Thank you, Mr. Garrison.
As I mentioned in my opening, the title of the bill is the Anti-terrorism Act, 2015, which would lead someone to believe that this is about terrorism. Certainly, if you look at the backgrounders on government websites that are promoting the legislation, and the public discussion by the Prime Minister and others, it's that this is about terrorism, a particular type of terrorism that we're going to challenge. That's fair enough, if that's what it's about, but when I downloaded and looked at it, it's certainly not about that topic.
Let's take for an example what I call SCISA, the security of Canada information sharing act. The definitional section, that's the foundational authority of that act, is about undermining the security of Canada, and then it has a long list, I think of about nine or ten items. Don't quote me on the number, but it's a long list. One of those items is terrorism, which, again, boggles my mind because terrorism is not a crime in the Criminal Code. It's terrorist activity and terrorist offences. I don't know, but there's a mismatch there. If lawyers at Justice are hearing that, you might want to clean that up because there's a mismatch. There's no such thing as terrorism as a crime.
That's an unlimited list. It's including all those things. There could be other things. So my question is who adds to that list? It's so broad ranging that, again, it could capture unlawful but peaceful activities. So if you're protesting and walking down a road, yes, you may be trespassing and need to be charged with that but you don't need to be dragged into the national security dragnet. That's the concern. It becomes a broad national security bill about undermining the security of Canada.
Then if you look at clause 5, all of government can share all of its information in this pool of 17 agencies. As Mr. Bucci said, big data's here. Yes, it is. This is lawful information the Government of Canada has and they'll be sharing it with these 17 agencies. But my disagreement with Mr. Bucci, respectfully, is that it's not just that, but the mandate. How did they first collect that information? Now they're sharing it for another purpose.
Secondly, big data is not a bogeyman and, yes, businesses do it. But when governments do it, it can be dangerous. Ed Snowden has told us that. It's the derivative work when you take pieces of disparate information, and work them through algorithms into predictive analysis. President Obama said that metadata is nothing. If you know a little bit about your phone, metadata is something. It's disingenuous to say it's existing information. It's derivative information as well.
So clause 6 totally disconnects the act. Clause 6 regarding information sharing, I believe, is unconstitutional on its face. It says that you can share that information with anyone for any purpose—not for terrorism, not for undermining the security of Canada, but for any purpose. I want to know what those purposes are. Any logical law-making would say the purpose needs to connect to the powers.
This goes on. In the bill, CSIS's powers are about threats to the security of Canada, not about terrorism.