Thank you, Chair.
NDP-27 seeks to remove any and all references to “active cyber operations”. I'm going to explain my motivation and reasoning for this.
Obviously, Bill C-59 is a response to a Liberal campaign promise, and something that the Liberals made hay of in the last Parliament, about supporting the then Conservative Bill C-51 in exchange for the promise that the most egregious elements would be fixed.
Now—and we'll get to some of those elements later—I don't believe the bill achieves that objective. That being said, in the consultations that both this committee and the minister did, and the debate on Bill C-51 in the previous Parliament, CSE was obviously never part of it, being enacted by the National Defence Act, which is something not normally dealt with by this committee. I understand that with the new cybersecurity reality and the different issues that we face on a day-to-day basis, that's become something that's necessary.
However, given that it hasn't really been part of the consultations, and as you know, Chair, you acknowledged that CSE took on a life of its own as part of this study. With all due respect to our colleagues here from CSE, that is very new. The committee didn't necessarily, as far as I'm concerned, have the institutional memory to appropriately address all those elements in this omnibus legislation. Several witnesses even made the comment saying that the remarks would have to be limited to one part of the bill given its size and scope.
For that reason, notwithstanding a position I may or may not take in the future on active cyber operations, we have just not had adequate reassurance as to the purpose of this nor have we had the chance to properly study it. I would welcome it as a stand-alone piece of legislation. In the meantime, while it's important to have the defensive capabilities, the active capabilities are a slippery slope that I don't believe this committee or parliamentarians are yet ready to be engaged on.
I move this amendment to remove that aspect from the bill.