Bill C-21 (Historical)

An Act to amend the Customs Act

This enactment amends the Customs Act to authorize the Canada Border Services Agency to collect, from prescribed persons and prescribed sources, personal information on all persons who are leaving or have left Canada. It also amends the Act to authorize an officer, as defined in that Act, to require that goods that are to be exported from Canada are to be reported despite any exemption under that Act. In addition, it amends the Act to provide officers with the power to examine any goods that are to be exported. Finally, it amends the Act to authorize the disclosure of information collected under the Customs Act to an official of the Department of Employment and Social Development for the purposes of administering or enforcing the Old Age Security Act.

Customs Act

[Pierre Paul-Hus, Conservative, Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, QC]

This bill was originally introduced by the Conservatives. We are very pleased to see that the Liberal government is moving forward with it. However, it is important to us that we keep moving in this direction in the context of security today and managing the problems at our borders. This bill is the first step. Make no mistake, we must go even further and ensure that our border services, including customs officers and the RCMP, can do their job properly.

[Matthew Dubé, NDP, Beloeil—Chambly, QC]

Mr. Speaker, during the Conservative government's last term in office, 1,200 border services jobs were eliminated. What is more, from 2013 to 2015, border services received incomplete information regarding passengers on over 3,000 flights. We will come back to those cuts and the impact that they have had on national security, given the Conservatives' hypocrisy on this issue.

I want to talk about Bill C-21, which is now before us. Obviously, the Conservatives' track record on privacy leaves much to be desired, particularly considering the passage of Bill C-51 and all of the resulting privacy breaches that occurred as a result of information sharing.

I would like to know how my colleague can support an initiative that will make it possible to share more information with the United States government, when the current President has signed an order under which American privacy laws no longer apply to non-U.S. citizens. It will be difficult to move forward with this bill given Canadians' current lack of confidence in the information-sharing system established by the Conservative government and the fact that the proper safeguards are not in place.

[Pierre Paul-Hus, Conservative, Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, QC]

With all due respect to my NDP colleague, it is hard to take a stand and offer comment when you have never been in government. The fact is that the Conservative government of the day made security its priority. The Conservatives' foremost concern is the defence and security of Canada. I think my colleague will agree with me there. We often take steps they disagree with, but the fact remains that defending Canadians is important to us. That being said, this is a bill we agree with. What we need to do now is put it in place, pass it in the House, and implement it. The measures related to protecting Canadians must take precedence. The planned information sharing is a good initiative. I would therefore ask my NDP colleague to rethink his strategy and put the safety of Canadians first.

[Alupa Clarke, Conservative, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

Mr. Speaker, earlier the member pointed out a certain contradiction in the Liberals' approach to border security. My colleague said that the aim of bill C-21 was to protect the safety of Canadians without impeding the flow of trade. However, he also mentioned that the budget for border security had been cut. I would like to know more about these budget cuts and about the border crossings that have been closed.

[Pierre Paul-Hus, Conservative, Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague from Beauport—Limoilou for his question.

That is precisely the question we are currently asking the government. Last week the people of Oshawa and Barrie informed us that CBSA checkpoints have been cut in their communities. These are some of the issues we need to address immediately with the government so there are no contradictions. On the one hand, we need to keep Canadians safe, and on the other hand, we need to be careful not to cut key border services.

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to follow up on what our colleague from Beloeil—Chambly was saying about giving information to the United States. Our bill is very clear: it will make it possible to get information from the United States, but it does not allow sending information to the United States.

I would just like to know if my colleague agrees with that statement.

[Pierre Paul-Hus, Conservative, Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, QC]

Mr. Speaker, it feels like I am defending the bill. The principle is very clear; it is about the transfer of information to ensure that both countries are properly linked and have some basic information on people who are travelling from Canada to the United States as well as on Americans, as the minister mentioned in his speech on the bill. This is basic information that already exists, that is, personal information about each American or Canadian. This information is simple. This is simply about managing movements in and out of the country. It also allows us to have better control over what goes on at our borders.

[Matthew Dubé, NDP, Beloeil—Chambly, QC]

Mr. Speaker, first, I would like to join the minister in expressing my condolences to the family of our esteemed colleague Arnold Chan. His death was a great loss to everyone in the House, regardless of their party. We stand in solidarity with the Liberal caucus and Mr. Chan's constituents, family, and friends at this difficult time.

We are here today to talk about Bill C-21, which the government introduced in June 2016. The government is very enthusiastic about this bill. It is now September, and we are finally talking about it, so we can see how enthusiastic the government is about this bill. Perhaps the purpose of the bill is to pander to the Americans during the NAFTA negotiations. Who knows.

It is important to understand the context here. The minister, in answer to my question, and the member for Laurentides—Labelle in his comments talked about the bill as though it was a piece of stand-alone legislation, when in actual fact it is part of an information-sharing agreement between the Canadian and American governments. We can look at the measures set out in the bill, but they are part of a broader agreement and broader operational practices that are beginning to be implemented for our services at the border.

Things are very different now, and if we take a big-picture view of border issues, Canadians are clearly concerned. The same issues come up over and over. Take cellphones, for example. There is a glaring lack of protection when it comes to cellphone searches and what we call the briefcase law. People surrender a certain degree of privacy at the border. That interpretation of the law is fine if we are talking about someone seeing our unmentionables in a suitcase, but a cellphone that contains vast amounts of information about an individual is something else entirely. That is just one of the concerns we have about the border.

Things have changed now that Donald Trump is in office. In recent months, there has been discrimination at the border. Everyone knows that. The minister says that, statistically, fewer Canadians are being turned away at the border than in previous years. That is not an acceptable answer when people are being subjected to degrading treatment by U.S. border officers who ask them questions about their religious beliefs, their country of origin, and the colour of their skin.

This context is extremely important for understanding where our concerns for this bill are coming from. The minister tells us not to worry, that it is basic information that will be shared, information that is found on page 2 of one's passport. In reality, subclause 92(1) of the bill states that:

the Agency may collect, from a prescribed source, in the prescribed circumstances, within the prescribed time and in the prescribed manner...

It goes on to describe what the Agency is authorized to do. The key phrase I want to draw to the attention of the House is “the Agency may”. It is left to the discretion of border services whether to keep the information or not. At a place like customs, where discrimination is on the rise because people are judged by their destination and their origins, this is quite problematic. This could lead to increased profiling. God knows that there is too much of that already at the border.

Let me go back to the agreement that led to this bill.

The entry/exit program is only just beginning and will grow. Despite the enthusiasm that Liberals and Conservatives might have for it, we are going down a very slippery slope here. Before we continue, someone needs to put on the brakes because what we are seeing here is further integration at the border. That might seem great if all that we are considering is efficiencies, but we want to consider people's rights at the border, but that is lacking in the conversations that are happening.

Where does it end? When we talk about the context that I described with regard to cellphones and the lack of legislation as to what people's rights are when they are asked to unlock their cellphones and provide that information, and when it comes to the profiling that is happening at the border, that also applies to what new tools we have brought into place. The current U.S. President has floated the idea of using biometrics at the border. Will that end up becoming part of this kind of entry/exit agreement on top of the biographical information that would be provided? We do not have answers to these questions.

The fact of the matter is that any information that is being collected and shared will lead us down a path that we have seen before, because, quite frankly, as I said in my question to the minister, some of the most egregious human rights violations that Canada has been a part of, even if by proxy, have happened because of the sharing of information. That is something we are doing more and more in a post-Bill C-51 world, which, by the way, was a bill that the Liberals supported. That is the reality that we have to take into account when we consider increasing the amount of information we are sharing. It is not only biographical information, but also about where people are going to and coming from. While that might seem fine for someone who is not being profiled at the border, there are certainly many law-abiding Canadians who know what the experience is like, who because of where they are going to or where they are originally from; because they might be dual citizens and because of the country from where other citizenship is from; because of the colour of their skin and their religious beliefs, suddenly that basic biographical information being collected and shared with the U.S. government takes on a whole different context despite the fact they are law-abiding Canadians. That is very troubling, and even more so when I hear the minister talk about the fight against radicalization.

Certainly it goes without saying that we all agree that radicalization is an issue that needs to be tackled. Here, I would add that we are still waiting to hear more about what the government is going to do with its grassroots approach to taking on the fight against radicalization. We have not heard much about that in a little while, but that is a sidebar.

The reality is that when I hear things like that and the Conservative member who just spoke, and this bogeyman that is raised of how we are going to go after terrorism, there is a code there and we know what that leads to at the border and the treatment that people go through afterward. That is not something we want to see happen. Sure, we can have faith in our CBSA officers, the men and women who do extraordinary work despite limited resources because of successive Liberal and Conservative governments, but we are also looking at what the U.S. is going to do with that information. That is where the danger lies.

President Trump has signed an executive order explicitly stating that persons who are not U.S. citizens are now excluded from the protections offered by United States privacy legislation.

That is extremely dangerous, considering that the Canadian government is rushing to partner with the U.S. government to increase the amount of information it shares with the Americans.

Given that the President of the United States says he may consider torture acceptable and given that Canada has a ministerial directive in place allowing for information to be shared with countries that engage in torture, we are facing a big problem. I am not saying that this is exactly what the bill says, but the upshot of this bill is that we will be sharing more and more information.

It is a very slippery slope, since we keep sharing more and more information with other countries, including the United States. Even though the U.S. is an ally, the statements coming from the current administration are cause for concern and make the idea of sharing information about public safety and national security extremely troubling.

In a post-C-51 world, the accountability procedures are wholly inadequate. Let us look at the facts. An article published by the Toronto Star in August said the following:

CBSA has quietly started receiving and sharing some information with the U.S. government.

That means some information sharing was already allowed even without this bill being passed. The bill will just settle things for good.

The risk is that this may be done more covertly, without proactive transparency. At the end of the article, it says that Canada Border Services Agency plans to update the privacy assessment once the bill comes into force.

It is far from reassuring that we are talking about doing another privacy impact assessment after the bill is adopted. In that spirit, the role we have as parliamentarians is to protect Canadian safety, but also their rights, and their right to privacy more specifically. As far as this bill is concerned, we should look at how much is left up to regulation in the bill. For example, under “Regulations”, the bill states:

The Governor in Council may make regulations for the purposes of this section, including regulations

(a) prescribing the information that must be given under paragraph (1)(a);

(b) respecting the conveyances in relation to which information must be given under subsection (1);

(c) prescribing the persons or classes of persons who must give the information under subsection (1);

(d) respecting the circumstances in which the information must be given under subsection (1); and

(e) respecting the time within which and the manner in which the information must be given under subsection (1).

Those are all things that the Governor in Council can do through regulations. That essentially means, for the people listening at home, that those are things that the minister can decide to do all on his own, without a proper vote in the House of Commons on a piece of legislation. That is extremely troubling. If we go back to the debate on Bill C-23, which is the sister legislation in the context of this more integrated border with the U.S., in committee, I asked public safety officials which regulations would be changed, as that bill also opened the door to all of the regulatory changes that could potentially change the scope of the bill. That certainly concerned New Democrats. I will give the Liberals credit. They got back to us and provided a list of regulations that may change, but the list was not exhaustive.

As parliamentarians voting on a bill and trying to protect Canadians' rights in the context of sharing more of their information with the American government, especially under the current circumstances or regime, if I can use that term, it is extremely troubling that there is so much latitude allowed for regulatory changes. We certainly understand that there is a place for regulatory changes in the way that our government functions, but when it comes time to prescribe what information is shared, who is sharing it, and how they are sharing it, which is the core of the issue with this bill, that cannot be left out of the accountability process, which obviously includes debate in the House and study at committee.

When I was in Washington with the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security, I learned about some new tools, such as digital fingerprinting and facial recognition, that the U.S. may begin using at its border. Those things are still in development, but they are getting to the point that the U.S. government will be looking to deploy them.

The minister is trying to reassure us by saying that he is in constant contact with his American counterpart, but people at Homeland Security envision using exactly those kinds of tools in the context of this information sharing agreement. We could very well see a higher level of integration. In the statement on greater integration of border operations that came out of the meeting between the Prime Minister and President Trump in Washington, they talked about the possibility of our border officials hosting American border officials.

Forget about all of the problems that co-locating two agencies from two different countries could cause, if only in terms of collective agreements and working conditions. Let us just talk about training. The minister took the time to point out that officials would be trained to protect Canadians' privacy and would always act in accordance with the law. I am not questioning the work that is going to be done, but when we debated Bill C-23, which would allow American officials on Canadian soil, we asked Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness officials what the plan was for delivering that training while ensuring respect for the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, privacy laws, and even Bill C-23 itself, and we were not remotely satisfied with the answers.

The minister can be as reassuring as he wants, but it takes more than that. We need something tangible that truly outlines the process that will be put in place for protecting people's privacy. Even if the process is clearly spelled out to us, in an agreement like this with a bill like this, given the way in which Canadians' information will be shared with the U.S. government the minister must admit that the information will not enjoy the same protection in American hands, even if we have the best men and women working as Canadian border officers and the best legislation in place and if we are making every effort to protect people's privacy.

The minister can reassure us all he wants, but, as he so often says, the Americans can do what they want. That is reason alone to not only oppose the bill, but, as I said, to also rethink the agreement.

As I have said time and again, we are seeing a troubling tendency with the new information related to the public safety file globally, whether it is the Justice Noël decision related to illegal collection of metadata by CSIS; the Privacy Commissioner reporting last week that the RCMP has illegally obtained information from cellular phones six times in the last year; racial profiling at the Canada-U.S. border; people being asked to unlock their cell phones and provide social media passwords at the border, without clear legislation in that sense; or whether it is the fact that two years in we still have not seen any changes to Bill C-51. We finally tabled a bill in the dying days of the last sitting of the House, which does not go nearly far enough.

It is a troubling tendency we are seeing that is undermining the confidence and trust that Canadians have in their national security agencies and in the approach that successive Conservative/Liberal governments have had. There is a lack of understanding that rights and security are not a zero-sum game, and that the word “balance” implies that there is sacrificing of part of one or the other. We need to do both. Unfortunately, that is not the report card that the government can have.

We look at a bill like this, at these kinds of agreements more broadly, as we decide to share more and more information with a U.S. government that is being led by a president who has opened the door to the use of torture, and has removed privacy protections on information, not only for his own citizens but even more importantly for non-Americans. For Canadians, in that specific context the government cannot ignore it. Whether it is trying to fast-track this bill that was tabled in the House in June 2016, maybe to make nice for NAFTA negotiations, the fact is, it is about time that the government started to hit the brakes on this willy-nilly sharing of information.

I want to end on one piece. If the government is so proud of this agreement, if it really thinks it is doing the right thing, I have one question to ask. Unfortunately, I will not get to ask it, so I will ask it rhetorically. Why is it that on the first day back in the House of Commons, after a great summer of work that we all spent in our constituencies, that we are hardly going to hear any Liberal speakers? The minister has spoken, and there will maybe be a handful more speakers. However, it is mostly New Democrats and Conservatives who will be carrying the debate.

Maybe my Conservative friends can tell me what is so great about this bill, because, sadly, I do not think I am going to hear about it from the Liberals. They have certainly not made the case for it. The “just trust me” approach by the minister is not good enough when it comes to protecting Canadians' rights and privacy.

[Sukh Dhaliwal, Liberal, Surrey—Newton, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I also express my sadness on the passing of our esteemed colleague, Arnold Chan.

I was listening carefully to the debate by the hon. member on the other side of the House. The hon. member mentioned that it is our duty to protect the safety of Canadians. I have not heard a single thing about how this bill does not protect the safety of Canadians.

I have had the opportunity to travel across the globe. All major countries have a system in place to help monitor the exit of travellers. We did not have a mechanism in place. I am proud that this minister is putting that mechanism in place to protect the safety of Canadians.

I would like to ask the hon. member if he would agree that this bill improves the safety of Canadians and if he would be able to support this.

[Matthew Dubé, NDP, Beloeil—Chambly, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for the question.

Despite what the Liberals and the Conservatives might say, just because the NDP stands up for Canadians' rights and privacy does not mean that we do not take the government's responsibility for ensuring public safety seriously.

Let us look at the current state of affairs. Take CSIS or the RCMP for example. They already have legal mechanisms and agreements in place with their U.S. counterparts for sharing information in the context of a criminal investigation, for example. The same problem comes up every time. We saw that in the debate on Bill C-51. We are told that these changes need to be made in order to ensure Canadians' safety. However, existing legislation does that already. In the meantime, the government proposes signing agreements that would make the border more seamless and allow more information to be shared, which threatens the rights and privacy of Canadians.

This creates a situation where information is exchanged with the American government, which does not seem to take seriously its responsibility to store and use that information appropriately. This is taking place within a context of profiling regarding people's country of origin or religious beliefs, despite the fact that legal provisions are already in place.

We in the NDP might be open to another proposal. However, the fact remains that, for us, any exchange of information that happens with no accountability and no mechanism to protect the rights of Canadians is unacceptable.

The time has come for the accountability, review and oversight mechanisms used by our national security agencies to take into account any and all exchanges of information that happen freely, not only here in Canada, between government agencies, but also with other governments, including the American government.

[Filomena Tassi, Liberal, Hamilton West—Ancaster—Dundas, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to begin by thanking the member and other members who have spoken in the House this morning for expressing condolences with respect to our beloved Arnold Chan. As a new MP, Arnold was a perfect role model for me. He will be sorely missed, and today will be a sombre day in this House. I am thankful to all who have expressed their condolences.

As Arnold would like me to do, I will return to what we are debating today in the House, which is Bill C-21. We are talking about disclosing who comes in and out of Canada so that we have a better idea as to whether someone is leaving the country. The information being shared is that which appears on the second page of the passport: name, date of birth, citizenship, date of issue, and date of expiry. In terms of safety, it is reasonable for us to know who is leaving the country.

The member was referring to us giving the U.S. information. Actually, the U.S. is giving us information on who is leaving Canada. This already applies to to foreign nationals and permanent residents. With this legislation, that will now apply to Canadian citizens. This is the sharing of information about people leaving the country.

It already applies to certain groups but does not apply to Canadian citizens. Does the member not believe that it is important for the safety for our country to know who is leaving Canada and when they are leaving?

[Matthew Dubé, NDP, Beloeil—Chambly, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the member's words about her late colleague. Certainly he will be missed by all of us. On that we can certainly agree.

On a lighter note, and with the member being from Hamilton, I would like to thank her city for the warm welcome we received there this weekend when the NDP caucus was in town.

On a more serious note, and to my colleague's question, as I said in my remarks, the fact is that this bill does not exist in a vacuum. It is part of a larger agreement between the Canadian government and the U.S. government to start sharing more information. It is only a first step in a larger program that is going to be rolled out over the next few years.

More specifically, proposed subsection 93(1) of the bill, “Information given to the Agency”, states:

(a) in relation to the conveyance or its travel route, the last place inside Canada from which it departed, regardless of whether the persons boarded the conveyance at that place, the date and time of that departure and any prescribed information

It goes on to talk about “the type of travel document that identifies the person,” and “the name of the country or organization that issued the travel document”.

Let us think about things like that. Say we have a Canadian citizen who is a dual citizen. This is a hypothetical example. Hypotheses are never very safe in politics, but for the sake of debate, let us use one. It is someone from a country that is a target of Mr. Trump's travel ban who uses his or her passport from that country to travel. Now we are sharing information with the U.S., telling it where that document is from and things like that. We are going down that rabbit hole, down that slippery slope. With all this profiling we are seeing based on religious beliefs or country of origin, that is where we start opening Pandora's box.

I have said a few times in my remarks that if we want to go down this path with these agreements with other countries, all the mechanisms that require the accountability of these agencies have to catch up, and they have not, whether it was Bill C-51 or the bills tabled by the government. We are not going in the right direction at all with regard to protecting Canadians' rights and privacy.

[Pierre-Luc Dusseault, NDP, Sherbrooke, QC]

Mr. Speaker, it is nice to see you again as a new session of Parliament begins.

I want to thank my colleague, because it is refreshing to see a member who has the courage to rise in the House to protect the privacy of Canadians. Listening to the debate today, it seems to me that most members are blinded by the word “security” and can no longer make a distinction between the privacy of Canadians and the importance of protecting our country.

Would my colleague agree that the direction we have been taking in recent decades will eventually lead to Canadians losing basically any right to privacy they once had? The government will know about every trip taken by Canadians and know everywhere they have gone in the past year. Part of the motivation behind this definitely has to do with social programs. The Liberals did not even try to hide that earlier. Indeed, the minister said that Service Canada would have access to that information to administer the EI program.

Does my colleague think this is heading in a dangerous direction, that it seems as though Canadians will soon lose all right to privacy and that the government will know everything about their day-to-day activities?

[Matthew Dubé, NDP, Beloeil—Chambly, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his question.

That is exactly what is happening. I remember what the Conservative member for Bruce—Grey—Owen Sound often said when he was asking witnesses questions in committee. He often said that he was prepared to sacrifice some of his privacy for the sake of national security and that he was not too worried about it.

That is easy to say when one is not the victim of discrimination. Once again, I am hearing the Liberals reassure us that we are talking about the basic information that is found on page 2 of one's passport. However, the problem with information sharing, when we create opportunities for privacy violations and we share more and more information within the various government agencies in Canada and with other foreign governments, in this case the U.S. government, is that it becomes possible for officials to sometimes jump to erroneous conclusions based on that small amount of information.

Information such as a person's country of origin, date of birth, or even gender may seem inconsequential, but that may be all it takes in the hands of a discriminatory government agency. When discrimination is involved, even basic information can lead to unfortunate consequences. That is why we need to take the responsibility to protect that information very seriously, and we do not believe that the Liberals or the Conservatives are doing that.

[Peter Fonseca, Liberal, Mississauga East—Cooksville, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am glad to be back in the House of Commons and in this chamber to be able to speak to and debate important pieces of legislation, as we are doing here today on Bill C-21.

I know I speak for all of us when I say, with a very heavy heart, that I am very saddened that one of our colleagues, the member for Scarborough—Agincourt, Arnold Chan, has passed away and I send condolences to his wife, Jean, and their three kids.

I will be splitting my time today with the member for Vaughan—Woodbridge.

I will be supporting Bill C-21, an act to amend the Customs Act, because it is really about safety and security for Canadians. It is about respect for our laws and accountability and ensuring that we keep a safe and smart border.

In simple terms, the proposed changes would provide the Canada Border Services Agency with the legislative authority to collect basic exit information on all travellers leaving Canada. In so doing, these changes would further advance two of the government's most important priorities: ensuring Canada's national security and its economic prosperity.

As hon. members well know, the women and men of the CBSA play a critical role in keeping our borders secure and in facilitating the flow of legitimate trade and travel. They are highly trained professionals on duty 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. At the same time, no matter how well we train our border services officers, and regardless of how vigilant they are, we must recognize that they cannot be fully effective in the performance of their duties if they are not equipped with the tools they need to do the job, the job we expect of them.

That is what the bill is about, ensuring that Canada's border services officers have the tools they need, namely, more complete and more accurate information about who is crossing our borders and when they are doing so.

Today, on entry into our country, this information collection and exchange happens for approximately 80,000 travellers a day, with no impact on their travel experience. While this information is useful, it does not provide a complete picture, because while entry data is collected for all travellers, exit data is collected only for people who are not Canadian citizens who leave the country by land. This creates a number of problems. For example, with no means of identifying precisely who is exiting our country, we cannot know if wanted individuals are fleeing Canada to escape prosecution, if an abducted child who is the subject of an Amber alert is being snuck out of the country, or if a radicalized individual is leaving Canada to participate in terrorist activities abroad.

Bill C-21 would ensure that Canada, like most of our allies, knows when someone leaves the country. It is pretty straightforward. It is pretty standard around the world. This is a big step toward safer and more successful border management.

Expanding our collection of exit information would offer a range of benefits. For instance, with access to exit information from airline passenger manifests prepared up to 72 hours in advance, the CBSA and its law enforcement partners would have a new capacity to respond to the outbound movement of known high-risk travellers and goods prior to their actual departure from Canada, and they would become aware very quickly if such a traveller crossed by land into the United States.

In a contemporary environment, where criminal activity frequently crosses international boundaries, I am especially encouraged by how this legislation would help combat human trafficking and exploitation.

There are a great many things we are already doing to pursue the perpetrators and rescue the victims of human trafficking. Other legislation is before the House, such as Bill C-38, which would give police and prosecutors important new tools to facilitate human trafficking investigations and prosecutions. The government has been partnering since last year with major financial institutions to track financial transactions related to human trafficking. Millions of dollars are being invested through the national crime prevention strategy to support programs in communities across the country that help people exit exploitative situations. Fifty-three law enforcement partners across nine provinces participated in the most recent operation, Northern Spotlight, which identifies and helps people who are being exploited or who are at risk of exploitation. However, if Canadian authorities do not know when a human trafficking suspect or victim is leaving the country, that is a significant blind spot for investigators.

With Bill C-21 in place, law enforcement would be better able to work with international partners to locate traffickers and their victims and to identify travel patterns, human smuggling destinations, and implicated criminal entities. This would help investigators break up a human trafficking operation and help prosecutors secure convictions in court.

As well as being very useful for criminal investigations, knowing who has left Canada and when would help immigration officials identify people who have remained in the country beyond their authorized periods of stay. It would also help protect the integrity of benefit programs with residency requirements by allowing officials who administer those programs to make eligibility decisions on the basis of information that is more reliable and complete.

To be clear, everyone collecting benefits in accordance with the law would continue to receive them. For example, this would not affect snowbirds collecting old age security, because anyone who has lived in Canada as an adult for 20 years can collect OAS, regardless of where a person lives. It would not have any impact on medicare eligibility, because the information would only be used at the federal level. I am sure that all Canadians want to know that eligibility requirements for benefit programs are being respected, and the bill would help ensure that they are.

Also, Bill C-21 would address a problem highlighted by the Auditor General in the fall 2015 report. At that time, the Auditor General found that the Canada Border Services Agency, “did not fully have what it needed to carry out its enforcement priorities” related to the export of controlled or illegal goods. He recommended strengthening CBSA's export authorities, information, practices, and controls to better protect Canada and its allies, fight organized crime, and meet its international obligations.

Bill C-21 is a major advance in that direction. It would give Canadian border services officers authorities with regard to the export of goods similar to the authorities they have when goods are imported into Canada. It would make it an offence, under the Customs Act, to smuggle prohibited or controlled goods out of the country.

We will achieve the advantages I have outlined, and my examples are by no means an exhaustive list, without any additional burden or requirements imposed on travellers. Under Bill C-21, people would continue to simply show their passports when crossing the border. Their basic information, such as name, date of birth, and nationality, would be collected, just as it is now, at land ports of entry for all travellers entering the U.S. from Canada and all travellers entering Canada from the United States. Each country would share that information with the other. In other words, when people told the U.S. that they were coming in, the U.S. would let Canada know that they had left. For travellers leaving Canada by air, the same basic biographic information would be obtained through electronic passenger manifests received directly from air carriers. Information collected in this way would not be shared with the U.S.

I emphasize that these changes would not be felt by travellers. They would, however, strengthen our border security and integrity and thereby improve the security of Canada as a whole.

At its core, Bill C-21 is about keeping Canadians safe and about having a border that is secure and efficient. Given the extent to which our prosperity relies on the movement of people and goods across the border, Canada must be a world leader when it comes to border security. At the moment, when it comes to maintaining awareness about who and what is leaving our country, we are at the back of the pack. The measures proposed in Bill C-21 would serve to align Canada with international partners that have implemented, or a are in the process of implementing, such systems, such as New Zealand, Australia, the U.K., the European Union, and the United States. We need to keep pace, and we need to ensure that the women and men of the Canada Border Services Agency have the tools they need to carry out the vital work we expect of them.

I urge all hon. members to join me in supporting this important bill.