Thank you.
I'm required under the terms of your motion to be here to speak to my amendments, but since Pam has opened the door on the fact that these three are similar, we could talk about them as a cluster. I appreciate the chance to speak to that.
I'm really pleased—and I've seen this over and over in this committee—with the extent to which Liberal members have been listening to experts. With all due respect, I would never describe Professor Forcese as a stakeholder, but as one of the pre-eminent security and anti-terrorism law experts in Canada, he certainly played a very important role when the 41st Parliament was going through Bill C-51. He and Kent Roach both were involved in the Air India inquiry and have a lot of legal expertise. You've captured it quite well, Pam, but I want to go back to his evidence.
With all due respect to our experts here from the department, as he describes it, there's a technical problem, “the inevitability of incidental acquisition of Canadian information.” That's what we're looking at. We know that in CSE's access, it's only supposed to be looking at collecting foreign information. It's not supposed to be looking at Canadians at all, but when you're collecting metadata you just don't know. It's inevitable, as Professor Forcese says, that you will incidentally end up with Canadian information, so how do we protect Canadians from significant violations of our right to privacy and of section 8 of the charter?
I'm pleased with the language in LIB-30. I know the language in Matthew Dubé's and my amendments is stronger and covers off more of the possibilities, but certainly the legislation is stronger once any one of these three motions is accepted by the committee. That's my only comment on it. When we went through it with the drafters, we looked at the testimony from Craig Forcese and from Amnesty International and Alex Neve, and tried to satisfy the drafters and draft as closely as possible to the recommendation we had from those experts.
That's all I have at this point, Mr. Chair. Thank you for the time.