Justice Committee on May 15th, 2014

[The Chair, Conservative, Mike Wallace]

Mr. Pardy, do you want to speak on behalf of the OPP?

[Carson Pardy]

Yes. I'll try to give a broad overview of some of the programs we have in place in Ontario. First, I'll focus on the provincial strategy we have for protecting children against child abuse.

This strategy involves the partnership of 18 police services across Ontario. This strategy started in 2006 and collectively has investigated over 22,000 incidents of child sexual abuse and made countless arrests, and well over 8,000 charges and over 2,500 arrests have been made with respect to that strategy. This is about leveraging our collective input so that together as a police community we can focus on the commonalities we have from one jurisdiction to another, because as we've heard repeatedly today, this crime knows no borders. That strategy is more from an enforcement perspective.

At the community level, we have school resource officers, community services officers who are constantly in touch with the media. We view our media as one of our critical partners in delivering key safety messages right across the board; our school resource officers are working with the kids right in the schools themselves. NeedHelpNow, one amazing tool that's available, we constantly put out to the kids through posters and brochures in the hallways of our schools. This is a very intuitive website that helps direct kids and gives them very quick answers. It gives them guidance on how to tackle this.

The youthconnected.ca that I mentioned earlier is a program that the OPP completely supported, along with the Ontario Provincial Police Youth Foundation and some private partners, to develop this website that was created by teenagers themselves. In that program, it gives lesson plans, for example, that teachers and parents can use to help guide and instruct children on safer Internet practices.

Annually, there's a Safer Internet Day and in those avenues we're constantly educating public displays on safe Internet. Just yesterday in the City of Brockville, there was a kiosk set up in the malls during police week, focusing on safe Internet usage and how to guide, instruct, and educate our children and our teenagers on this phenomenon of sexting, as an example.

There's a lot more going on. Our focus right now is educating our front-line officers to give good advice, that we're giving proper guidance to parents and teachers and teens themselves so that they're not misled and that they don't feel helpless, and that we are there to do our part.

On a broader sense, however, we realize that because of the economics of policing, we're having to capitalize more greatly on our partnership through our framework for action in Ontario for crime prevention, and our community mobilization and engagement of our stakeholders in our community. We alone cannot solve these problems. From an enforcement perspective, we're there. We can provide investigative excellence, but if we do not have community partners at all levels, we will not be able to fill our mandate to keep our communities safe.

[The Chair, Conservative, Mike Wallace]

A question was also asked of you, Chief Blais, that you may want to answer.

[Chief Jean-Michel Blais]

Mr. Jacob, like other police forces in Canada, we have liaison officers in schools and community resource officers carrying out awareness campaigns against cyberbullying. As my colleague from the Ontario provincial police pointed out, last week was national police week.

In recent years, we have seen a change in what people in shopping malls and in schools are telling us during those events. They are no longer just talking about drug crimes, but also crimes associated with cyberbullying, “sexting”, and so on.

In the internal training that our police officers receive, we focus our involvement on the trauma, in order to prevent victims from being traumatized again.

We have a major presence on social media like Facebook and Twitter. We have reduced our presence on traditional websites so that we can be more present on Twitter and Facebook. I know that a number of police forces in Canada are doing the same.

In a sense, we are very lucky. At provincial level, we have the CyberSCAN unit that conducts investigations that have so-called penal, but not criminal, consequences. The province is responsible for that unit.

That is the situation here in Halifax.

[The Chair, Conservative, Mike Wallace]

Merci, Chief.

Our next questioner is Mr. Seeback, from the Conservative Party.

[Kyle Seeback, Conservative, Brampton West, ON]

One of the other issues or concerns raised at the committee, and I think Mr. Fraser was talking about it, are those surrounding the definition of transmission data. He was saying that under Bill C-13, transmission data is way broader than what you get from the existing Criminal Code provisions for telephone calls.

My understanding is that when you are looking at transmission data, you're only getting the type, the date, the time, the origin, the destination, or the termination of a communication. It doesn’t include the content, and you're not getting all of the metadata. That's my understanding of how it's being defined in the Code.

Does anyone want to comment on that, and let us know your view of transmission data and if it's way too broad as is being alleged?

[A/Commr Joe Oliver]

Our understanding of transmission data—I mean, it’s very clearly spelled out in the proposed legislation already. It clearly indicates that the content of transmission, which “does not reveal the substance, meaning, or purpose of the communication”, is to be disclosed to police and you can't get a product order for that or use that provision to get that information. You have to rely on other means, including a general production order, which has a higher threshold.

[Kyle Seeback, Conservative, Brampton West, ON]

So if you want more information from that transmission data, what would be the process for that then?

[A/Commr Joe Oliver]

We would have to either secure a search warrant for the physical device and then do an analysis, or we'd have to go to the service provider with a general production order. This is for historical data.

[Kyle Seeback, Conservative, Brampton West, ON]

What's the threshold for that, then?

[A/Commr Joe Oliver]

For historical, a general production order is reasonable grounds to believe, so it's a higher threshold.

[Kyle Seeback, Conservative, Brampton West, ON]

And it's with judicial authorization.

[A/Commr Joe Oliver]

Correct. All of the provisions within the proposed legislation include prior judicial authorization. Transmission data and our understanding of how it would be applied is a modern equivalent to phone-call information in terms of the origin and the type. It includes a little bit more insofar as the size and the type, but pretty much everything else is…but the direction, the date, time, the origin, destination—those are the things we would normally get with an order for telephone information.

[Kyle Seeback, Conservative, Brampton West, ON]

Great. That's it.

[The Chair, Conservative, Mike Wallace]

Thank you very much.

Our next questioner is Madame Péclet, the New Democratic Party.

[Ève Péclet, NDP, La Pointe-de-l'Île, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'll be sharing my time with my colleague Mr. Garrison.

My question is for Mr. Oliver. One of the witnesses expressed doubt about the main section of the bill, saying that there's a challenge with it. I'm going to read out what he said, because he expressed it perfectly. He said that the real challenge arises when addressing third parties who do not know the person depicted in the image, nor do they know the circumstances under which the image was taken.

So the provisions in the bill include a recklessness standard, which is too low. How would you manage that? Do you think there should be a revisit of that proposed section, like raising the standard, because third parties could be caught in a situation where they didn't know. The proposed section states that “being reckless as to whether or not”. Is the recklessness standard too low?

Mr. Chu, do you have a comment?.

[Chief Jim Chu]

The recklessness standard actually comes up with criminal negligence, in terms of, were you intentionally doing the act or were you reckless in doing the act? When we proceed with charges, we have to satisfy, at least in British Columbia, the charge approval standard and the reasonable likelihood of conviction. Then it's up to the judge, in terms of the factual basis of whether this reckless behaviour was inadvertent or egregious to the point where it's a criminal offence.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

There are a lot of things in Bill C-13. One is that it reopens the hate crime section of the Criminal Code to add additional identified groups. As I know, Chief Chu will be familiar, my private member's Bill C-279, which passed the House over a year ago, is either sleeping or stuck in the Senate, whichever analogy you like.

We have said that we have the intention of bringing the amendment to the committee, since that section is being opened, to add gender identity to the hate crime section of the Criminal Code, which is half my private member's bill.

I'm asking an easy question of Chief Chu. Police deal a lot with violence on the streets. Transgender people are more often subject to violence than others. I wonder whether you would see that as something we could do in this bill.

[Chief Jim Chu]

This is something that we would support, yes.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Are there any others who—?

[Carson Pardy]

I'd say the same thing.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

It's been my experience that everybody who's worked in policing on the streets recognizes the higher levels of violence directed at transgendered people.

I appreciate the support of the police for that. We had an expression from the minister when he was here that he had no objection to that.

Hopefully, we'll see that added to become part of the government bill. Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Mike Wallace]

There's still some time left in this slot, and I know Mr. Jacob had another question.

Mr. Jacob.

[Pierre Jacob, NDP, Brome—Missisquoi, QC]

I would like to know approximately what percentage of your work, your budget, is allocated to prevention.

Let's start with Mr. Chu and then move to Mr. Armstrong, Mr. Pardy and Mr. Blais.

[The Chair, Conservative, Mike Wallace]

He wants an answer from all four witness groups.