Thank you for the question.
When Bill C-2 came out and there was concern around the scope of the information demand, which is now the confirmation of service demand, those concerns articulated by the critics were mainly related to the fact that it was a demand that police could issue on their own without any judicial oversight. This would form part of a Criminal Code production order, which is issued by a judge. The judge has discretion as to what is appropriate or not in the circumstances. Police, for a variety of reasons, may require information from all sorts of service providers, including hotels, car rental agencies, medical clinics and things like that, but in order to get that information they have to go before a judge and justify why they need it.
I understand what the Privacy Commissioner is trying to do because if you limit the class of people who can be served with this, you will restrict the amount of information.
The corollary to that is that there ends up being a differential privacy treatment of information in other service providers' hands. They either get more privacy or you'd have to use a tool like the general production order, so the people who have their data with those other service providers that are not covered...because this would narrow it. If it wasn't with the TSP, it would be under a general production order. The general production order allows police to access any and all information the service provider has on hand. It would almost have a negative effect, because the privacy would be more at risk. Police might just want to identify victims or people who are actually not persons of interest, but because they'd have to use that tool, they'd also be able to obtain all the information on them. The amendment is problematic from a number of perspectives.