Thank you, LaVar.
And thank you, Mr. Chair, and thanks to our witnesses.
I just want to correct some of the misconceptions I've heard so far in this committee. I'll start with information sharing.
There seems to be an implied belief that someone who is protesting lawfully, or perhaps unlawfully because they don't necessarily have a municipal permit, would somehow come under the scrutiny of being spied on. That is absolutely not the case.
The aspect of this bill has five different parts. The first one is information sharing. It has absolutely nothing to do with law enforcement, the RCMP, or CSIS. It's the ability for agencies to be able to share information from one branch of the government to another.
It's also a two-pronged approach, if you read the bill. On page 3, it specifically states:
For greater certainty, it does not include lawful advocacy, protest, dissent and artistic expression.
Now, some of the concerns I've heard have been about cases in which it's unlawful or there is no municipal permit. If you look clearly at the bill, the fact of the matter is that the same proposed section talks about the purpose of the Information Sharing Act. It has to do with “activity that undermines the security of Canada”, including activities that undermine “the sovereignty, security, territorial integrity of Canada or the lives or the security of the people of Canada”. So, unless your unlawful protest is somehow going to include blowing up infrastructure, I think you're misinterpreting this proposed section in the bill.
The second thing I want to clarify before I pass it over to my colleague, Mr. Payne, has to do with preventative arrest, detention, and the extension of the 24-hour period to up to seven days. It seems to have been implied that someone is going to be simply thrown in jail and that the police officer or the investigator who initiated that is somehow going to leave on vacation.
That's simply not the case. They actually must have the consent of the Attorney General; it has to go before a judge; the judge has to review all of the evidence that would warrant someone's being detained for 24 hours; then there is a review period every 48 hours after that, up to the maximum of seven days.
In that period, the person who has brought this before the judge to seek this type of detention has to prove that there is an ongoing investigation, that they are accumulating information, and give the reasons for there being a delay. This is all necessary. This has clearly been identified by our security and national security agencies. In fact, at Tuesday's meeting we heard that these types of measures are absolutely critical to the RCMP to carry out their investigations.
I just wanted to clear up those two things that I've heard so far as misconceptions of the bill.
I now will pass my remaining time over to Mr. Payne.