Thank you very much.
Thank you very much to the committee and to the chair for the opportunity to speak with you today about this very important subject.
I will introduce myself. I am a privacy lawyer practising with McInnes Cooper in Halifax. I've been practising law in this area for more than 15 years, and in that time I've had the benefit of advising clients on a full range of privacy, access to information, and technology issues. I've worked with clients who regularly have contact with the police and with the national security authorities looking for information, both through regular lawful channels and, shall we say, informal channels.
I am here in my personal capacity, so I'm not speaking on behalf of any of my clients or any of the associations that I am a member of—I'm a proud CBA member—nor am I speaking on behalf of my firm. This is just me.
This committee has a very important opportunity, and I think we are at a turning point in global history. We have the chance, right now, to take a deep breath, take a step back, and ask some very important questions: who are we as Canadians, and what do we want to be? What kind of country do we want to live in, and are we taking positive steps to make that happen?
Looking south of the border, I am very mindful of a phrase that I first heard said by William Binney, who was one of the first whistle-blowers from the U.S. National Security Agency. He left because he was afraid that what he was being asked to create within that organization was something he called “turnkey totalitarianism”.
If you build an intrusive tool for the most benevolent institution, you can have faith in the people for whom you build it, but you can't be sure that it won't fall into the wrong hands. Setting aside the cynicism I've developed over the last dozen years, even if you absolutely believe what the leaders of our national security and policing agencies say to you—and I understand there will be further testimony from them—you can't be sure that their replacements will necessarily have the same good faith and concern about the rights of citizens. You can't be sure about the good faith and commitment to Canadian values of the next government.
The new U.S. administration has at its disposal the most significant surveillance apparatus ever assembled, and it's being built with Canadian collaboration. This committee needs to look at the here and now, but also look over the horizon for what may come next. The Anti-terrorism Act of 2001 and the Anti-terrorism Act of 2015 are, or could be, the foundation of what could become a massive abuse of Canadian rights.
We also need to look at whether any of this is really necessary or proportional in the first place. We need to look at what we have here and what is going on. On the one hand, recently we've seen that CSIS, with the assistance of Department of Justice lawyers, has lied to courts in order to feed CSIS databases. We've also seen that CSIS has refused to delete the information that it unlawfully retains. Most recently, we've seen that CSIS has been working within government to try to justify its data mining practices and has actually been looking to get more data to put into its massive databases.
Then we have the Security of Canada Information Sharing Act, which is, in my view, a privacy disaster. The privacy of Canadians was previously connected by information silos. Departments could collect information that was reasonably necessary for their purposes. They could share it with other departments for purposes that were consistent with those purposes, and they could share it with law enforcement in other circumstances. There were rules around that. You knew that the information about your Canada Pension Plan contributions or EI claims would not be used for any other purpose, unless the relatively weak hurdles of the Privacy Act—with which everybody here is familiar—were complied with, or unless a judge determined that it was appropriate in those circumstances that the public interest in disclosure outweighed the privacy interest.
Now we have a system whereby CSIS can ask any government department for virtually any data, as long as they think it's relevant to their task. You can try to get insight into how they would calculate that; I'm not sure. They can then get it, and it is no longer covered by the privacy protection of the originating institution.
They might think, for example, that people who visit bad guys are probably bad guys themselves, so let's get all the visitor logs from Correctional Service of Canada and then let's match that up against the Canada Border Services Agency records of people leaving and returning to Canada, and passport applications—and why not all the records of people receiving EI, and then everyone else's tax returns to see who has donated to Muslim charities? This law would allow CSIS or the RCMP to collect, in one massive database, all the information that every other government department has about you, based on the linchpin of that extremely low threshold of relevance.
SCISA does not contain any limit on what organizations like CSIS or the RCMP can do once they build those databases. There is nothing built into SCISA that does that. There is also no internal limit on how much information can be transferred between any government department and any of those institutions listed in the schedule to the act. On top of this, all of this happens in the shadows: there is no oversight within this statute.
As parliamentarians, all you know are the evasive non-answers given to you. There is no oversight, no accountability within this framework. This is essentially a blank cheque giving national security agencies access to some of the most sensitive personal information about Canadians. This is a real problem, and the act should be repealed.
In closing, I would also highlight the presence of section 9 in the statute. It should raise a flag. It should raise a flag very high. It says, “No civil proceedings lie against any person for their disclosure in good faith of information under this Act.”
If a statute has to provide immunity for otherwise unlawful conduct, we should be very careful about authorizing that conduct in the first place and we should be very careful about granting that immunity.
Thank you very much again for this opportunity. I very much look forward to the discussion.