must be tougher on crime and we should be certainly tougher on Internet-based crime and that in fact we should have a zero tolerance for child pornography.

Canadians also need to know that when they use the Internet or they use email what their privacy rights are.

The bill appears to reintroduce warrantless searches which would allow police to conduct searches without proper oversight. We are already hearing serious warnings from people like the Privacy Commissioner. I asked one or two questions about that this morning and she has some very important observations about this area. That is something, once again, that we are going to have to deal with at the committee stage.

We also have some concerns that the stakeholders have to be properly consulted. I know that at committee we dealt with another bill a few months ago, the charities bill, which is a bill that had been through several incarnations, and through several parliaments. We are still finding that only a small number of charities actually even know that the bill exists.

It seems hard to believe that if the government is doing its job that it would not be sending out letters to thousands of charities across the country telling them that such a bill is before the House and it is in their particular interest to make representations and get involved in the process. I think that is the sort of problem that we all face that we can only dig down so far with legislation. We only have so much time to do the consultations and sometimes it is hard to shake out and stir up the stakeholders to get them involved. However, that is something that we definitely want to do on this bill.

We think it is very important to modernize these laws. It is not only this law that needs modernization. There are many laws that we have on the books which go back to the horse and buggy days. We have to upgrade and update these laws to get them into the computer age. That fact is that even in five or ten years the technology can change so much that we are basically playing catch up. That is what I find as a legislator that we seem to be always playing catch up from a legislative point of view.

We need to get tough on criminals like Internet predators while still allowing ordinary Canadians privacy when sending e-mails to friends and family.

The previous Bloc member asked a question just minutes ago about that very point. It is a very difficult balance between the privacy issues, protecting people's privacy and certainly having the public protected. That is the exercise that we have to deal with at this particular time.

New Democrats agree that we must be tougher on crime, tough on Internet-based crime and have zero tolerance for child pornography. We support modernizing our laws to ensure that cellphones and the Internet are not a haven for criminal activity. We want to work with the government to ensure that these changes are done right.

Now that the Internet is in place, particularly since 1995, criminals adapt very quickly. If they can get away with frauds and scams by using the Internet and do it in an offshore place where there are really no laws against what they are doing, or they can hide and not suffer the consequences, then they will do that. We need to adapt to these changes by giving our police forces the tools they need to catch up to the criminals and stop them before they get away with their crimes. We in the NDP are very interested in combatting cybercrime.

We are pleased with a number of provisions in the bill and one is the creation of a new Criminal Code offence to prohibit people from agreeing or making arrangements with another person to sexually exploit a child. Another one is the creation of a new Criminal Code offence for possessing a computer virus for the purpose of committing mischief.

As I indicated before, much of the bill is taken up with amendments to definitions of various terms to reflect modern technologies. We have not seen any compelling evidence yet that the current definitions impede police in their investigations but we are certainly not opposed to getting the updated language in there to reflect the realities of today.

I mentioned before that the Privacy Commissioner had some opinions about the legislation. She has called for assurances that any legislative proposals on surveillance be minimally intrusive. She has called for a limit on the use of new powers and ensure that appropriate legal thresholds remain in place for court authorizations. She also has asked that the draft regulations be reviewed publicly before coming into force and that we include effective oversight. I am not exactly certain what she has in mind there but oversight, in any type of government legislation, is good.

We only need to look at the lack of oversight in the eHealth file, which started out as, and still is, a very positive and solid idea, but 10 years after the start of the eHealth programs, not only in the federal government but in the provincial Governments of Ontario, there is absolutely nothing to show for it. I could even go back further to the Manitoba government before 1999 where it spent $50 million on an eHealth program and yet, at the end of the day, there was absolutely nothing to show for it.

The federal government feels that 16% of Canadians will have electronic health files by perhaps 2010. The cost is about $1.6 billion and that $1.6 billion was supposed to cover the whole country. I must ask a rhetorical question. How do these programs get out of control? I have always been a very big supporter of e-government files, d eHealth files and e-commerce files. In fact, when the legislation was introduced in Manitoba in 2000, the most comprehensive e-commerce legislation in the country, I was the MLA in charge of putting it all together.

At that time, we were trying to promote e-commerce but people were reluctant to buy things online. It was just the very beginning of the process. I remember getting a piece of consumer legislation in that legislation, which I think, to this day, only exists in Manitoba, and that was the requirement that if someone bought a product or service online and, as the consumer, did not get that product or service, then the credit card company was responsible for reimbursing the consumer. That was peculiar to Canada at the time but I took it from one of two or three American states that had that legislation at the time. Ten years ago, we put that piece of consumer legislation and several others dealing with electronic commerce into an omnibus bill dealing with electronic commerce to promote the idea.

However, at the time we could never have even comprehended what in fact would happen over those ensuring years. As a matter of fact, we had the best government-secured system in the country in terms of security. Our people were so good that when they left the Manitoba government we were paying them maybe $100,000 a year, which we thought was excessive. However, one of them went to work for the Bank of Montreal and I think his salary was $300,000 a year. He lived in Toronto anyway, so he made $300,000 a year and simply walked to work, as opposed to flying back and forth to Manitoba every week for $100,000. That is just to show members how important Internet security actually became at about that time.

Members will recall that there were viruses afloat in those days that crippled the British government. The B.C. government was down for a day or two. I think Manitoba was the only government that we were aware of that withstood all of these cyber attacks. I used to get printouts and reports, certainly not a daily basis but any time I wanted them, which would show how many attacks the government would have.

I think any of the members of the government can talk to their online people and can get that information themselves. They can go back and ask how secure our government's system is. They can ask about the number of attacks, the type of attacks and where they are coming from. I think they might be surprised to see those results. They might be positively surprised now because those attacks may be dropping. I have not followed the file as much as I did in the past years.

When Reg Alcock was here he was a big champion of e-government and pushed the file. He obviously lost track of that eHealth file somewhere because it is not producing the results that he would have hoped for. However, his heart and his head were in the right place. He certainly pushed Prime Minister Martin on that whole e-government file. I would guess that the file has been essentially forgotten under the Conservative government. It is just a guess at this point, but my guess is that the Conservatives have gone for simply retrenchment and have taken out no real new initiative since Reg left that particular file. I checked into the secured channel just about a year and a half ago and they were basically retooling the whole concept.

The government has a duty to get its systems and services online as quickly as possible and make them transactional so that people can get proper service. In Manitoba, we have student aid applications online. We did not want students driving 100 miles to Winnipeg to stand in line at the student aid branch for an hour to fill out an application and then drive all the way home again, so we put the application online.

All government services should be put on line. Not only should the government have the applications on line, but it should make them transactional so people can pay for the service with their credit card and have a much happier experience dealing with the government than having to wait in line at government offices. This is something that I do not hear much from the government on and I think we should be looking at that. I intend to ask more questions about that in the future.

What sort of oversight will we have on the bill? I sure hope it is a better oversight than what we had on the eHealth file and other files where there were boondoggles in the government.

I think the five year parliamentary review that was suggested by the Privacy Commissioner is a good idea. However, I need to know whether there will be a review after five years, which is a great idea, or even a sunset clause after five years given the great changes in technology that could happen over a period like that.

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

Madam Speaker, I am pleased to speak today to Bill C-46, which would modernize investigative methods in relation to computer crimes.

The Bloc Québécois supports Bill C-46 in principle. It will allow police forces to adapt their investigative techniques to contemporary technological realities, such as the widespread use of cellphones or the Internet, and it will facilitate the work of police officers without unduly infringing on basic rights. I will come back to that later and to the Ligue des droits et des libertés du Québec. The Bloc Québécois has always preferred that route for fighting crime and protecting the individual.

The Bloc Québécois feels that increasing the chance of being caught is much more of a deterrent than increasing the punishment, which often seems remote and abstract. However, this bill raises a number of concerns with respect to privacy, while any justification for infringement of privacy has not been fully demonstrated.

Given the importance of enhancing police powers to deal with the most complex forms of organized crime, the Bloc Québécois supports Bill C-46 in principle. However—and this caveat is important—it will ensure in committee that any invasion of privacy is minimal, always necessary and very clearly defined.

As a number of my colleagues have already said, fighting cybercrime is a major challenge in today's world, which has 1.5 billion Internet users, not to mention those who use cellphones, BlackBerrys or other communication devices.

Before I go any further with this bill, I would like to digress and point out that the problem with access to Internet service is an increase in economic crime and crimes against individuals. At the same time, the fact that certain regions do not have access to high speed Internet represents a major problem. There should be a debate on this in the House. To a number of economic and social stakeholders in my region, access to high speed Internet represents an economic issue for the very development of rural regions and communities. It is now essential to some financial and trade transactions with other countries. It is distressing to see that a number of municipalities in my riding, such as Mandeville, Saint-Gabriel-de-Brandon and Saint-Mathieu, do not have access to high speed Internet. Accordingly, a number of municipalities in the riding I represent want these services.

For years now, the Bloc has been calling on the federal government to establish a program to promote the installation of high speed Internet in the regions. The federal government has finally responded with the broadband Canada program, but I think more money needs to be invested in it.

I wanted to digress here, because, as we know, the Internet poses a problem for a number of people today. At the same time, many people and regions do not yet have access to high speed Internet.

I will return now to the bill before us. With the expansion of the Internet and digital technology, cybercrime has become a growing threat, as a number of my Bloc Québécois colleagues and members of the other parties have mentioned in the House.

To deal with it more effectively, the European Union, with the cooperation of countries such as the United States and Canada, developed the convention on cybercrime. Its purpose is to formulate a common criminal policy aimed at protecting society against cybercrime, through such means as more appropriate and stronger legislation and the promotion of international cooperation.

As we know, the Internet reaches beyond the borders of Quebec, Canada and, ultimately, the world. Anything is possible with the Internet. People everywhere in the world are within reach.

In order to harmonize the legislation of the various countries, the international convention establishes four broad categories of offences. First, there are offences relating to network security. An example of this might be offences against confidentiality. Then there are computer and content offences. This refers to child pornography sites, for example. Finally there are offences against intellectual property and related rights, such as the illegal reproduction of protected works causing a great stir.

Although Canada signed the convention in November 2001, it has yet to ratify it. The government is introducing this bill, but it has not even ratified a convention we signed in November 2001.

And so the bill before us today is, in a way, a next step to the convention. Why have we not signed the convention? This is a question we have to ask today.

The legal arsenal must be constantly readapted in the face of organized and international cybercrime, which uses digital technology and Internet resources as targets or means to offend.

Bill C-46 modernizes the tools used by police services to track criminals by creating the power to require the production of data relating to the transmission of communications and the location of individuals.

This bill also creates a power to make preservation demands and order the preservation of electronic evidence.

In other words, the bill establishes the new concept of transmission of data and also makes it possible to seize transmission data.

The bill would therefore permit the seizure of data and of the content of transmissions based on reasonable grounds to believe that a person has committed an offence.

A police officer acting without a judicial warrant, and based on suspicion, will be able to compel a service provider to preserve the content of all communications that took place previously between the individual and other persons. This is somewhat like asking the post office to photocopy all of someone’s letters.

The bill also allows warrants to be issued to track transactions, individuals or things.

The concern we have about this bill is of course the entire question of confidentiality and people’s liberty. This bill must not result in wrongful intrusion into the lives of people or into communications people might engage in. Those communications are confidential to that person and the other people with whom they converse over networks like the Internet. This is a major concern.

As well, and I think this is a very important point, Bill C-46 creates a new offence, subject to a maximum sentence of imprisonment for 10 years, that prohibits the use of a computer system to enter into agreements with another person to commit a sexual offence against a child.

The bill 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 issued under the Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Act.

Overall, the purpose of the bill is to enable police forces to adapt their investigative techniques to modern technological realities. Facilitating police work, where it does not unduly interfere with fundamental rights, is an avenue the Bloc Québécois has always advocated for fighting crime. This is what must be taken into account, and we will insist on this when the bill is considered in committee.

The new investigative methods the police will be allowed provide for access to a very broad range of information. Obviously, that information must be dealt with in a way that also protects individuals’ privacy. Monitoring someone’s activities on the Internet provides a lot more information about their private life. That is the caveat we would state.

For example, as has also been pointed out by the Ligue des droits et libertés, this bill is a cause for concern about respect for privacy, given that the justification for such interference has not yet been demonstrated.

In this respect, I would like to mention the concern of Quebec's Ligue des droits et libertés that Bills C-46 and C-47 give Canadian authorities unprecedented means and powers that allow them to pry into the private lives of citizens. The government has not shown that existing investigative powers are inadequate. In a democratic society, it is the government's actions that must be transparent, whereas the private lives of citizens must be protected. Conducting surveillance activities on the strength of mere suspicion threatens the presumption of innocence. These are concerns that were raised by the Ligue des droits et libertés.

Moreover, this urge to unduly monitor our communications could trigger a kind of self-censorship and restrict people's freedom of speech and freedom of thought.

In short, the Ligue feels that the bill is a major intrusion into people's private lives. In a democratic society, it is the government's actions that must be transparent, whereas the private lives of citizens must be protected. This is why the Bloc Québécois will carefully review this legislation in committee to ensure that the powers given to the police are not excessive but, rather, are justified and clearly delineated.

It is very important to reconcile the fight against cybercrime with the rights of Internet users. That is what this bill is all about. In order to be acceptable to the House, the bill must necessarily deal with these two important issues. Indeed, freedom of association, freedom of expression and non-discrimination are all rights that must be respected.

The right to speak freely and to receive and communicate information or ideas without interference from public authorities is also important. We must not go to the other extreme, where people would no longer feel comfortable conversing and exchanging views on the Internet. As parliamentarians, we must find the best possible balance between these two fundamental rights, namely the right to privacy and the right to security.

I also want to stress the importance of prevention in an effective strategy against cybercrime.

Little is said here about prevention, but the government's strategy must necessarily be based on a multi-pronged approach. It must involve both the private and the public sectors.

How can we better protect our young people who communicate on the Internet? How can we better protect people who conduct financial transactions on the Internet? How can we ensure that the system is safe for people? How can we teach people to be careful? How can we convince our young people to avoid contacts that may sometimes be harmful to them and threaten their physical and mental well-being?

Here, in the House of Commons, we can put in place means to better protect Internet users. It is important to give the public, and particularly younger people, the tools and the means to protect themselves against cybercrime. A great deal of information must be provided on this issue. We must get people and entrepreneurs to adopt safe computer practices and to invest in prevention.

Currently, Internet users are often careless. Many people turn on their computer and enter important information on the Internet, without worrying enough about possible consequences. We must change this mentality. In order to do so, we must inform the public of the dangers related to the use of Internet services. We must promote public awareness and, of course, we must provide tools to better use a technology that is now very much part of people's lives.

In conclusion, we are going to support this legislation, but with some reservations.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague for his thoughtful comments and questions.

One of the confusing parts of the bill is that the government chose to introduce Bills C-46 and C-47 at the same time, and they interrelate.

It is quite complicated and difficult to untangle which particular clause deals with which particular bill.

One of my colleague's concerns was the ability of police to get subscriber information from telecom service providers without a warrant. With respect to my colleague, that provision is in Bill C-47, but he can be forgiven for being confused about that. We were all confused about that because of the way the government chose to combine these bills.

The bill before us, Bill C-46, does not, from our reading, contain any provision for police to get any information from anyone without a search warrant. That is Bill C-46.

However, with regard to Bill C-47, he is exactly right. New Democrats will be opposing Bill C-47 on that very basis. That bill allows police to get very personal information about people without a search warrant, and we will stand firm against that. However, this bill does not do that.

One thing the member is correct about though is that this bill does create the concept of a preservation order so that telecom service providers will have to, upon the request of police, preserve certain data. I believe the member is quite right to point out the serious privacy reservations we have with that. At committee I think we will be looking very carefully at that area.

I guess the difficulty is that with electronic crimes, evidence of which can be created and then erased, there has to be some mechanism, the argument goes, to preserve that data. Otherwise a crime can be committed and the data is gone.

Therefore we have to look for a way to see if we can balance that need with the need to protect Canadians' privacy rights. The member is quite right and I thank him for pointing out that very important balance that must be struck. We will work in committee to see if that balance can be achieved.

If it cannot be achieved, then we can always come back to the House at third reading and vote against the bill.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Mr. Speaker, it is a great privilege to speak to Bill C-46 on behalf of the New Democratic caucus. The bill amends the Criminal Code, the Competition Act and the Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Act, and is colloquially known as the investigative powers for the 21st century act.

New Democrats agree that we must be tougher on crime. We must be tougher on Internet-based crime. We have to have zero tolerance for child pornography or any offence targeted at children or any particularly vulnerable people in our society. In this regard, we support modernizing our laws to make sure that cellphones, email, the Internet and all modern forms of communication through which crimes may be committed are not a haven for criminal activity.

The New Democratic caucus is pleased to work with the government to ensure that these changes are made, but also that they are made in a correct manner so that they are effective and efficient and achieve the goals to which they are directed.

New Democrats support this bill in principle, but look forward to examining it in detail to ensure that it will be effective in combatting cybercrime while protecting the privacy rights of ordinary, law-abiding Canadians and in following long-held, cherished and established precepts of civil liberties and law in this country, which I will speak to in a few moments. There are a number of provisions in this bill that we think are positive and we are pleased to support.

First, this bill creates a new Criminal Code offence to prohibit people from agreeing to or making arrangements with another person to sexually exploit a child. I am going to pause there. That is a positive amendment to our Criminal Code with which we think it is impossible for any right-thinking individual to disagree. We would point out, however, it is probably the case that there are presently Criminal Code provisions which, arguably, cover such an offence now, but if it helps the police community, the judiciary and our prosecutors, and more important, if it makes it clear as a social denunciation by our society that it is absolutely unacceptable and intolerable that anybody would even think of sexually exploiting a child, then we think this is a positive amendment.

Another provision in this bill that we are pleased to support is the creation of another new Criminal Code offence for possessing a computer virus for the purpose of committing mischief. This pales in comparison to the previous amendment I just discussed. However, it does modernize our Criminal Code to take into account something in the digital world that has become a pressing problem and creates economic and social dislocation in our society.

Much of the rest of the bill is taken up with amendments to the definition of various terms to reflect modern technologies. As an example, the Criminal Code presently discusses the warrant system with respect to telecommunications. This bill proposes to modernize the language by making it clear that when we speak of telecommunications, we speak of things such as Internet transmissions, email transmissions, website visits and website creation, as well as cellular phone transmissions.

In that respect, we think this is a positive and long overdue amendment to the Criminal Code that will again help our judiciary and prosecutors and, indeed, everybody associated with the judicial system to expedite and make our warrant system better.

While we have not been presented with any compelling evidence that the current definitions are impeding police and investigations, we are not opposed to updating this language in our laws to reflect this new technological reality.

I will pause there to comment that many people in civil society and experts in the digital and technological world have pointed out repeatedly that there does not seem to have been a case made where any police force in this country has not been able to use the current definitions and provisions in the Criminal Code to get warrants in a case involving new digital technology. A number of organizations have repeatedly asked for such examples and, to my knowledge and understanding, not a single example has been forthcoming.

Nevertheless, sometimes it behooves Parliament to act in a proactive manner and to identify gaps in our law or needed improvements in our law without waiting for mischief to actually take place. In this respect, this is a positive step.

Concerns have been expressed by experts in the digital world, including those who have a particular interest in ensuring that citizens' privacy interests are always taken into account by Parliament, including the Privacy Commissioner of Canada and privacy commissioners of various provinces. They are concerned that this legislation has some deficiencies and may not strike the right balance between individual privacy and the legitimate needs of the authorities. The Privacy Commissioner has set forth a number of very helpful and valid benchmarks that will help us as parliamentarians as we consider this bill and other bills that touch on these areas. Let me mention some of these considerations.

Any intrusions of our civil liberties must be minimally intrusive at all times. We must impose limits on the use of new powers and ensure that appropriate legal thresholds, including judicial oversight, remain in place for all court authorizations. We must require that draft regulations be reviewed publicly before coming into force. We must always include effective oversight whenever we are talking about expanding or creating new police powers, particularly when those relate to intercepting communications from our citizens.

We must provide for regular public reporting on the use of these powers. In particular, it would be considered very helpful to include a five year parliamentary review of this bill and others like it, which I will speak about in a moment, that also deal with Internet privacy and the need for us to modernize our laws in terms of technological and digital communications.

We look forward, as New Democrats, to working together to address these concerns and others during the committee study of this bill.

The current telecommunications provisions in the Criminal Code that speak of intercepted communications were drafted in a time when telephones were the primary mechanism over which certain crimes were being committed. It is called telephony, and in the telephony world our police forces used wiretaps. The digital world has changed the type of technology and the type of investigative tools that are needed to deal with crimes.

In terms of the content, we need to have laws that are geared more toward production orders and preservation orders so that when a crime is committed digitally, the information is not erased or overridden quickly in order to destroy the evidence of those crimes before there is a chance to intercept it. It is very important that we give our police forces the tools to effectively police and intercept these kinds of communications, which is one thing that this bill is geared to do. The provisions in this bill to create production orders and preservation orders in the digital world are sound and new.

However, there are some concerns about this bill that New Democrats have heard through our early consultation with people who are very familiar with the digital world, and in particular with crimes as they are being committed in that world. One concern is that the bill appears to lower the standard for getting warrants. At present, in order to get a warrant to get a telephone intercept, a police officer would have to appear before a judge and would have to provide information or evidence that would give reasonable grounds to believe that a crime was being committed or was about to be committed.

This bill uses different language. It departs from that long, well-litigated, well-known standard. It talks about having police officers appear before judges to get production orders or preservation orders based on a reasonable suspicion, having reasonable grounds to suspect that a crime may be committed.

Using different words, “belief” as opposed to “suspicion”, we of course know will result in a different standard before our courts. A number of civil liberty groups in this country have expressed the concern that this would result in a diminution of the standard test used to get a warrant. This matter is something that I believe the committee will be looking at very carefully, calling witnesses to appear before it who have expertise both in criminal law and in civil liberties jurisprudence, to ensure that Canadians' rights would not be unduly affected by this.

There is also a concern in the digital community that this bill, while positive in its own right albeit with some of the reservations I have mentioned, when combined with some of the government's other legislation, would represent a holistic problem.

I am not going to get into too much detail, but there is a companion bill to Bill C-46 before this House, and that is Bill C-47. Bill C-47 is a bill that would require telecom service providers to install equipment that would allow them to preserve data about their subscribers so that they would be subject to a warrant later on. In that respect, we on this side of the House, in the New Democratic caucus, think that may be a positive and necessary development in our law.

However, Bill C-47, as it currently stands, would also allow police, without a search warrant, to demand that those telecom service providers give the police personal information about their subscribers, including their name, their address, their Internet service provider, ISP, and the number in their cellphone that would allow it to be digitally tracked. That has raised grave and serious concerns, not only among experts in the digital community, but also with every Canadian who uses the Internet or web surfs, because that provision represents a serious departure from our law under which Canadians' personal private information ought not to be disclosed to the police without judicial oversight.

Now, the concept of having Bill C-46 and Bill C-47 together is something that we, as parliamentarians, have to be very cognizant of because, as all members of this House know, bills do not operate in isolation. Laws do not operate in isolation. One law may have impacts on another. In this respect, New Democrats are going to be working very hard to achieve a balance between preserving Canadians' privacy and ensuring that our police and our judiciary have the tools they need to effectively fight crimes committed over the Internet or in the digital world. Case closed.

Let there be no mistake. My friends on the Conservative side of the House seem to think they have a unilateral lock on concern for victims in this country. They seem to think that they are the only people who care about safety, or the only people who care about crime, or the only people who care about victims. I would point out that people on this side of the House, New Democrats, have always championed the most vulnerable people in this society and we have always supported laws that make our citizens safe in this country.

With the greatest of respect to my colleagues on the other side of the House, I think they are prepared to sacrifice civil liberties and privacy rights in order to achieve safety, whereas New Democrats believe that it is important to have a balance whereby we can live in a society that is safe, democratic, and secure for our citizens and at the same time respects the privacy and civil liberties of those citizens.

That is the balance that we believe needs to be achieved in this bill and when this bill is read in conjunction with Bill C-47.

We on this side of the House will be working hard in order to achieve both of those objectives.

I just want to move briefly into some of the details of Bill C-46 so that Canadians who are watching us here today or those who are interested in this bill can understand what it would really do.

Bill C-46 would allow for warrants to obtain transmission data, thereby extending to all means of telecommunications the investigative powers that are currently restricted to data associated with telephones. In other words, it would modernize our warrants and our production orders, bringing them from the telephone age into the digital age.

The bill would require the production of data regarding the transmission of communications and the location of transactions, individuals or things. Again, this would be a positive step reflecting the fact that in the digital world, crimes can be committed in a nanosecond and evidence of them destroyed in a nanosecond. Through the use of cellular phones and mobile computers, that data can be moved. We need to take care of that.

Bill C-46 would create the power to “make preservation demands” and “orders to compel the preservation of electronic evidence”, which I spoke about a bit earlier. If data on these crimes can be created, that data can be erased. Sometimes police need the ability to go in and freeze the status quo, and that is a very important power that our police may need to have.

The bill would provide for warrants to allow the tracking of transactions, individuals and things, within legal thresholds that would be appropriate to the interests at stake.

Under this bill, police would be able to remotely activate existing tracking devices. Forty years ago a telephone line went into a house and that line did not move. Now, a cellular phone is mobile and it goes wherever the person who has it goes. It is important to modernize our laws to deal with that.

I am going to pause here to emphasize that we need to make sure that the legal thresholds for giving police these powers remain at the current levels, to make sure that police must still appear before a judge and must demonstrate before a judge that there are reasonable grounds to believe that a crime has been or is about to be committed so that Canadians' privacy rights are not restricted or impinged upon when it is unjust to do so.

The bill would create a new offence, which would involve someone using a telecommunications system, such as the Internet, to agree to make arrangements with another person for the purpose of sexually exploiting a child. The offence would carry a maximum penalty of 10 years' imprisonment. I touched on that earlier. There is nothing more odious, in New Democrats' view, than a crime that involves the sexual exploitation of anybody, but in particular, a child.

Further, this bill would amend the Competition Act, for the purpose of enforcing certain provisions of that act, in view of new provisions being added to the Criminal Code concerning demands and orders for the preservation of computer data.

This bill would amend the Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Act such that it would give Canadian authorities responding to requests for assistance some of the new investigative powers being added under the Criminal Code and it would allow the Commissioner for Competition to execute search warrants under the Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Act.

Overall, we think Bill C-46 would be a positive step that would help modernize our laws. It would help give our police the investigative powers they need to catch up to the digital world and the digital age.

New Democrats will support this bill as it moves forward to achieve that aim, while we remain at the same time a strong and unceasing voice to make sure that the privacy interests and civil liberties of Canadians are kept firmly at the forefront of our mind at every step of this equation.

We can have that balance in Canadian society. One of the reasons Canada is one of the best places on earth to live is that we have always managed to achieve that balance between safety, security and liberty and civil liberties and civil rights. New Democrats will continue to work hard to achieve this balance, and we encourage all members of this House to join with us in making sure that Canadians are safe and free.

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

Mr. Speaker, I think you have answered the question for me. Bill C-46 is a safe street and safe community initiative that fits with the government's law and order agenda. Electronic health records and e-secure channels are beyond my area of expertise.

The member's question is a good one, but it has very little, if anything, to do with Bill C-46.

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Barry Devolin]

Before I go to the hon. member for Edmonton—St. Albert, I would remind members that we are discussing Bill C-46. With that, the hon. member for Edmonton—St. Albert.

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

Mr. Speaker, it is certainly an honour for me to speak in favour of BillC-46, the investigative powers for the 21st century act which aligns with the government's priority of getting tough on crime, including the Internet and other computer crimes. It also responds to many of the issues surrounding organized crime.

The justice committee has undertaken a comprehensive study of organized crime, and at every venue and at every hearing we hear about the need for the police to have the exact type of tools that BillC-46 provides.

With the amendments put forward in Bill C-46, which amends the Criminal Code among other acts, including the Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Act and the Competition Act, Parliament would provide police officers with more precise and less cumbersome investigative techniques which they need and have been asking for in the 21st century to do their work in a more effective and efficient manner.

Crime is becoming more sophisticated. Criminals are becoming technocrats and police need to keep up with technical advances that organized crime has been developing.

In addition to updating certain existing offences that are facilitated by the Internet, including child sexual exploitation, Bill C-46 proposes to create new production and preservation orders to address today's computer and telecommunications environment.

Investigative powers must be tailored to modern technologies. Investigations may be compromised if they are not. In addition, these changes assist in ensuring that established privacy protections put in place to protect the rights of all Canadians are maintained in the face of these ever-developing new technologies.

Bill C-46 would update the existing dial number recorder warrant, which currently allows police to obtain data relating to dialed telephone numbers. The proposed transmission data recorder warrant would allow police to obtain data in relation to the routing of an electronic communication, including communications by email or by cellphone in real time. Police would also be able to obtain historical data of the same kind under such a production order.

The existing requirements for obtaining dialed telephone number data would continue to apply to the data obtained under the transmission data warrant. As with the existing warrant, the updated powers would explicitly exclude access to the content of the message.

The existing tracking warrant would similarly be updated to provide for both a production order for tracking data and a warrant for the real-time collection of that tracking data. These updates would create a two-warrant system, which would better recognize the different expectations of privacy that persons have in relation to their personal location and that of their vehicles, transactions and other things.

Computer data by its very nature is volatile. As a result, there is a risk that it will be lost in the time that it takes for police to get a warrant or order to obtain that type of evidence. Police need a way to ensure that computer data necessary to an investigation is preserved during this time and during the fullness of the investigation. The new preservation demand and preservation order is simply a do not delete order, requiring the custodian of the computer data to ensure the preservation for a limited period of time, and of specific data related to a specific communication or to a specific subscriber. This data will only be preserved for the purpose of conducting a specific investigation.

It is crucial to understand that any disclosure of information under all of these legislative proposals would be pursuant to a judicial authorization. That protection is not being changed by these amendments to the Criminal Code.

We need to ensure that pursuant to a judge's order, investigators can obtain the kind of information they need, but no more and nothing else. We must ensure that any intrusion into privacy only goes as far as is necessary. These new measures guarantee privacy with precision and strike the appropriate balance, I submit, between law enforcement needs and privacy protections.

The proposed legislative amendments are required to meet our domestic imperatives. However, they would also allow Canada to ratify the Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime and its additional protocol on xenophobia and racism. In the international context, this treaty is not only one of its kind and will allow Canadian law enforcement to avail itself of the international cooperation that the protocol permits.

I can assure the House that the legislative proposals put forward in the bill would not only contribute to getting Canadian law enforcement officers the tools they need in the 21st century but they also demonstrate Canada's commitment to cross-border and hemispheric security in the Americas, and assist in meeting international expectations for Canadian participation in the global fight against cybercrime.

Lawful access is not about eavesdropping on private communication, or monitoring the web surfing and emailing habits of ordinary Canadians. It is about ensuring that law enforcement and national security agencies have the technical and legal ability to keep up with new developments in information and communications technology.

New technology is a useful and powerful tool. However, in the hands of criminals, terrorists and organized crime, this same technology can be used in ways that threaten public safety and national security. That is why the Government of Canada is committed to updating Canada's laws to keep pace with these ever emerging technologies. While Canada was one of the first countries to enact criminal laws in the areas of computer crime, there have been no substantial amendments since the 1990s. Technology has evolved considerably since then and Canada's laws have to keep pace.

These increasingly complex technologies are challenging conventional investigative methods and criminals are taking advantage of this situation using sophisticated technology to help them carry out their illicit activities that threaten the safety and security of Canadians. To overcome these challenges, legislative tools such as this bill and amendments to the Criminal Code must evolve so that law enforcement can effectively investigate criminal activities while ensuring that Canadian's privacy laws and civil liberties are always respected. The proposed legislation will update certain existing Criminal Code offences and investigative powers as well as create new powers to meet the demands of today's technological cybercrime environment.

The proposed legislation will accomplish five things. First, it will update the current Criminal Code provisions to allow police to obtain transmission data, also known as traffic data, that is received or sent via the telephone or Internet. Second, it will require telecommunication service providers to preserve, for a limited period of time, data related to a specific communication or subscriber, if that information is needed for the investigation of an offence. Third, it will make it a specific offence for two or more persons to agree to arrange to commit an offence against a child by means of telecommunication. Fourth, it will modernize the current tracking warrant provisions to better recognize Canadians' expectations of privacy. Fifth, it will update the Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Act so that the proposed new investigative powers in the Criminal Code are accessible to Canada's treaty partners.

This bill deals with data preservation and not data retention. When requested to do so through a preservation order, ISPs would only be required to preserve specific data already in their possession with respect to a particular suspect. Data preservation would ensure that volatile information vital to an investigation was not deleted before the police were in a position to access the specific data by way of a judicially authorized search warrant or a production order. These proposed amendments would not require ISPs to retain data relating to all of their customers' Internet activities.

Privacy will be protected by these amendments. The government is strongly committed to maintaining the rule of law in all of its legislation. None of the lawful access tools such as production orders, preservation orders, interception orders and search warrants can be obtained in the absence of lawful authority. A person's reasonable expectation of privacy will continue to guide how the Canadian government operates and how its legislation will be enforced.

In addition, the government will ensure that such authority will continue to be exercised, bearing in mind privacy and human rights contained in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act. The issuance of warrants will continue to require judicial authorization. No lawful access, production orders, preservation orders, interception orders, or search warrants can be obtained in the absence of lawful authority.

It is with a view to maintaining the privacy of Canadian citizens and keeping up with the sophistication of the new breed of high-tech criminals that I ask all hon. members to support Bill C-46.

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

Mr. Speaker, I am happy to be speaking in support of Bill C-46, which seeks to provide necessary amendments concerning evidence. In many ways, this legislation is a long time coming. I believe that it allows policing authorities and our court system to operate in the 21st century. Criminals are committing their crimes in the present tense. We cannot live in the past.

My history with this bill began earlier this year when my community was reeling from a spate of gun crimes. It seemed that every other day yet another shooting had claimed the life of someone. In the past, most citizens believed that gang violence only affected those who were involved in gang culture. There was less public outcry because of this.

How that changed over the course of this year. Not even innocent women, children or senior citizens were safe from a stray bullet or from feeling the grief of losing a loved one to this terrible increase of killings in our community. I needed to know what could be done, so at that time I spoke to Kash Heed, the current minister of public safety and solicitor general in British Columbia, along with my friend and former colleague, Mr. Wally Oppal, and MLA John van Dongen, who was the minister of public safety and solicitor general in British Columbia at that time.

All three of them were very frank about how they felt about the current legislation. They had lived and breathed these issues in the courtroom and they have listened to the police officers on the front lines of this battle in British Columbia. I have spent a great deal of time listening to these front line officers and first responders as well. I knew that the recommendations that Mr. van Dongen, minister Heed and Mr. Oppal would give me were sure to be grounded in reality, a reality that the current legislation does not reflect.

That is why this bill is so important. The Liberal Party of Canada was lucky enough to have Wally Oppal and then B.C. solicitor general John van Dongen come to Ottawa to present a whole slate of legislative recommendations. This bill represents job one from what we have heard.

First and foremost, by extending the definition of transmission data to all means of telecommunications beyond telephones goes a long way to addressing a situation we are all familiar with in the House. Members only need to look at the holsters on their belts or in their pockets to know what I am talking about. I am talking about the BlackBerry.

We all have to face one thing here. We may try to be ahead of the curve, but we should face the fact that criminals are at least as sophisticated as we are. They talk on these tools. They email and send PIN messages to each other. They know their way around police surveillance because right now in a court of law anything they say or write will be inadmissible.

We could argue that we in the House are asking for legislation that allows our email correspondence and PINs to be admissible. Yet, the Conservative government's own legislation on freedom of information for the government stops short of email correspondence. I leave it to the members on the other side of the House to explain this point to Canadians, especially because they were the ones who made such a big noise about transparency and accountability when they were first elected.

As we have seen over the last year, of course, transparency and accountability have taken quite a beating in the cheque republic we are all living in now, but let us hope that with this legislation the government is moving in the right direction at least within the Criminal Code.

There is another part of the bill, however, that I would like to be a bit more serious about at this time. It refers to an issue that I think every member of Parliament in the House would agree goes far beyond partisan interests.

The stiff penalty that this bill would bring in for those who use the Internet to exploit a child makes this bill, without a doubt, one of the most important reforms we as members of Parliament can champion.

As a parent of two daughters and a young boy I can say that I, along with my wife Roni, like most Canadians view this very modern form of evil as a family's worst nightmare.

As a member of Parliament I know we all, no matter what party we belong to, come to the House to work for our communities, but what no one riding can speak for is the community that exists online and the importance we must place in ensuring the highest standards of conduct to protect the innocent.

This amendment is really about bringing our justice system into the century we are all living in now, the world our kids will inherit. Let us ensure they can grow up in a world where we can guarantee their safety when they are online as well.

I would like to say in closing that I really do not have any problem with the main points in the bill at all. Indeed, I know from my side of the House when a crime bill works for Canadians we see no reason in slowing down the process. Of course, we will never hear that from my colleagues across the floor, but a quick look at our record on crime bills that make sense tells that story.

The fact is, as I mentioned earlier, we do not have the luxury of living in the past tense because criminals are taking advantage of how our laws have not modernized. We have to move with the times and allow our police and our court system to let justice prevail. Though there may be finer points with the bill that could stand a closer look, that is what we are here for.

I am sure I speak for all of us in the House when I say that if we truly mean it when we say we want to make Parliament work, there is no greater priority than making it work for the justice system.