Good evening.
Thank you for giving us the opportunity to share with you the perspective of the Ontario Child Sexual Exploitation Investigators Association, or OCSEIA, on Bill C-22. OCSEIA is comprised of police officers, former Crown prosecutors and members of the private sector who work together to advocate for those who work to rescue children from online child sex offenders.
My name is Andrew Ullock, and I volunteer as the chairman of the board for OCSEIA. I am an officer with 28 years of experience, 14 of which was in the field of online child exploitation. I have worked both as an investigator and a supervisor of officers in this field.
Joining me is fellow OCSEIA board member, Lisa Henderson, who recently retired after working for over 30 years as a Crown prosecutor. Since the early 2000s until her retirement, Lisa worked both as the chair of the Attorney General's task force on Internet crimes against children and also as the provincial Crown coordinator for Ontario's provincial strategy to combat Internet crimes against children.
The law must create a proper balance between protecting privacy and protecting the public from crime. As technology continues to evolve, the challenge of striking this balance becomes more and more complex. One of the bedrock foundations of criminal law in Canada is that the burden of proof falls to the state, exercised through its agents in law enforcement. The state must establish beyond a reasonable doubt that an individual is guilty of a crime, an essential safeguard that cannot be compromised. That being the case, if law enforcement is tasked with the burden of meeting this necessarily high threshold, then the law should have within it reasonable tools that make it possible for the police to accomplish this objective.
Since the creation of the Internet, there has been very little change in statutory law to regulate the manner in which police obtain evidence of criminal offences, be it online or in computer data stored on devices. Without updates from Parliament, the courts are forced to adapt by filling the legal gap with a patchwork of decisions that can be confusing, inconsistent and redundant. This patchwork amounts to what OCSEIA calls legal inflation, where the number of steps and authorizations that police must go through to complete an investigation increases over time but never decreases.
Time is a finite resource for law enforcement. There are simply only so many hours a single officer can work in a given year. As the amount of time required to complete an investigation increases, the number of investigations that police can complete simultaneously decreases. The objective of privacy laws should not be to create redundant obstacles or barriers that are impossible for the police to overcome. Sensible limits on the investigative powers of police protect the privacy and dignity of citizens; insensible ones protect crime.
Bill C-22 has inspired a lot of discussion regarding the privacy rights of Canadians. OCSEIA agrees that this is an important debate and appreciates the contributions made by privacy advocates. However, on the topic of privacy, OCSEIA wants to ensure that the discussion is a complete one that considers all facets of this issue.
Behind each statistic or police report regarding online child exploitation is a real child who has suffered immense abuse at the hands of a predator. These children are equally entitled to have their privacy considered in this debate, since it is their privacy that is violated in perpetuity in the most horrendous way imaginable. Once an offender creates and then shares an exploitive image of a child, it becomes a permanent part of the Internet. From that point forward, that child's privacy rights get trampled upon each time a new offender consumes or shares that image.
The best way we as a society can respond to these violations of privacy is to find and hold accountable those who thrive on the abuse of children. To do that, law enforcement needs the right tools. OCSEIA believes that there are a lot of reasonable tools that can be brought about to accomplish this.
Law enforcement in Canada should not have to obtain a mutual legal assistance treaty order instead of a production order to obtain content data from online service providers who are physically present in Canada, just because they are international companies.
Law enforcement should not have to obtain a second redundant search warrant to analyze a computer device simply because it was seized from a person's hand or pocket during the execution of a residential search warrant that already authorized the seizure and analysis of any device found in that place.
Law enforcement should not have to obtain prior judicial authorization to seize an IP address that is being broadcast in plain view to millions of other users over a peer-to-peer file-sharing network.
Law enforcement should have the ability, through prior judicial authorization, to obtain Internet subscriber information for longer than 30 days after an offender has exploited a child, thereby allowing them to find that offender and, in some cases, rescue a child being abused.
To be reasonable, investigative authorities for law enforcement must not unreasonably intrude on the privacy of citizens. On that, we can all agree. However, they must also be capable of accomplishing their intended purpose. It is not reasonable to expect law enforcement to protect society from crime a quarter of the way through the 21st century using search and seizure laws drafted in the 19th and 20th centuries.
OCSEIA believes that our input and recommendations will go a long way in assisting Parliament to find the right balance.
We are happy to take any of the committee's questions.