I feel there are insufficient safeguards in the legislation to prevent that kind of risk from materializing. I'm not saying that government officials involved in national security are in bad faith and are looking to do surveillance of the population, but the safeguards are insufficient.
It's not just a theoretical concern. We have seen cases in the recent past where there has been excessive, sometimes unlawful, collection or retention of information. Think of the report of the CSE commissioner who found that the CSE had disclosed metadata to other countries illegally. Think of the recent judgment by the Federal Court that found that CSIS had unlawfully retained the metadata of a large number of law-abiding individuals who are not threats to national security because CSIS felt it needed to keep that information for analytical purposes.
These are not theoretical risks. These are real things, real concerns. Do we want a country where the security service has a lot of information about most citizens with a view to detecting national security threats? Is that the country we want to live in?
We have seen real cases in which CSIS had in its bank of information the information about many people who did not represent a threat. Is that the country we want?