Chair, I am here because you invited me. I'd like to say on the record that I've rarely sat at a committee table where I look around the room and see nothing but friends. I want to acknowledge that I'm grateful to see you all here and that I have nothing but goodwill towards all assembled; however, I need to put on the record that I object to the motion that was passed by this committee and that the so-called invitation to me and other members in my situation amounts to coercion and denial of our rights to put forward substantive amendments at report stage.
That said, I'd like to propose an amendment which I think would be very helpful to this bill. It would be to delete said subclause 59(1), particularly lines 8 through 12, to delete the incorporation of offences under the Copyright Act in section 42 into the Criminal Code, where they would be found in section 183.
To put it simply, Mr. Chair, what I'm objecting to, and what I hope my amendment could correct—and I have a couple of grounds of concern here—is the insertion of essentially a civil offence into a criminal section of the Criminal Code, essentially creating increased opportunities for wiretaps into an offence for which I don't believe wiretapping is appropriate.
Particularly, Mr. Chair, I refer to the Supreme Court decision in R. v. Tse, which identified that electronic surveillance is a last resort, and only in cases of investigative necessity. The way the Copyright Act has been...and these provisions and these amendments we have before us in Bill C-8 incorporate things that are in, I think, a fairly vague swath between private use and commercial scale. In previous conversations on other amendments, we've had discussions about how many Coach purses before you're caught under the act, how many items that you should have known were being passed off in violation of copyright, and so on.
Wiretapping is a particularly invasive mechanism of the state, and inappropriate, as you can see from the kinds of offences that we're now inserting, such as these offences relating to infringement. The act deals at section 183 of the Criminal Code with high treason, sabotage, hijacking, sedition, using explosives, threats, providing for terrorist purposes, hoax—terrorist activity, perjury, and luring a child.
In any case, we're not suggesting that offences under copyright are all right. We're just suggesting that the investigative rights of invasion of privacy of a wiretap offence don't belong there. We also suggest that we don't need to make it a further offence. I wonder if this committee had taken note of other sections of the Criminal Code that already deal with these areas.
I'm surprised that they're not incorporated into Bill C-8, but under section 406 of the Criminal Code, we have making it a criminal offence to engage in forgery of a trademark. We also have, under section 432—and I'm going quite fast because I know I only have a minute—an offence—