In addressing some of the points that Mr. Butt raised, I think it's a bit of a straw man argument to say that requiring stricter controls somehow emasculates the police. I mean that's simply untrue. Of course, if there are exigent circumstances, the police don't need a warrant. If there are exigent circumstances, the police can enter your house without a warrant. So let's leave that aside. The police can also request that information be preserved. The police have that ability as well.
I think the biggest difference lies in the underappreciation of Mr. Butt's part of the type of information that is to be disclosed. Certainly, privacy commissioners and academics disagree with the narrow view of the type of information that can be disclosed. The Supreme Court has taken a view that this sort of information deserves a heightened level of privacy.
If you look at the report, it's not just simply saying that person X is the person who is operating that computer. That information can be catalogued, can be stored, can be cross-referenced—and that only increases as capacity grows—but that information can, for example, lead to information about which websites you visited and what posts you've made. In one case, it allowed—and this is in the Privacy Commissioner of Canada's report—a determination based on websites visited, sexual preferences, and political affiliations. It's not just who you talk to, it's who they talk to and for how long. The fact that content isn't available is no shield to the criticisms here.
As the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario said, in some respects, and in many cases, metadata is actually more revealing than content. So it's a straw man argument to say that this somehow emasculates the police, and that they can't do their job with the standard that is constitutional. What nobody wants to see—and we have seen a few times in the last little while—is that constitutional issues arise, as in R. v. Vu. In that case, evidence was excluded and prosecutions were affected. Ultimately, the matter didn't make its way through the courts. The extra burden to require reasonable grounds is a requirement in section 25. Section 25, and the protections against voluntary disclosure, make it clear that there have to be reasonable grounds. With the ability to preserve the data, there is no principled reason why a standard of reasonable and probable grounds shouldn't apply with this type of information. The police still have the tools, and privacy is still protected that way.