Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. It's good to be back on the committee that is tasked with looking at ethics, information and privacy. These three things, I note, are in very short supply with this Liberal government, especially with Bill C-22.
When we look at the way this process has proceeded before the public safety committee, it is shocking that a bill this complicated and lengthy, with as many good-faith concerns that have been raised from actors on the left and the right, from civil society groups and from civil liberties groups, was met by the Liberals with a desire to have an incredibly abbreviated study of the bill.
I note that my Conservative colleagues had to fight a Liberal government that was kicking and screaming to allow for even a modest expansion of witness testimony. In the course of that, we heard precisely how many issues were embedded in the bill that would compromise the privacy and security of Canadians.
We have big-tech companies. I have a great deal of skepticism about how big-tech companies operate when it comes to privacy. When they are sounding the alarm, and they are saying that they will not be able to safeguard user privacy if Bill C-22 passes, we should listen. These are the people who have infinite resources and can read the bill and see that Bill C-22 will compel them to build back doors into their own systems, systems that all of us as members of Parliament use. It will allow the government, not even Parliament but a minister, to circumvent this process. We are to believe that the government will just naturally, in good faith, constrain its own power that it's granting itself with Bill C-22.
I'll note the powers and authorities that law enforcement officials were asking for. I canvassed police chiefs in my riding. I spoke to other law enforcement officials and police associations across the country. The powers they wanted are in part 1 of Bill C-22. The powers the government is trying to seek in part 2 of the bill were not what the vast majority of law enforcement officials were seeking in this country. That's exactly where the concerns have come from these privacy groups and from the Privacy Commissioner.
When a commissioner, who ultimately serves at the pleasure of the federal government, wants to weigh in on this, the fact that the government, which claims there are no privacy concerns in the bill, is seeking to deny him the right to testify is, in and of itself, incredibly concerning. It doesn't want to hear what he has to say, because it knows he's right.
It was interesting. If you watch the public safety committee meetings from last week, there were actually government witnesses who questioned the motives. They didn't impugn the motives, but questioned the motives of the Privacy Commissioner. The response by the government was to not allow the Privacy Commissioner the opportunity to come and answer for himself, answer for his own motivations, and speak to amendments that he put forward on ways to improve the bill and ways to minimize and mitigate the harms.
On the one hand, we had the Public Safety Minister coming out and saying the government was open to amendments, but on the other hand, refusing to commit to any substantive amendments that would actually deal with the requirement to build back doors into electronic systems, that would deal with the broad retention and definition of metadata, that would deal with the broad ministerial authority that the minister is trying to give himself, and that would deal with, and this is particularly insane, the encryption issue.
On the one hand, we had some government witnesses saying they actually did want to get into encryption while the government was trying to say encryption was not at issue. This is exactly why the privacy implications of Bill C-22 are so important. If we have a public servant, a Privacy Commissioner, whose job it is to look at bills like Bill C-22, the only conclusion we can draw from the Liberal government's attempts to deny him the opportunity to speak is because it is scared of what he will say about the problems he sees in the bill.
Mr. Cooper's motion is basically reporting to the House of Commons, because this is a full parliamentary issue that needs to be raised here. The fact that the Liberal government has silenced and sidelined the Privacy Commissioner is incredibly important. I will be enthusiastically supporting this motion. I hope my Liberal colleagues will see the error in their approach in denying him the opportunity to testify and will also support this motion.