Public Safety Committee on June 9th, 2026

[Jacob Mantle, Conservative, York—Durham, ON]

I mean, you're the chair; you'll make your decision, but I would just say for the record that we went through the routine motions last time. There's no routine motion that defines exactly what you've just said, which is that there's a set process for this meeting. It's open to the committee to govern its own proceeding, including by unanimous consent.

[The Chair, Liberal, Jean-Yves Duclos]

Well, you can seek unanimous consent, but you already did that a moment ago. You didn't receive unanimous consent to—

[Jacob Mantle, Conservative, York—Durham, ON]

That's great—as long as that's clear. Respectfully, Chair, it's my understanding that it's not your role to deny unanimous consent. It's my ability as a member to ask if there is. It's your role to canvass members of the committee to see whether there is unanimous consent.

[The Chair, Liberal, Jean-Yves Duclos]

That's entirely right. It's not my role to deny unanimous consent. It's my role to seek it. It obviously wasn't there.

[Jacob Mantle, Conservative, York—Durham, ON]

Okay. Great. Then I—

[Claude DeBellefeuille, Bloc, Beauharnois—Salaberry—Soulanges—Huntingdon, QC]

On a point of order, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Jean-Yves Duclos]

Mrs. DeBellefeuille, you have the floor.

[Claude DeBellefeuille, Bloc, Beauharnois—Salaberry—Soulanges—Huntingdon, QC]

I'm sorry to interrupt you, Mr. Mantle.

Mr. Chair, from what I understand, we'll be here until 8:30 tonight. We could ask the witnesses if they want to eat. You could invite them to do so.

[The Chair, Liberal, Jean-Yves Duclos]

Yes. I hope that they did. Mrs. DeBellefeuille, you're quite warm and caring. We're fed and they aren't. We believe in justice. We're a committee based on fairness and equality.

Witnesses, I hope that there's still some food left for you, if you would like to have it.

Thank you, Mrs. DeBellefeuille.

MP Mantle, would you like to continue, or should we move to MP Kirkland?

[Jacob Mantle, Conservative, York—Durham, ON]

I'd like to continue, Mr. Chair, on this discussion of the standard to apply.

I want to start with our law enforcement colleagues. I want to understand their view of the process right now through the general production order.

Can you walk me through that process today?

[Aaron Gilkes]

I suppose the way we would walk through a general production order is that we would have to meet certain obligations before we could actually present it to a justice, who would decide it. One of the main obligations we have to establish is that the evidence likely exists, but it's in the possession of the person or entity to whom we're addressing the order to produce. Essentially, at the outset we're trying to establish who might be in possession of the information. We essentially ask questions to whoever might be a provider in the hope that they will respond in the affirmative that they were providing services at a certain date and at a certain time. If that fails, that can end at least that point of an investigation.

To start off an investigation, it could hamper or completely stop the progress if we were unable to confirm right away that an entity held the evidence we were looking for.

[Jacob Mantle, Conservative, York—Durham, ON]

That's just for the confirmation of service, the subscriber information, that you're talking about.

[Aaron Gilkes]

I'm sorry. I thought you were asking me about our current process.

[Jacob Mantle, Conservative, York—Durham, ON]

I think I've confused it in my mind.

[Aaron Gilkes]

I'm referring to our current process. In our current process, we have to establish that the evidence is likely in the possession of the person we're addressing it to. We typically start off by asking questions, which is why the confirmation of service is more of a codification of our existing practices, but as my colleagues mentioned before, not all service providers respond to this.

[Jacob Mantle, Conservative, York—Durham, ON]

My understanding is that you do that now. You ask, whether it's an ISP, a tech company or some other entity, if they're providing this service. Many of them respond to those presently. I'm thinking of the companies that produce transparency reports, for example. At whatever level information is requested of them by law enforcement, they produce a report, and it's online; you can see it. For example, the Googles and Apples of the world produce them.

Is that the kind of back-and-forth that's the initial step for you?

[Aaron Gilkes]

Depending on the investigation, that can start off our investigation. Where we run into some issues is in establishing who might be in possession of that information. It might be a chain of providers that has it.

What can hamper an investigation as well would be, for example, when you have a reseller of IP services, and this larger provider sells its services to another provider, which resells its services to a web host, for example. According to the information you have, it belongs to the larger provider, but if you write a production order to the larger provider, by the time you receive a response, they might say that in this case, it is actually the smaller provider that has the information you're looking for, which would lead to another production order and so on.

[Jacob Mantle, Conservative, York—Durham, ON]

That's like if Rogers resells access to a more local provider, and they provide it in a local area. Then when you ask Rogers, they're just saying it's not them. Well, it is them, but they sell that wholesale onward.

[Aaron Gilkes]

That's correct. They wouldn't be in possession of the actual subscriber information, but they would be in control of the IP range.

[Jacob Mantle, Conservative, York—Durham, ON]

Keep going.

[Aaron Gilkes]

I'm sorry.

Once we have established who is in possession of the subscriber information, we write out our information to obtain a production order, which would lay out the grounds that allowed us to believe that an offence has been committed. This information provides evidence of that particular offence.

The grounds to believe would be based on our perceptions also. For example, if you receive information like Internet logs, you might not look at them the same way I would based on our previous experience and what we know about Internet logs. Then we have to show how we attempted to corroborate the information we received, and we spell it out in a way that would make potentially anyone—or in this case a justice or judge, based on their criteria—also believe that an offence was committed and that this information will provide evidence of the offence.

[Jacob Mantle, Conservative, York—Durham, ON]

I think you embedded the discussion of the standard in your response, but maybe you could hone in for me on where the current standard comes into play for you when you start thinking.... I mean, I assume that throughout, you understand the test you need to meet to get the production order, but you didn't say, “Now we're thinking about what the standard is and what we need to meet it.” Maybe you could hone in on that for me, because I want to contrast it to what's being proposed. That's why I'm asking.

[Aaron Gilkes]

If I were to give an example, it would be that Bob says he's receiving calls in the middle of the night. They're harassing calls. They are from Alice. He is able to show me a phone number that he received the calls from. Now, I have no confirmation quite yet that a crime has been committed because I haven't heard the calls that have gone through, but I do have a phone number, so I suspect that an offence may have been committed.

I can reach out to a service provider and ask if they provide services to this particular phone number. If they respond yes, then I can move on, in this case, to a subscriber information production order because I'm still not quite sure that an offence has been committed, or it's not probable. It's possible, but it's not probable yet. If I receive a response that confirms that this account belongs to Alice, I start to increase my grounds, because Bob says that Alice was the one who did it, and this account happens to come back to Alice. I'd have to do some additional corroboration, but we're on our way to building grounds to believe. It's a step-by-step process.

[Jacob Mantle, Conservative, York—Durham, ON]

How does the proposed change change that process for you?

[Aaron Gilkes]

It would facilitate our process greatly.

In terms of the confirmation of service, we can ask the providers if they provide services. For example, as I mentioned before with resellers, I can confirm who provides services right away through a confirmation of service demand, which can be sent out to the service provider that would possibly have this information. If they confirm that, I can move on to the next step at a threshold of “reasonable grounds to suspect”, and I can immediately write a subscriber information production order. From receiving a response that much faster, I can move on with my investigation.

It's not only that it's going to confirm what I think; it could be exculpatory in eliminating the possibility that this was the individual who committed the offence. I can either end the investigation more quickly or move on and carry on my investigation more quickly.