Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
This is NDP-3. With respect to this amendment, the NDP has received comments from prominent lawyers, legal professors and so on who are concerned about the impact of this bill on privacy and constitutional rights in Canada. They say:
As affirmed by the Supreme Court of Canada's decision in R v Spencer, Canadians have had a strong privacy interest in anonymity online. The existing general production order—available since 2004 and readily obtained by telewarrant—already gives police an effective tool to link an IP address or phone number to a named subscriber, and requires them to establish reasonable grounds to believe that an offence has been committed. Bill C-22 creates a new, dedicated subscriber information order that reduces that standard to reasonable grounds to suspect. The courts have held that this distinction is not semantic: in R v West, the Ontario Court of Appeal excluded evidence obtained through a production order precisely because the officer had established only grounds to suspect rather than grounds to believe.
The scope of disclosure under the new order is a further concern. Although the definition of subscriber information has been narrowed compared to Bill C-2, the order still allows for production of a broad scope of information, including the types of services provided—