Public Safety Committee on June 16th, 2026

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

—but it was a similar topic.

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

Mr. Chair, this isn't a conversation. Would you like to call the new committee member to order? My patience is rather limited this evening.

[The Chair, Liberal, Jean-Yves Duclos]

I think that the tone was clear.

Mr. Mantle, you have the floor.

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

Mr. Gilkes, how long does it take to get a response, typically?

[Aaron Gilkes]

I hate to answer questions like this, but it does depend. It depends on the service provider. There are some that are somewhat slower than others in terms of response time. It also depends on the type of request that's going through. For example, if there's a request for subscriber information, it would typically go faster than, let's say, a request for something like a tower dump where they have to produce many lines of information that typically have to be manually extracted. This is something that generally can be part of the back-and-forth with the police officer and the service provider that's actually providing the information.

It can take a considerable amount of time with some providers. Please keep in mind that these are cascading timelines. If your first return of information is within 30 days, and then you write a new production order based on the information that you receive and there are another 30 days, you're at 60 days within your investigation. You have a lot of down time while waiting for what might actually come next before you move on.

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

That's fair enough. I would say “it depends” is probably my favourite phrase ever, as a lawyer. That's the best answer to give a client: “It depends.” That doesn't bother me in the slightest.

We just heard from Mr. Wong. Some of them were up to 90 days. I assume that could be a situation of a cascading return as well. If you're not getting the first one for 90 days, then you're not getting the next one for...etc. It seems as though that problem exists now, does it not?

[Aaron Gilkes]

That's correct. That is a problem we experience now.

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

Would it not be helpful, then, to have some standard baseline? At some point, picking a number becomes somewhat of an arbitrary exercise, and you do it based on the best information you have and your experience in dealing with this, but would it not be helpful to set up a baseline to start? Thirty days is certainly faster than 90 days.

[Aaron Gilkes]

This is an accurate statement. If I had to provide an opinion on this, in that case, based on the restrictive information that's to be provided—which would be, for example, something like subscriber information, which generally should be quicker to secure and produce—then a reduced turnaround time would be beneficial to police.

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

That's helpful. Thank you.

One of the other problems that appear to me, at least in this situation, and that I've been gathering throughout these exchanges is that there seems to be what I'll call a lack of respect from the companies when they do get one of these orders issued to them. My understanding is that—and Ms. Gibner can correct me—in the case of a production order, this is a judicial authorization. If a company doesn't respond to that per the terms of their order, that's contempt of court.

Is that right, Ms. Gibner?

[Kimberly Gibner]

I'll let you go ahead.

[Normand Wong]

Thanks for the question. I'll answer it.

The production orders have their own penalty scheme. When we originally did the production orders back in 2004, contempt of court was seen as perhaps too draconian or too severe for production orders. Since many of these production orders would be served on corporations, it also poses some prosecution issues, so there is a fine scheme that comes with not obeying a production order.

I think our law enforcement colleagues have talked about this before, and I certainly have. Production orders are to be served on co-operative third parties, and that relationship is very important. I think Sergeant Gilkes was getting to the point of the back-and-forth between him and a service provider. Sometimes there might be a little slack in terms of the production, because the service provider is having problems. It wouldn't benefit Sergeant Gilkes to report this service provider and ruin the relationship.

The whole scheme was designed to be used with co-operative third parties. There are other tools in the Criminal Code for when they're not co-operative.

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

Thank you.

I take your point about co-operation. My point would be that sometimes priorities are differently organized, depending on the recipient. In my experience, sometimes responding to a request may not be at the top of their priority list, especially if a penalty scheme is not a sufficiently motivating factor.

What is the penalty, Mr. Wong, for failing to comply with a production order?

[Normand Wong]

It's found at section 487.0198 of the Criminal Code. There's a possibility of fines or an offence on summary conviction as well. It's no more than two years less a day.

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

In your experience, Mr. Gilkes, or yours, Mr. Wong, is that operating as an effective motivating provision? It seems, from the discussion previously, that it wasn't.

[Normand Wong]

As I mentioned, there are other tools in the Criminal Code that police can use, including a warrant power. That's when police will go in themselves and get the information. To my knowledge, that has generally worked to get compliance with production orders, because it's less disruptive to the service provider to get the information. I think the production orders have largely been a success.

Perhaps my colleagues from the RCMP have a different opinion, but I think they've become the most used tools in the Criminal Code since they were introduced.

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

I don't know if you have anything you want to add. That's fine.

It seems as though ultimately, from what I've heard, you do end up getting information, but it sometimes is either this ping-pong game or an iterative process, or you don't get what you need in the first one, so you have to go back and do another one. That goes to the problem of time, which I'm sympathetic to, in these investigations.

That's why this amendment was interesting. It provides at least some baseline for the police to know that they have a deadline. Maybe for a simple one it's, in your opinion, too long. They should be able to do it more quickly, but for longer ones on the company side, maybe a 30-day deadline is a motivating factor. At least that gives you something to shoot for, because it seems like, right now, when we're leaving it up to the judge or the justice, we're still having the same problem, where deadlines come and go and information is not provided, or you have to go back and ask again for something else. It seems to me that having at least some starting point would be beneficial.

I think you said as much, Sergeant Gilkes, that having something would help.

At the same time, I'm sympathetic to the fact that maybe, in some cases, you need something more quickly. In going through the code, especially, coincidentally, on some of these standard issues for certain offences or defences, you often see reference to exigent circumstances. I was doing some review on that.

Mr. Wong, normally, to enter a dwelling place, you need to have a higher threshold, but if—and I'm just paraphrasing here—you think somebody is committing a crime and could injure someone grievously or kill them, then there may be exigent circumstances, and you can enter that dwelling place on a lower standard.

Can you give me more colour on that idea of exigent circumstances? I'm going to use that in a second, I think.

[Normand Wong]

There is a provision in Bill C-22. I think it's clause 14. I won't be able to read you the provision, because I forgot my glasses today, but that is an amendment to the exigent circumstances codification. That allows police to act without a warrant under both the reasonable grounds to believe or reasonable grounds to suspect thresholds when exigent circumstances exist and it would be impracticable to go to a court to receive an order.

This is the codification of the common law. Whether we made the amendments here or not, they would still exist. Generally, as I've mentioned before, when police act under exigent circumstances, it comes with a great deal of judicial scrutiny, and they have to demonstrate that they acted reasonably in those circumstances. The ability to act in exigent circumstances lasts only as long as the exigent circumstances exist, so they can exist at one moment, but a couple of hours later, if they don't exist, they can't continue to act. It's very onerous in terms of the proof that they have to show that they acted reasonably.

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

Thanks.

You said it emerged from the common law. Is that a fairly well understood concept in the code?

[Normand Wong]

I think it's fairly well understood.

The Supreme Court in Spencer talked about the ability to act in exigent circumstances, and the recent Supreme Court decision in Campbell also talked about acting in exigent circumstances.

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

Would there be a way to use either that concept or another to say, “Let's start with a baseline of 30 days”—I'm open to another suggestion on what that might be—“but if necessary, or if we have exigent circumstances, you know what? It's not going to be 30 days; the judge could vary it and say that you need it in seven days”? Could we do something like that?

[Normand Wong]

You could do something like that, but I don't think it would be consistent with the scheme here. There are amendments other than the one we're talking about right now at section 487.0193. I think it's clause 10. There are no motions for that, but that spells out a new timing regime for the ability to object to a production order, and the connection is not really clear about the return date and the objection date.

What's happened, because this provision applies to all production orders.... The objection date was actually interpreted to be the return date. Almost by default, a lot of production orders are issued with the 30-day return date right now. You have to remember—and Ms. Gibner talked about this—that prior to Spencer, there used to be a database that police were able to pull from in real time to get customer name and address information in relation to a phone number. It was in real time.

Most of our Five Eyes partner countries can get this information within hours or days. To have a 30-day timeline, I think, would perpetuate the issue that police are having currently, which is a delay in getting very basic information at the beginning of an investigation.

Also, as Sergeant Gilkes said, it has a cascading effect, because this is just basically the start of an investigation, and if there's a 30-day delay and on the next there's a 30-day delay, before you know it, you're a few months old. In terms of investigations of cybercrime and crimes that happen online, it may not be the subscriber information that's at risk of being lost, because service providers need that to bill you, but it's all the other information that will actually lead you or connect the crime that might be at risk, because there's no standard for how that information is kept.

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

Yes, that's fair enough, and I would just reiterate that I'm sympathetic to that argument. It's been disappointing in this process to hear a sort of lack of respect for priority issues, or whatever the case may be: lack of resources for certain smaller companies that are responding to this. When I dealt with this, I always would say to clients, “I know it's not your day job to be filling out information for me as your counsel to be giving it to whatever government entity we're working on.” Sometimes it's just an issue of resources, and there are two sides to that coin: what you need and what they can provide in a reasonable time.

I'm going to propose a subamendment to this that I'll provide orally and can then email to the clerk for translation. I hope we'll try to set this stage for 30 days, but then also provide an opportunity....

Mr. Chair, the current wording of the motion in CPC-6—it's the same in NDP-6—says:

named in the order within 30 days after the service of the order and at the place and in

It continues: “the form specified in the order.”

Here's the proposed subamendment. After “the service of the order”, we would add the following:

, or within such shorter period as is specified in the order where the justice or judge is satisfied that the circumstances make a shorter period necessary,

Then the amendment would continue.

[The Chair, Liberal, Jean-Yves Duclos]

We'll have to see whether that subamendment is admissible in relationship to the amendment itself. Obviously, we'll have to see this subamendment in writing. Otherwise, there is no way we can make any useful progress.

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

I have it right here. I can email it to the clerk right now.