Mr. Chair, briefly, the government does not support this amendment.
As discussed at committee and elsewhere, Canadian jurisprudence has already established that a device includes a computer program. The government's provision amends the previous definition of a tracking device to simply codify the common law and make clear that a tracking device could either be hardware or a computer program, i.e., software. Some tracking devices, as you will know, may be hardware, particularly those from many years ago, and some may be software, but most are a combination of the two. The exclusion of a computer program from the definition of “tracking device” does not, in our view, correspond to existing technology in this area.
On that basis we will not be supporting the amendment.