Thank you very much for the opportunity to be here today on Bill C-22 and lawful access.
I am here as the Canadian Chamber of Commerce on behalf of our 400 network chamber partners and boards of trade across the country, our 200,000 combined members and more than 100 industry associations. I'm also here as a father. I can share that many representatives from Canada's digital companies also have families. We all want to ensure that law enforcement has the tools it needs to pursue criminals, especially online.
I'd like to express our appreciation to the Minister of Public Safety, the Minister of Justice and their teams for the extensive back-and-forth over the past year. The amendments made to Bill C-22 in part 1 addressed many industry concerns, and we thank the government for acting, but when you compare Bill C-2's part 15 and Bill C-22's part 2, it's clear that the government doesn't share the same concerns as the vast majority of our members at the Canadian Chamber of Commerce.
I’ve worked in and around cybersecurity for years. I don't understand why we treat cybersecurity differently from other crimes. If a business is hacked, the business CEO must apologize. The liability is on the business, even if the hackers are state-sponsored, yet our discussions here today are not about how we can support business to further protect their systems and our data. Instead, we’re talking about obliging them to install devices, open their digital doors and give access to information to “authorized persons” essentially on demand.