Thank you, Mr. Chair.
It's along the same lines as the previous amendment, in that I think the proposed change is simply too broad. As I indicated in some of the questions I asked when this issue was raised—I think two meetings back—there is a requirement for this section to be in here in order to get around the provisions of the Criminal Code's section 25, and more specifically section 25.1.
What those sections are about, and Mr. Ménard and Ms. Jennings have already referred to it, is that we passed those amendments in order to provide protection for police officers when in the course of their employment they were compelled—usually when they were undercover—to commit criminal acts. They were particularly concerned about acts that entailed violence or force. But the sections certainly go far beyond that, including, I believe, to catching this type of conduct of creating a false identity, now that we passed these amendments, for the rest of the act. This section is necessary, in effect, to extricate police officers from the provisions of section 25.1.
I don't think that is what is desirable in a democratic society; it extends too much authority, really, to individual police officers. What I have proposed with this amendment to proposed section 368.2, if I have the same version as everybody else—it's part of clause 9 of the bill—is to add to the end of it. What we're saying up to this point, in the amendment the government has proposed, is that if the police officer is doing this for the “purpose of establishing or maintaining a covert identity for use in the course of the public officer's duties or employment”.... This would add to that: “and if a competent authority, as defined in subsection 25.1(1), authorized the public officer to do so”.
What subsection 25.1(1) does is create really three categories of authority. One is a member who's a “public officer” or “senior official”, and then they go on to say in paragraph 25.1(a) that “in the case of a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police”, it would be “the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness” who would authorize this type of activity to go on. Paragraph 25.1(b) goes on: if it's a police service at the provincial level, it's “the Minister responsible for policing in the province”. Then there's a third category in paragraph 25.1(c): “in the case of any other public officer or senior official, the Minister who has responsibility for the Act of Parliament that the officer or official has the power to enforce”. That would cover the mention we've already had from the officials of people acting at border service agencies or the Department of National Defence, and then you go down through the list of people operating in the field under the ministers of the environment or of natural resources.
It then goes on in that section to define “public officer” and “senior official”.
What we would be incorporating by this amendment is moving away from a police officer as an individual being able to make the decision as to whether to have a covert identity, to having that person make the decision but also having the authority from those senior members of the department. In fact, the way this has worked is that the authority is delegated down through the police forces and other agencies to the local level.
Those are my comments.