Evidence of meeting #34 for Public Safety and National Security in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was c-51.
6:30 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Rob Oliphant
Thank you very much.
I'll let the committee know that we have received a written submission from your group already, and as soon as it's translated, we'll have it distributed to the committee.
Thank you.
Jens Porup, you're next.
6:30 p.m.
Jens Porup As an Individual
Good afternoon. Thank you for the opportunity to address the committee today.
My name is J.M. Porup. I am a national security and cybersecurity reporter based here in Toronto. I have covered wrongdoing at the CSE for the CBC, specifically on how the agency's hoarding of zero day security flaws endangers Canadians. Earlier this year, I broke the story in Ars Technica that the NSA's SKYNET program is killing thousands of innocent people due to a faulty machine learning algorithm. My work has appeared in the CBC, The Economist, The Christian Science Monitor, Ars Technica, VICE Motherboard, the Daily Dot, and others.
For many years, I reported from Colombia during that country's civil war. Next year, I will join the Berkman Klein Assembly at Harvard University. The Berkman Klein Center is arguably the world's leading think tank on cybersecurity. The views I share with you today are my own.
Why am I here? Cybersecurity changes everything. Technology writes constitutional law. Let me say that again: technology writes constitutional law. Mass surveillance and targeted hacking disrupt democracy and redistribute power to the intelligence agencies.
Where does that leave us? Canada faces a constitutional crisis. The powers that CSIS, the CSE, and the RCMP have seized for themselves in collaboration with their Five Eyes partners constitutes a direct assault on the powers of Parliament, a direct assault on Canadian democracy, and a direct assault on Canadian sovereignty. The question you must ask yourselves is, what are you going to do about it?
For my part as a journalist, I will continue to investigate and report on the crimes these agencies commit on a daily basis. I have no choice. For exercising my charter rights, I have personally been hacked, stalked, harassed, and interfered with while practising journalism right here in Canada. If Parliament is unable or unwilling to put an end to this kind of abuse by these agencies, then it falls to us, the press, the fourth estate, to defend democracy in Canada. If you do not do your job, then we, the press, will do it for you.
Thank you.
6:35 p.m.
Sharly Chan As an Individual
Thank you for organizing this today and for allowing members of the public to come forth and engage with such an important issue.
My concern today rests with the information sharing act within the Anti-terrorism Act.
The green paper posed a question about general data retention periods in the context of the telecommunications sector, but what is not mentioned in the green paper is the data retention period for this act. To my knowledge, there are no indications about what happens to the data after it is shared. Would it be collected or disposed of after it has been used by the organization?
Personally, I believe the data that is shared through the information sharing act must be included in this context, as it permits the unprecedented sharing of our data amongst 17 governmental institutions and more, depending on the discretion of the Governor in Council.
Under this provision, the scope of sharing is much too wide for an activity that undermines the security of Canada. These include terms that are much too vague. As a governmental organization, you can request data for public safety or for the economic or financial stability of Canada. I would urge the clarification of such terms in schedule 3 of this act in order to prevent the limitless power to monitor and profile ordinary Canadians such as me.
If you look at the pictures on your phone right now, you'll see that most of us are hoarders. There's picture we took of an informational poster. Just in case we need it, we'll keep it, and without clearly identifiable regulations on the sharing practices of our data, I'm afraid these organizations will do just that.
We as citizens do not have adequate protections to challenge this backdoor practice despite the fact that the Privacy Act obliges institutions to limit collection of personal information to what is directly related to and demonstrably necessary for the programs or activities of government institutions.
Just as a couple of examples, in the U.K. there's a one-year period for the data collected under their Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act, and similarly in the intelligence bill in France, which stipulates a range from about one to 12 months depending on the type of information that is collected.
As a young Canadian, I want to see more transparency and protection for the average citizen and our data doubles. I believe that clearly defined data retention periods about what information is shared, how it is shared, for how long, and the ways in which it will be de-accessioned are very important, and this will provide some protection against the possibility of profiling. The clarification of the terms in schedule 3 may reduce the unnecessary sharing of our data.
Thank you.
6:35 p.m.
Voices
Hear, hear!
6:40 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Rob Oliphant
Thank you. That was three minutes right on.
Are there any questions?
Peter Glen.
6:40 p.m.
Peter Glen As an Individual
I want to thank all the previous speakers. Having this context created today has been very educational.
About five years ago I got the idea that I had to do something, and that manifested at the time as going to marches, rallies, and protests. As you begin to get used to law enforcement taking your picture, you recognize that you've probably sacrificed some degree of privacy when you do these things, and that might be the nature of it.
What I didn't know when I started thinking about this was that I was a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, and that given some of the things that have been talked about by the previous speakers, I have to slip that into the context of my own life. When you get to the point where you're ready to heal from those kinds of things, it's really important that you know the story is being entrusted to people you trust. Given the culture of fear that's been created and has been cited by previous speakers, it's a puzzle and an enigma that remains with me as I attempt to heal from this. If that isn't troublesome in its implications at the very least, I don't know what I could say to you to convince you that it is.
Thank you.
6:40 p.m.
Voices
Hear, hear!
6:40 p.m.
Bernice Murray As an Individual
I want to say a couple of things.
In terms of the security review, the government is presenting security as a question of balance between rights and security. I just want to make the point that, in terms of a starting point, you will not deal with people's security if you don't guarantee their rights. It's not a question of balance. It's a question of defending the rights of all of us. Also, it's more than just civil rights. It's a question of economic, political, and social rights. I think it's extremely important to start from that point of view. These rights are things that belong to people because, by their being, the fact is that they collectively belong to us and so on. That's the starting point for any kind of consideration.
I have a concern that the green paper and various other documents being used in the consultations divert the whole discussion of security rights into a discussion of violent extremism, and then all the measures become acceptable because that's to combat these things, rather than dealing with the very important question. I think that even this question of the consultations particularly.... I'm not sure that you're wrapping up on December 1 but some of them are. In terms of the fact that you're trying to have a discussion on security and rights in this country on the basis of two months or whatever, and one session in Toronto, it's not going to be that kind of comprehensiveness that's required.
Specifically, I'm here to raise the question of the Anti-terrorism Act, 2015, which everybody refers to as Bill C-51. While I'm saying that these consultations are not serious in the sense of “extensive”, I would say that the discussion and public consultation that took place on Bill C-51—no thanks to the government of the day—was extremely broad and extremely deep. Somebody else has already mentioned it, but there were actions all across the country. There were broad discussions. There were town halls. There were days of action. There were 311,000 signatures on a petition to repeal the bill.
I think it should be brought before you that the question of this bill has been discussed, and the Canadian people have given their verdict on it. That verdict is that they want it repealed.
On the whole question of the Harper government, one of the issues.... I ran as a candidate in the election and did door-to-door work right from January 2015 on. One of the very big concerns of people across the area of the city I was doing work in was Bill C-51, and it was that it should be repealed. There is definitely no mandate that can be alluded to by any party to say that the bill was something they should hold on to. I don't think it's reformable and so on.
I also want to point out that what is now the governing party pointed out that they would repeal the problematic aspects of the bill. I would just like to point out that they're all problematic. The bill itself should be repealed.
6:40 p.m.
Voices
Hear, hear!
6:40 p.m.
As an Individual
I have particular concerns on the whole question of the criminalization of dissent. I have particular concerns that we have a government that says it's for indigenous rights and for new nation-to-nation relations, and yet that bill specifically targets areas where the defence of your land and the defence of things that are part of the sovereign rights of indigenous people can come under the definition of terrorism. I'm particularly concerned about the broad definition of “terrorism-speak”, where people simply giving their views can be considered terrorism. It's fine, as the bill says, that some of these things are “well, you know, we wouldn't do it”, but the fact of the matter is that only legal demonstrations are excepted from this. This is actual law.
I would encourage the committee to look at the broad amount of information that was submitted, probably not to yourselves but to the consultations on that bill, from all sectors of society, from constitutional experts, and from civil liberties experts and lawyers of all sorts. It's a huge wealth of information. I think it all speaks very strongly to the fact that this should be repealed. Any legislative sorts of measures that were needed were already there in the Anti-terrorism Act, 2001. That act already was problematic because it introduced this question of interference with critical infrastructure. One of the sets that's targeted by that, quite frankly, is workers. If you go on strike at an infrastructure site, or if you go on strike and your strike has been declared illegal, illegal simply on the basis that the government said you should go back to work, this is considered interference with the economy of Canada.
6:45 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Rob Oliphant
I'm afraid I need to stop you. We're well over time.
You're actually quite like some of the members of all our committees. You don't take a breath.
6:45 p.m.
Voices
Hear, hear!
6:45 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Rob Oliphant
Thank you very much for your presentation.
What was helpful for me on that was the reminder that the environment and the economy are not either-or issues, nor are our rights and our security. I think that's a very valid point that you brought for us. Thank you very much for that.
Evan Light.
6:45 p.m.
Evan Light As an Individual
Hello. My name is Evan Light. I'm an assistant professor of communications at Glendon College, York University, which is—
6:45 p.m.
As an Individual
It's in your riding? Hello.
I'm also a collaborator with the Snowden Digital Surveillance Archive that's hosted at Canadian Journalists for Free Expression.
I'm here today to speak about mass surveillance in terms of Bill C-51. I'd like to impress upon the committee the opportunity you have to really set Canada apart, which is supposedly what the Trudeau government was elected to do. You have the opportunity to take this bill, which is malformed in many ways, and potentially repeal it and spend time developing something proper, something that puts human rights into the centre of the regulation of communication or the regulation of privacy, something that values people's privacy instead of violating it.
As one of the previous speakers said, you have the opportunity, for instance, to step away from the Five Eyes alliance, which automatically makes every Canadian citizen a victim of mass surveillance around the world. This isn't just speculation. This has been proven time and again over the last three years. I think mass surveillance is dangerous to parliamentarians and to our democracy. The fact that I can't knowingly communicate securely with my member of Parliament is a problem. The fact that you and I can't send encrypted emails to each other is a problem.
Last year, I had the opportunity to interview a deputy chair of the Senate committee on national defence and security. I spoke with him about the management of computer networks at Parliament. He had no idea who set the policy, but thought that, you know, maybe using encrypted email would be a good thing to do because the government in power can spy on me, because CSIS can know what I'm doing, and because maybe privacy is something that I should integrate into the way I operate.
I'll stop before the three minutes is up, but—
6:50 p.m.
As an Individual
—I just wanted to impress upon you that you have a unique opportunity on an international scale to set Canada apart in terms of what we think about human rights and how we value them. I suggest that with a majority you could repeal this bill easily and spend the next couple of years doing a serious public consultation instead of a one-week whirlwind one across the country with no advance warning. Academics like me can come together and provide you with real information.
There's an incredible amount of publicly funded research in Canada on surveillance and privacy, on telecom, and on security, and an incredible amount of publicly funded research in Europe. There are resources out there that you can have easy access to, that you've already paid for and you don't need to ask for, so you don't need to form committees to do the research. There's a lot of it out there already. You just need to give us fair warning and make us partners in it.
Thank you.
October 19th, 2016 / 6:50 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Rob Oliphant
Very good.
Are there questions?
I have a question. We have three parties represented here at the table with differing opinions, so we try not to debate with people who give us their ideas. In the last election, we had a party that was against Bill C-51, a party that was for Bill C-51, and a party that was for changing problematic parts of Bill C-51. There were three different views and, as the last speaker said, there was a variety of public consultations and 311,000 people on a petition, etc. We have all that.
The election happened. Democracy happens in our system. The party that said they were going to repeal problematic parts won the election, but people are telling us, no, our mandate is to repeal it, which we told people we weren't going to do. I'm trying to square that circle to understand your.... Is it the democracy problem or...? I'm just trying to figure that out, because the party that wanted to repeal the bill did not win the election. The party that wanted to keep it did not win the election. The party that wanted to repeal problematic parts won the election. How do you...?
6:50 p.m.
Voices
Oh, oh!
6:50 p.m.
A voice
The party that won the election right now [Inaudible—Editor]
6:50 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Rob Oliphant
You'll get your turn.
Because you gave us advice, Mr. Light, I'm just trying to figure out how I square that circle.