Everyone can laugh or not laugh if they want. I don't really care. I have a particular view that I'm trying to express on this bill, and I'm going to continue doing that until you tell me I can't. I'll leave it there.
I'm going to read the one paragraph I was trying to read from Mr. Geist's article, because it disagrees with Mr. Wong's memory of, frankly, more than 10 years ago. It's not fair, but....
Mr. Geist wrote the following this morning:
The departure on Bill C-22 is not the presence of departmental officials from Public Safety and Justice, whose attendance is routine, but the inclusion of the RCMP and CSIS, the operational agencies that sought the legislation in the first place. The contrast with how Parliament has handled comparable legislation is telling. When the Justice committee conducted clause-by-clause review of Bill C-13, the last lawful access bill to reach that stage, the officials at the table were from the Department of Justice, and the police and intelligence agencies that would use the powers were not there to advise members on the amendments.
Therefore, as I said, it would be helpful to have the Privacy Commissioner here to discuss my subamendment, which I'm now going to talk about.
Ms. Gibner and Mr. Wong, we had a discussion about how to interpret the meaning of the definition of “subscriber information”. In reviewing the transcript of our back-and-forth, I was left with two different opinions that seemed to be expressed to me.
Mr. Wong, in response to some of my questioning, you made the point that proposed paragraphs (a), (b) and (c) are supposed to cover types of information that the police will use, and they're described that way with examples to try to make them future-proof in terms of what other types of information, like that information, may be used to identify the subject. When you say future-proof, that means the information we have there could include other stuff in the future. That's the definition of trying to future-proof.
In contrast, Ms. Gibner, you described the inclusion of the word “means” in the chapeau, and then the inclusion of the word “including” in the subparagraphs.
I made the subamendment, and I was left a bit confused, so as any good lawyer would, I went to the source. Don't worry. I'm not going to read the whole thing, but I will read a portion of it, because it's directly relevant to this.