Thank you very much for that question, honourable member.
In fact in the last few years we've been focusing increasingly on matters of national security and the maintenance of privacy rights because of the various new programs that have been developed.
We published a document that's available on our website called “A Matter of Trust”, which sets forth the principles that we apply and that have been approved over the years within our country and by our courts, in terms of privacy principles and to the extent to which they have been respected. We hope that's a kind of blueprint or a series of suggestions for developing programs on the one hand and for telling Canadians what they can expect on the other hand.
In terms of C-30—in fact, I recently noted in going back over some material—I believe this was introduced under another name and title as far back as April 2009. So for not less than three years we have been commenting on this, both formally and informally. We've been meeting with department officials, and we remain very concerned with the architecture of the bill. Notably—and we have not changed what we've been saying for the last three years—it's with the ability to get personal information of Canadians without authorization, the fact that there is not a proper oversight framework, and that Canadians would remain largely unaware of what is going on.
While we do understand that technology and the access to very complex and efficient technology on the part of people who wish to do no good has complicated the work of our law enforcement forces in Canada, we think we need to see a clear explanation to the public to understand why new enhanced powers would be needed. Once that explanation has been done, we expect to see in any further iteration of the law—or we would hope to see—a more complete supervision framework as well as a role for independent authorization of access to personal information.