Bill C-63 (Historical)

An Act to enact the Online Harms Act, to amend the Criminal Code, the Canadian Human Rights Act and An Act respecting the mandatory reporting of Internet child pornography by persons who provide an Internet service and to make consequential and related amendments to other Acts

Part 1 of this enactment enacts the Online Harms Act , whose purpose is to, among other things, promote the online safety of persons in Canada, reduce harms caused to persons in Canada as a result of harmful content online and ensure that the operators of social media services in respect of which that Act applies are transparent and accountable with respect to their duties under that Act.
That Act, among other things,
(a) establishes the Digital Safety Commission of Canada, whose mandate is to administer and enforce that Act, ensure that operators of social media services in respect of which that Act applies are transparent and accountable with respect to their duties under that Act and contribute to the development of standards with respect to online safety;
(b) creates the position of Digital Safety Ombudsperson of Canada, whose mandate is to provide support to users of social media services in respect of which that Act applies and advocate for the public interest in relation to online safety;
(c) establishes the Digital Safety Office of Canada, whose mandate is to support the Digital Safety Commission of Canada and the Digital Safety Ombudsperson of Canada in the fulfillment of their mandates;
(d) imposes on the operators of social media services in respect of which that Act applies
(i) a duty to act responsibly in respect of the services that they operate, including by implementing measures that are adequate to mitigate the risk that users will be exposed to harmful content on the services and submitting digital safety plans to the Digital Safety Commission of Canada,
(ii) a duty to protect children in respect of the services that they operate by integrating into the services design features that are provided for by regulations,
(iii) a duty to make content that sexually victimizes a child or revictimizes a survivor and intimate content communicated without consent inaccessible to persons in Canada in certain circumstances, and
(iv) a duty to keep all records that are necessary to determine whether they are complying with their duties under that Act;
(e) authorizes the Digital Safety Commission of Canada to accredit certain persons that conduct research or engage in education, advocacy or awareness activities that are related to that Act for the purposes of enabling those persons to have access to inventories of electronic data and to electronic data of the operators of social media services in respect of which that Act applies;
(f) provides that persons in Canada may make a complaint to the Digital Safety Commission of Canada that content on a social media service in respect of which that Act applies is content that sexually victimizes a child or revictimizes a survivor or intimate content communicated without consent and authorizes the Commission to make orders requiring the operators of those services to make that content inaccessible to persons in Canada;
(g) authorizes the Governor in Council to make regulations respecting the payment of charges by the operators of social media services in respect of which that Act applies, for the purpose of recovering costs incurred in relation to that Act.
Part 1 also makes consequential amendments to other Acts.
Part 2 amends the Criminal Code to, among other things,
(a) create a hate crime offence of committing an offence under that Act or any other Act of Parliament that is motivated by hatred based on certain factors;
(b) create a recognizance to keep the peace relating to hate propaganda and hate crime offences;
(c) define “hatred” for the purposes of the new offence and the hate propaganda offences; and
(d) increase the maximum sentences for the hate propaganda offences.
It also makes related amendments to other Acts.
Part 3 amends the Canadian Human Rights Act to provide that it is a discriminatory practice to communicate or cause to be communicated hate speech by means of the Internet or any other means of telecommunication in a context in which the hate speech is likely to foment detestation or vilification of an individual or group of individuals on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination. It authorizes the Canadian Human Rights Commission to deal with complaints alleging that discriminatory practice and authorizes the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal to inquire into such complaints and order remedies.
Part 4 amends An Act respecting the mandatory reporting of Internet child pornography by persons who provide an Internet service to, among other things,
(a) clarify the types of Internet services covered by that Act;
(b) simplify the mandatory notification process set out in section 3 by providing that all notifications be sent to a law enforcement body designated in the regulations;
(c) require that transmission data be provided with the mandatory notice in cases where the content is manifestly child pornography;
(d) extend the period of preservation of data related to an offence;
(e) extend the limitation period for the prosecution of an offence under that Act; and
(f) add certain regulation-making powers.
Part 5 contains a coordinating amendment.

Opposition Motion—Sale of Gas-Powered Vehicles

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton—Bkejwanong, ON]

Madam Speaker, we are here tonight to talk about the EV mandate the Liberal government has put forward, which states that 20% of Canadians will have to be driving electric vehicles by 2026, 60% by 2030 and 100% by 2035. These are not targets. It is going to be a mandate that will force Canadians to drive electric vehicles whether they want to or not.

There is a cost associated with this, because within the mandate it says that the auto manufacturers will have a quota of how many EVs they have to sell. For every one they do not sell, they will be charged a punitive fine of $20,000 per vehicle. We can be sure they are not going to absorb that cost themselves, but will pass it on to the consumers, which will drive up the price of the electric vehicles people are being forced to buy.

I am opposed to this EV mandate on a whole number of grounds, which I will outline.

The first thing I would say is that this mandate is not freedom of choice. I really believe there has been a huge war on our freedoms under the Liberal government over the last 10 years. We know that freedom of expression has been under attack with bills such as Bill C-11, where the government gets to control what social media content is put up, such as videos and the like. We have seen Bill C-63, where it wanted to put people in jail in the future if it thought they might commit a hate crime. Fortunately, that one died on the vine. I hope not to see it again. There have also been attacks on freedom of the press, not just through buying the media by donating huge sums of money to mainstream media, but also with bills such as Bill C-18, which really compromised the ability of Canadians to share news links now on things like Meta and hurt a lot of local smaller media because of it.

Freedom of religion has got to be a concern for every person of faith across this country. It does not matter which faith one talks about, we have seen attacks on people and their places of worship, and a rise in violence against them and vandalism. We have seen our freedoms under attack, and now the Liberals want to add another freedom. They do not want to let people choose what kind of vehicle they want to buy. They want to make them buy an EV.

If somebody wants an EV, I am happy for them to have it. I am all about choice. I do not want one because I live in a really rural part of the riding and there are no charging stations. I have not seen a plan from the government to put any charging stations in place. I can just see myself trundling around the riding and running out of juice with no options. I would have to get towed, and then the next day I would have to get towed, because there is no infrastructure there.

What I would also say is that EVs do not work very well in the cold. If it gets to -40°C, they lose 40% of their efficiency. We have all seen online the experiences of people who have electric vehicles and were trapped in snowstorms. They were very concerned about the fact that they were trapped and did not have enough power to keep the car warm. That is another risk there.

Also, the current technology for lithium batteries is not great in that they catch fire. According to the U.S., 3% of vehicles catch fire. We saw the horrific accident that happened in Toronto recently where the battery caught fire in an electric vehicle, and that shorted out the electricity in the car so the doors could not be opened. Sadly, four people burned to death.

The technology is developing, and the proposed solid-state batteries do not catch fire, so I think better technology is coming, but at this time, with the existing technology, I have concerns. I am sure other Canadians do as well.

When it comes to freedom, I see this as another step through which the government is trying to remove our freedom. What is next after this? Is it going to try to control what we can and cannot eat or what kind of house we buy? Where does the control of the government stop? I have a problem with that.

What are we trying to achieve with the mandate? We talk about how we are trying to address climate change, but the reality is that this mandate will reduce the carbon footprint of Canada, which is now 1.6% of the world's footprint, by 0.08%. If we compare that to those of China and India, which are at about 60% of the world's footprint, it is an insignificant change. It is not going to impact climate change in a real way.

If we really wanted to impact climate change, we would sell Canadian LNG to supplant coal and heavy oil in China and India, and that would reduce their 60% to 15%. That is huge. It would create well-paying jobs here in Canada, and it would help the environment and address climate change.

I just think that the initiative would not make any difference, but it would really hurt Canadians because it would cost us 38,000 jobs and $138.7 billion. That is assuming it does not put the car businesses and the auto manufacturers out of business, which is a real possibility.

The next reason that I do not like the mandate is that there is no plan. The Prime Minister was supposed to be the man with the plan. What do we need to put this mandate in place? We have to have places to plug the things in. We have to have a source of electricity. We have to have the infrastructure in the residential and commercial places where people are in order to make it all go.

With respect to the issue of charging stations, it is being said that we would need 670,000 charging stations across Canada, and we currently have fewer than 150,000. How much would that cost, and how long would that take? The government has not provided any answers. It does not know. That is not a plan.

Also, with respect to the practical details, people living on a suburban block will notice that there are 600-volt transformers. If one person has an electric vehicle, it is no big deal, but if everybody is forced to buy an electric vehicle, there is this little equation in electricity that says voltage is equal to current times resistance, and plugging in cars is resistance. If the resistance is increased with the same voltage, that will reduce the current, and eventually people will not have enough current to turn the lights. This is especially problematic with respect to high-rise apartment buildings, where there could be 20 or 40 floors. If everybody has to plug in, the infrastructure is not there to supply the electricity to them. How much would it cost to get that? Again, there is no plan for that.

Then there would not be enough electricity in the grid. We can see that people recognize that we are going to be increasing our take of electricity. We have brought four million people into Canada, which increases, by about 10%, the usage of electricity. We have emerging businesses, which is a good thing, but it takes electricity. There is a pinch point, and we are going to see brownouts before we can build the capacity in electricity that we need.

In my riding of Sarnia—Lambton—Bkejwanong, the Ontario government has provided a mandate to build a facility, the Riverside Generating Station. It is going to build a cogen plant, small modular nuclear reactors and alternate energy in conjunction with the indigenous people in my riding. That is fantastic, and it will take a certain number of years to get it in place, but the federal government has no plan for how the rest of the country would get electricity and get it into the grid with the infrastructure. Again, there has not been a lot of thought to that.

How much is all of this going to cost? The government will not even come forward with a budget, and I would like to be helpful, so here we go. This is from the government's own web page and finances.

The government gets about $459 billion in revenue every year. It has to pay $75 billion on the debt, $55 billion for health transfers, $25 billion for social transfers, $20 billion for equalization payments, $5 billion for territorial transfers, and $259 billion for the cost of running the government. That gives the government $20 billion before it starts doing any other projects. However, the government announced $77 billion during the election, and then after the election, with the estimates, it announced $486 billion. Now we are talking about possibly $543 billion in deficit before we even talk about building more charging stations, building the electrical infrastructure and building the infrastructure in apartment buildings and neighbourhoods to take it on. This would absolutely bankrupt Canadians and drive the affordability crisis even further into the ground. We need to check what we are doing here.

There is also no solution for the roads. EVs are heavier than regular cars. They do more damage to the roads. Today, the system is that people pay a gas tax and that gas tax is sent back to the municipalities to build roads. In rural communities, it is very difficult, with the number of people the communities have and the amount of gas tax they get back, to maintain the roads.

Now the roads are going to be in even worse condition. How will we address that? I am sure there is another tax coming, because if it is not spending with the Liberals, it is taxing. That is why people call them tax-and-spend Liberals. Those are some concerns.

The other concern I would highlight is my concern about the whole cradle-to-grave of the lithium batteries. The amount of energy that it takes to mine, process and turn them into batteries is actually net destructive to the planet. Then, at the end of life, there is currently no idea of how we are going to dispose of these things, so we may be creating another contamination issue that, again, will cost money to fix. That is not part of the plan, because there is no plan. These are all concerns that I have when it comes to why I do not think these EV mandates need to happen.

I think a much better way to go would be to introduce targets. The automotive industry has said that it will work towards that. The technology, as I said, is developing and I think people are willing to do something, but we are not going to fix the fact that Canada is cold. The solid-state batteries do run better at cold temperatures, so we will see. It is not commercially proven yet, so we do not know.

If people have a desire to do it, my question again is, why are we trying to do it? Are we really going to get this kind of reduction in our footprint? No, we are not. We should be building LNG facilities and shipping it to China and India. That is the bigger success for Canadians. It would also help pay down the huge $2-trillion deficit that we have racked up and that we will keep racking up, as far as I can see. Those are things that would be of great concern to every Canadian, and I am sure that when it comes to the mandates, we are going to continue to see them.

We know that the previous minister of the environment, the radical environmentalist who is like a convicted felon, is now the Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture. I can say that this is certainly not my definition of Canadian identity and culture. He has said so many ridiculous things, starting with saying that he is not going to build any more roads. Do members remember that? Now there is this EV mandate, which is an ideological thing, but it is not practically something that we are able to afford to do. I really think there needs to be some reflection on the Liberal benches to say, “We do not have a plan. Let us at least cost the plan, figure out how much it is going to cost to build all this stuff or at least figure out the timing.”

The Liberals have already set the time in the mandate: 20% by 2026. We are only at 7.5% right now. How are we going to incentivize people to buy EVs? The government invested $55 billion of taxpayers' money trying to build battery plants, EV facilities and the downstream supply chain, so they were trying to pick winners and losers. What have we seen from that money that was spent? Most of them have gone bust, and those that have not, like Stellantis, have announced they are going to move their production to the U.S.

The government has already put out a huge amount of money without getting anything for it. I think Canadians are right to be concerned that we will not be able to meet this mandate. The automotive manufacturers are raising the flag; many of them have already shut down their facilities because of lack of demand. There are a lot of Canadians, as I said, including myself, who will not buy them.

I do not see any evidence of a plan of how we are going to essentially triple in one year, by 2026, the uptake in electric vehicles. There is nothing, not even a marketing campaign that I can see, that would drive any kind of behaviour like that. The incentive program is out of money, and people are not going to pay the additional cost.

All of these reasons, from freedom to cost, the lack of a plan, the cradle-to-grave and the fact that we are not going to achieve anything, are good reasons why I cannot support an EV mandate, and I will continue to stand against it.

Freedom of Expression

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Mr. Speaker, freedom of expression is the foundation of every other freedom. Without it, we cannot challenge bad ideas, question authority or hold governments to account. We cannot protect truth. Freedom of expression is the oxygen of democracy. When governments decide to censor speech, they begin to control thought itself. This path does not lead to safety. Instead, it leads to silence, fear and eventually oppression.

In the last Parliament, the Liberals pushed Canada down that path. Bill C-18 banned news from social media. Bill C-11 manipulated what Canadians can see and say online, and Bill C-63, a bloated censorship regime, threatened to put in place an Internet czar and sweeping new powers to police speech.

The Liberals claim that they have changed, that this is a “new government”, but Canadians know better. The government does not trust Canadians. They do not trust Canadians to think independently, to speak freely or to make their own choices, but Conservatives on this side of the House will always protect free speech, always protect open debate and always stand for the rights and freedoms of Canadians. We are here to continue—

Canadian Heritage

[Andrew Lawton, Conservative, Elgin—St. Thomas—London South, ON]

Mr. Speaker, baseless smears like that are why the Liberals cannot be trusted to regulate speech in this country. For years, the Liberal government has been determined to censor what Canadians see and say online, from Bill C-11, which put the Liberals in control of YouTube algorithms, to Bill C-18, which squeezed out small and independent media, and their thought crime bill, Bill C-63. Now we have learned through the National Post that the cabinet ministers over there are all clamouring over who gets to be responsible for the latest online censorship law.

Will the minister who gets to censor what Canadians say please reveal themselves now?

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Mr. Speaker, what I am hearing is that this is the same old government, which is absolutely hell-bent on continuing to censor what Canadians can see and say online.

My question is with regard to Bill C-63 going forward. Bill C-63 does not just target predators. It targets opinions, freedom of thought and discourse within the online sphere. It institutes the thought police, for crying out loud. It is a Trojan Horse for further government control.

I will ask this again: In any future legislation going forward, will the Liberal government commit to respecting Canadians and making sure that it does not censor them?

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Mr. Speaker, in the last Parliament, the Liberals forced through one piece of censorship legislation after another: Bill C-18, which stops the spread of news on social media outlets; Bill C-11, which controls what Canadians can see and say online; and then Bill C-63, which is bloated censorship legislation that brought in an Internet czar and controls freedom of speech.

The Liberals claim that this is a “new government”. My curiosity is for whoever is in charge over there: Will the Liberals commit to respecting Canadians and, of course, stop censoring them?

Strong Borders Act

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I doubt the hon. member my colleague is referring to who made the comment actually read the bill, because he has not. This is what the bill says. As my colleague across the way mentioned, there are some provisions, although not that one, that could ostensibly, maybe, help fix the mess that the Liberals created themselves. However, there are some things in there so egregious that I think the Liberals put them in there specifically as a poison pill. That means they are not serious about solving these issues and want them to continue. If the Liberals were serious about addressing these issues, they would not have put, as they did in Bill C-63, poison pill civil liberties issues in there to bottleneck Parliament.

I encourage all colleagues in this place to go to the minister and say that this is a dog's breakfast. Let us figure this out.

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I think we are getting somewhere. I am sure my colleagues from the Bloc Québécois have concerns about some of the deep incursions into provincial jurisdiction as well.

Again, we are getting some consensus in debate, and as with Bill C-63, which had provisions about increased reporting requirements for child pornography, there might be a few things in this bill we can agree to agree on, or at least agree to study. However, there are some that are out of scope and designed to make us choose a false dichotomy.

Hopefully, there can be something that resembles work here and that the government understands it has put a dog's breakfast forward and can somehow work something out to try again.

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Mr. Speaker, as I rise in debate for the first time in this 45th Parliament, I would like to present colleagues with some statistics about what a rare and unique privilege it is to serve in this place, if they will give me the floor.

Of the millions upon millions of people who have lived in Canada throughout its entire history, fewer than 5,000 individual Canadians have served as members of Parliament. Of that number, fewer than 450 have been women, and of that number, by my count anyway, fewer than 40 Canadian women in the history of our country have been chosen to serve as a member of Parliament for five or more terms.

On April 28, 2025, I was honoured to be re-elected by my constituents and joined the ranks of some of those giants, women like Agnes Mcphail, Flora MacDonald, Ellen Fairclough, Rona Ambrose, Sheila Copps and Alexa McDonough. The gravity and honour of standing here, once again, is hitting a little harder this time around.

I am here on behalf of, and thanks to, another special and unique group of people, the people of Calgary Nose Hill, who are unique and special in this particular area of Canadian history too. The people I represent, in a riding that has existed for decades, have only ever elected a woman into federal office. Prior to me, my predecessor, Diane Ablonczy, served as a member of Parliament in an even more select group: women who have served as members of Parliament for seven or more terms.

Getting here has meant that I have had to learn a lot of lessons: how to win primaries, the value of having my dogma challenged, how to earn the trust of my community and my colleagues, how to survive being in a government after an election loss and how to thrive in opposition, how to navigate leadership changes, which battles to pick and which ones to walk away from, but most importantly, how to be humble while refusing to let my voice be silenced.

With that, I would like to acknowledge the six other women in the 45th Parliament who are now part of the “been around for a hot minute and have seen some things” five terms or more club: the member for Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, the member for Brossard—Saint-Lambert, the member for Vancouver Centre, the member for Algonquin—Renfrew—Pembroke, the member for Humber River—Black Creek and the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands.

I thank my husband Jeff, my family, my staff, my volunteers and the good people of Calgary Nose Hill, with a special and deeply profound thanks to Sean Schnell, his wife Leeta and their children Charlize and Easton for bringing me to this place today.

Colleagues, I pledge the true pledge of being a member of Parliament: to do my job, which is to hold the government to account to the best of my ability. Let us begin.

I rise today in debate on Bill C-2, a 160-page omnibus bill from the Liberal government that raises serious concerns about the capacity of the government to address several crises of its own making. These were not problems prior to the Liberal government taking office in 2015: a rapid influx of migrants that Canada's social and economic infrastructure could not sustain; an open and porous border; and an illegal drug production, trafficking and addiction crisis.

I would like to start with the issue of Canada's fentanyl crisis, because it is important context for new colleagues to understand how we got here. A decade of ultra-progressive policies juiced a deadly problem that really came into prevalence in late 2015. At that time, precisely the same time that the Canadian political landscape changed, Liberal prime minister Justin Trudeau had a farther left platform, to put it mildly, than his predecessor government. In 2017, an ultra-left version of the NDP, led by the late premier John Horgan, formed government at the subnational level in the province of British Columbia, the region hardest hit by the drug.

Prior to 2015, right-of-centre governments favoured a crackdown on criminal activity related to the emerging problem of fentanyl, coupled with enhanced recovery programs for addicts. However, Trudeau's incoming government, as well as Horgan's in British Columbia, all had long-held beliefs that so-called harm reduction, taxpayer-funded hard drugs and the effective legalization of hard drug possession were superior public policy alternatives on hard drug crime to those of their predecessors on the political right. Between 2015 and 2023, these governments went on to usher in a dramatic shift away from government policy that focused on criminalizing hard drug production and trafficking.

At the federal level, the Liberal government expanded access to hard drug injection sites, ended mandatory minimum penalties for major hard drug offences and softened bail criteria for all crimes, including those related to the production and trafficking of hard drugs. A currently sitting Liberal member of Parliament even went as far as to table a bill that aimed to fully legalize all hard street drugs across the country.

Then, in 2021, British Columbia's NDP government formally applied for a subsection 56(1) exemption under Canada's Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, requesting permission to effectively legalize possession of hard drugs, including fentanyl. In early 2022, Trudeau's federal Liberal government approved the request and allowed for a three-year pilot program. The program was expansive. The government even went as far as to set guidelines that would have allowed recreational fentanyl to be legally provided to children. The results were deadly.

There are people across the aisle who will get their backs up on this situation, but it is the reason we have zombie-like people walking across the streets of urban Canada and rural Canada. Our mothers, our daughters, our husbands, everybody from every demographic has been touched by the crisis that was caused by these extremely failed, ill-sighted policies that literally everybody was telling the Liberals were wrong, but they persisted.

Today, we have this omnibus bill in front of us. As the Liberals did in the former Parliament with Bill C-63, the so-called online harms bill, this bill is trying to suggest to Canadians a false dichotomy: that Canadians have to choose between their civil liberties and fixing epic messes with deadly consequences that the Liberal government set up. That is a false dichotomy and something that this place should reject.

I am going to briefly talk about two components of the bill. I am going to talk about some of the border issues and immigration, and then I want to talk about the civil liberties component very briefly.

This bill is a missed opportunity, on the fentanyl and addiction crisis, to address the real problems of how we got here: the Liberals' catch-and-release bail policies. They could have tabled a bill on that, but they did not, so we are now forced to review this omnibus legislation without understanding whether or not the Liberals are going to address the true cause of this problem: the fact that they do not penalize people who produce these drugs.

The Liberals could have increased penalties for people who produce these drugs. As the leader of the Conservative Party said during the election, these are mass murderers, and they should be treated as such. The Liberals also failed to put in place compassionate measures that would allow for life-saving intervention for people who have lost agency due to addiction.

These are the measures that we need to actually stop the drug production crisis in Canada. Are there other things? Sure there are. Are there things in this bill that Parliament could look at? Sure, but again, the Liberals have purposely structured a bill where Canadians have to choose between their civil liberties and trying to fix a deadly mess that the Liberals made.

On immigration, here is a little history for colleagues who are new to this place. The Canadian consensus on immigration can be boiled down to this: Do not bring more people into the country than our social and economic infrastructure can handle. By that I mean our health care system, our education system, and our capacity to provide language acquisition and provide jobs and housing as well. That is the basic consensus that our pluralism is based on, because if people are housed, if they have access to work, if they have access to health care and if they can speak one of Canada's official languages, then pluralism can be maintained, but the Liberals broke that promise.

I remember that in 2016, first of all, the Liberal government essentially implied that I was racist for suggesting that the Liberals should not lift the visa requirement on Mexico, because there would be false asylum claims made. Guess what: It was like I was Cassandra, doomed to know the future and have the Liberals call me racist. Honestly, what did the Liberals have to do last year? They had to reverse the visa imposition on Mexico. Then there was the next Cassandra moment. I said that maybe we should not let people who have reached the safety of upstate New York illegally cross the border into Canada and then claim benefits here while their asylum claims, which will likely be rejected, linger for years in Canada's broken asylum system, which the Liberals broke.

I said that maybe we should close the loophole in the safe third country agreement. Once again, the implication was that Canada was anti-immigrant if we were to suggest that we restore order, balance and fairness. There are people who apply legally to come into Canada, who do everything right, are waiting for years and never get the chance to come here, or they want their children to come here. The government essentially rolled out the red carpet at Roxham. There was literally a red carpet with the RCMP pulling the luggage across the border and “#WelcomeToCanada”.

What do members think happened when the Liberals sent the message “#WelcomeToCanada” to people who were already in upstate New York? They enabled an industry of people. There were human traffickers telling people how to make their way into Canada. What happened was that our asylum system was broken. It was abused.

Now, the Liberals have this bill, which has a few minor provisions that would do a couple of things that I am concerned about. It would delegate more authority to the minister in vague ways, and it would delegate more responsibility into regulation. If there are problems with the system, why are they not just laying it out in this legislation to make it clear so that we will not have endless judicial appeals, which is also part of the problem here? People could appeal and appeal because too much authority would be put onto the minister, and there is vagueness and an endlessly changing regulatory structure. That is part of the problem here too. I need to look at this bill in more detail on those provisions to understand what is happening here.

There was the minister's performance in question period. She should get someone to practise with her. This is not going to get easier for her. Seriously, this is too big of an issue. She needs to be able to understand and explain why Canadians should vest more power in a minister who does not even know the numbers that are on her own website.

The bigger problem that I have with the immigration provisions in the bill is that they do not address the bigger problem that is facing Canada's immigration system right now, which is that the government does not track exits. Did members know that the government does not coordinate information to track when people leave the country? It does not publicly disclose when people who are on expired visas, or who have deportation orders, actually leave. There is no way for parliamentarians to look into the data to see whether the government has enabled people to leave the country when they have no legal right to be here.

What happens in that situation? First of all, it sends a message to the world that they can have all of the processing on the front end, but there is no consequence on the back end if they do not have a legal right to be in the country. It incentivizes people to come here because they know the system can be abused.

The second thing that happens is that it pushes people underground. It creates an underground economy. We have to have empathy for people who come to Canada because there is a promise of Canada. We cannot blame the housing crisis, the health care crisis and the jobs crisis on people who are drawn to our country and our pluralism by every promise that makes it good. We have to blame the Liberal government for failing the system so badly that people feel their only option is to go underground, into an underground economy where they live in slave-like working conditions.

That happens here in Canada. It happens because the Liberal government has failed so profoundly on this file with minister after minister for a decade. The fact that in this bill the Liberals did not have any sort of plan to departure-track, to coordinate information across departments that already gather this information, and to express to Canadians and people who are here on expired visas how they will enable them to leave the country is only going to exacerbate the problem, particularly with the vagueness in some of these provisions. That is a huge problem. Again, I do not understand why the Liberals would have put in this border component, and all of these missed opportunities and the immigration component with the following.

There are some pretty big poison pills when it comes to civil liberties that every Canadian should be concerned about. If passed, Bill C-2 would allow CSIS, police and peace officers to demand personal information from online service providers without a warrant, based only on vague suspicions of potential crimes or legal breaches based on any act of Parliament.

The Liberals today said that it is not personal information and we should not worry about it, but guess what. Whether or not I use an online service, or where I use an online service, if I depart from an online service, start an online service or use an online service for an amount of time, everything that Bill C-2 says it would do involves my personal information. That is none of the government's business, certainly not without a warrant. There has to be a line drawn here.

The government has severely under resourced our information-gathering departments. Sure, it takes time to get a warrant, but most police departments, after the “defund the police” movement, are so underfunded that they do not have cybercrime units. Now the government is trying to shortcut this by taking away the civil liberties of law-abiding Canadians, and that is not right. At the end of the day, like anything else the government does when it comes to removing civil liberties, it is law-abiding Canadians who get punished, not the criminals.

When I read this bill, I see a road map of ways for criminals to avoid being tracked on where they could legally do this snooping stuff. What is going to happen? Hardened criminals who understand how to get around the system are going to get around the system, and then a government, which unlawfully used the Emergencies Act, froze Canadians' bank accounts, introduced censorship bills Bill C-11 and Bill C-18, and introduced Bill C-63, wants to insert itself. Can members imagine if the Liberals were to retable Bill C-63, with all of their suspicion of hate crime stuff? That bill would couple with this bill to form a mega Voltron of censorship and oppression. I am not being hyperbolic. The government has, over and over again, at every opportunity, taken away Canadians' freedom of speech. Every bill that it has passed has been designed to control speech. My constituents should not have to make that choice.

I am going to bet I know what happened with this bill. Some of these departments have had this policy sitting on the shelf for literally years and more savvy ministers have said, “Not today.” More savvy PMOs have said no, but there is a green minister, a green Prime Minister and a perfect cover, which is the fentanyl crisis. Some bureaucrats said that this is harmonizing with other things and that it is not going to have a big implication on Canadian civil liberties, and these guys fell for it. They did not politically question this. They did not think about what was in the best interests of their constituents.

How do I know that? The Liberals did not put a charter statement in for this. I cannot wait to see that charter statement. It is going to be dance, dance, kitty, dance, I am sure of it. I am positive, because the information that I talked about is personal information. Even if this bill passes, I guarantee it will be challenged all the way up to the Supreme Court.

It is not just that. My colleagues have talked about Canada Post opening mail. Was Canada Post consulted on this provision? I heard it was not. My colleagues heard that Canada Post found out about this after the bill was tabled. How are Canada Post employees going to deal with opening up fentanyl envelopes? That is new. What about the telco companies that this provision would affect? There are things in the bill that give the government unfettered access into telecommunications companies. I am no fan of Canada's telcos' oligopoly, but where we can agree to agree is that I do not want the Liberal government further inserting itself into the management of Canada's telecommunications companies.

There is another concerning component as well, which I saw this morning. The International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group is sounding the alarm about provisions in Bill C-2 with respect to powers to allow the government to request information from foreign entities. This raises an important question: Will the government allow for reciprocal requests from foreign governments? Let us say Bill C-63 were to pass, too. Even if it does not, Bill C-2 can have these snooping provisions and would let foreign governments reciprocate on snooping provisions with all the foreign influence stuff that we have had without a foreign agent registry under this geopolitical situation. The fact that there is nothing in the bill that says what this means is crazy.

Also, the government has not shown Canadians any specific situation, evidence or circumstance in granular detail about why we should be giving up our civil liberties to a government that unlawfully used the Emergencies Act and imposed draconian censorship bills, which resulted in news bans in this country. I will not do it. I think the one thing that all of my colleagues from all opposition parties can agree on is this: There are elements in this bill that are worthy of further study that might help fix the mess that the Liberals have made, but we should not have to choose between civil liberties and keeping our country safe.

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Mr. Speaker, if Bill C-2 passes, it would allow CSIS, police and peace officers to demand personal info from online service providers without a warrant based only on vague suspicions of potential crime or legal breaches of any act of Parliament. Whether or not a Canadian uses an online service, where they use it and when they use it are personal information, and the government has not provided a charter statement for the same.

With Bill C-2, combined with Bill C-63, the government could target whatever it deems to be spreading hateful content. Bill C-2 would combine with Bill C-63 to essentially form Voltron-type censorship. The government has not indicated what policy concerns, aside from vague references to security, these provisions are needed for. These snooping provisions are a massive poison pill that should not have been included in this bill.

Why, as they did with Bill C-63, are the Liberals making Canadians choose between their civil liberties and safety and fixing the broken immigration system that the Liberals broke themselves?

Justice

[Francesco Sorbara, Liberal, Vaughan—Woodbridge, ON]

Mr. Speaker, children in Canada need protection from online harm. The abuse that occurs online is endangering our kids, and it is time we acted to prevent more families from being harmed. Our government has risen to this challenge, putting forward a plan to help parents and children. Bill C-63, the online harms act, would create safety measures that would save lives. The Conservatives are now the only roadblock to making the bill a reality in Canada.

The safety of our children should not be political. Can the Minister of Justice please discuss the importance of this critical legislation and why we need it passed now?

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

Mr. Speaker, children in Canada are just not safe online. Our government wants to join the many countries that have now adopted online safety regulations, yet the Conservatives are preventing our online harms act from moving forward. Shockingly, they are blocking our efforts to remove child sex abuse material from the Internet. How disgusting.

Can the justice minister please describe the importance of Bill C-63 to parents and children, and explain why Canadians so urgently need this law now?

[Lena Metlege Diab, Liberal, Halifax West, NS]

Mr. Speaker, our government takes the safety of children seriously. That is why we put forward a comprehensive plan to bring Canada into the 21st century and change our online world, making it safer for kids and better for all. The Conservatives are blocking the plan, and they are standing in the way of a better future for our kids online.

Parents want the online harms act. Experts want the online harms act. Can the Minister of Justice explain why Bill C-63 must be passed to keep our kids safe?

John Horgan

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Mr. Speaker, if you seek it, you will find unanimous consent for the following motion, given that Bill C-63, the so-called—

[Arif Virani, Liberal, Parkdale—High Park, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order.

Regarding Bill C-63, if you seek it, I believe you will find unanimous consent for—

Industry and Technology

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, the member raises a very important issue about the Internet, and threats on the Internet, in a number of ways. He spent a great deal of his time focused on Bill C-27, and understandably so since that is what the motion is about. The government has taken a very holistic approach in dealing with all aspects of the Internet in the form of legislation and regulations.

Quite often in legislation, we see a framework that is absolutely essential to support healthy and strong regulations that, ultimately, protect the interests of Canadians. It has been somewhat frustrating, as the member was frustrated when talking about what is taking place in committees; on the floor of the House of Commons, it has also been frustrating. The member referred to Bill C-27 being held up in committee, but he tried to put the blame on the government.

One of the biggest differences between the government today and the government while Stephen Harper was prime minister is that we are very open to ideas, constructive criticism, and looking at ways we can improve legislation. That means we have been open to amendments and changes. There have been a number of recommendations, but there was also an extensive filibuster on Bill C-27. It was not just government members but opposition members, much like we see filibusters taking place now on other aspects of the safety of Canadians.

For seven or eight weeks now, there has been a Conservative filibuster on the floor of the House of Commons, and there are other pieces of legislation dealing with the Internet that the Conservatives continue to filibuster. I am referring to Bill C-63, which deals with things such as intimate images being spread on the Internet without consent and child exploitation. We are talking about serious issues facing Canadians, including Bill C-63, that we cannot even get to committee because the Conservative Party has made the decision to filibuster on the floor of the House of Commons.

When the member opposite talks about Bill C-27, I can assure the member that the government is very keen on the legislation. We do not see how Canadians would benefit by splitting the legislation because both aspects are really important to Canadians. We should look at where it can be improved and we are open to that. We have clearly demonstrated that, but we need a higher sense of co-operation, whether dealing with Bill C-63 in the chamber or Bill C-27 at committee. Bill C-26 deals with cybersecurity. As I said, the government is very aware of what is happening on the Internet and our responsibility as legislators to advance legislation that helps establish a framework that will protect the interests of Canadians.

Earlier, I referred to a trip I took to the Philippines in the last five days. One of the companies we visited was a Canadian company, Open Text, that employs 1,500-plus people. We sat in a room that had this huge monitor of the world, and Open Text talked about how threats to infrastructure and to individuals occur every second. We are talking about a trillion type of number when it comes to computer threats occurring on a monthly basis. Open Text can tell where they are coming from and where they are going. It was a very interesting presentation.

No government has invested more in issues around AI than this government has, recognizing the potential good but also the extreme harm out there. We can think about different types of data banks. There are government data banks, such as Canada Revenue at the national level and health care records at the provincial level. There are the Tim Hortons, the private companies, and the data they acquire in their applications. The amount of information about Canadian individuals on the Internet is incredible. Technology has changed the lives of each and every one of us, whether we know it or not.

We can take a look at the number of cameras on our public streets, in malls and so on. We can think of the number of interactions we have on a daily or weekly basis, whether that is banking, which contains very sensitive information, or medical reports—