Public Safety Committee on June 16th, 2026

[Rhonda Kirkland, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

I have a point of order, Mr. Chair.

[Jacques Ramsay, Liberal, La Prairie—Atateken, QC]

We agree with Bill C‑22.

[The Chair, Liberal, Jean-Yves Duclos]

Ms. Kirkland on a point of order.

[Rhonda Kirkland, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

I'm sorry. I am confused. Are we not talking about BQ-5?

[Jacques Ramsay, Liberal, La Prairie—Atateken, QC]

Absolutely.

[Rhonda Kirkland, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

You're going to support—

[Jacques Ramsay, Liberal, La Prairie—Atateken, QC]

Absolutely. Please listen to what I say.

I speak in French, so you may need your earpiece.

[The Chair, Liberal, Jean-Yves Duclos]

No, I'm sorry—

Mr. Ramsay—

[Jacques Ramsay, Liberal, La Prairie—Atateken, QC]

Mr. Chair, members of the Conservative Party talk for hours, and then they criticize me.

I'm talking about BQ‑5. I'm talking about substituting the word “suspect” with the word “believe”.

[The Chair, Liberal, Jean-Yves Duclos]

Ms. Kirkland, if you have a point of order, please state it.

[Rhonda Kirkland, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

My point of order is that I would like to be treated with respect. I'm simply asking for clarification.

Are we talking about BQ-5? He said he would support the amendment, which I was surprised by, so I'm trying to understand.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Jean-Yves Duclos]

The question is whether you were speaking about BQ-5. It is a relevant question. It's not necessarily a point of order.

[Rhonda Kirkland, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

I'm sorry. I guess it's a point of clarification.

[The Chair, Liberal, Jean-Yves Duclos]

Mr. Ramsay may want to take that comment into account.

Mr. Ramsay, you have the floor.

[Jacques Ramsay, Liberal, La Prairie—Atateken, QC]

This is for the law enforcement representatives.

Does the fact that we can act quickly—and here we agree that, if we change the requirement in BQ‑5 from “reasonable grounds to suspect” to “reasonable grounds to believe”, we will slow down the proceedings—mean that, in many cases, we won't be able to access the information because the evidentiary threshold will be higher?

Am I correct in saying that several hundred, if not thousand, cases will bypass the judicial proceedings that should be the norm in cases of cybercrime or fraud?

[C/Supt Richard Burchill]

Thank you for the question.

Speaking to the tools proposed in this legislation, “reasonable grounds to suspect” in the confirmation of service and subscriber information production order would, yes, speed up that process and help assist with the backlog of cases, most certainly. That's because you'd be, at the very beginning of an investigation, looking to attach somebody to a device that has been reported in a criminal offence.

The threshold of “reasonable grounds to believe” is much higher. At the beginning of an investigation, trying to get to that level—given the complexity of online crime and the volume of complaints—is very difficult, yes.

[Jacques Ramsay, Liberal, La Prairie—Atateken, QC]

Mr. Chair, I think we've just heard clearly, after all this debate about “reasonable grounds to suspect” and “reasonable grounds to believe”, why Bill C‑22 adopted “reasonable grounds to suspect”. It's because there are aspects of this issue that involve thousands of crimes that will remain unsolved.

Our party, the Liberal Party of Canada, cares about the safety of Canadians. This party wants criminals to go to jail.

The bad guys should go to jail.

We'll defend this principle, which our opponents, our colleagues on the other side, have literally renounced. They demonstrated this today in this committee, which has become a farce.

I'll leave it at that, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Jean-Yves Duclos]

Thank you, Mr. Ramsay.

I will now turn the floor over to Mr. Lawton. Then it will be Mr. Au's turn.

[Andrew Lawton, Conservative, Elgin—St. Thomas—London South, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

This is to whichever official—perhaps one of our witnesses from law enforcement.

Can you please give us an example...and if you have a concrete example, that would be ideal, but if you need to go into the realm of the hypothetical, I would understand. Can you give an example of someone who would fall between the two evidentiary thresholds at issue—the one originally put forward in Bill C-22, as drafted by the government, and the one in Madame DeBellefeuille's amendment?

I basically want to know who's being captured by one definition but not the other, in order to justify changing or not changing it.

[Aaron Gilkes]

I suppose I could return to an example I used previously.

Someone makes a complaint that they've been defrauded at a financial institution. There's money missing from their account, and they're alleging that someone defrauded them of the funds. However, the bank might make an allegation or a counter-statement saying that they believe the individual is the one responsible. At this point, we cannot necessarily say that we believe an offence has been committed, but we suspect that one has, maybe. We can't automatically take one person's word over the other's. We are not at that stage yet. We don't have enough information to make that assertion. We start to build our grounds by collecting information, and some of that would be subscriber information.

[Andrew Lawton, Conservative, Elgin—St. Thomas—London South, ON]

Following on this logically, the number of people who fall into the “reasonable grounds to suspect” bucket would be fundamentally different from the “reasonable grounds to believe” number. In one, you're going to have a broader net, which means, statistically, you're going to have more people captured who are not criminals and not going to be charged, let alone convicted.

Do we have any sense of how big that pool would be? We're talking about who these extraordinary powers Bill C-22 would grant authorities apply to. No one has issues with laws being used against people who have broken the law. We have issues with laws like these being used against people who haven't. How many more people in that category would be caught up by this definitional change, if Madame DeBellefeuille's amendment is not put in the bill?

[Aaron Gilkes]

I can't really speak to exact numbers, but we did hear, from our colleagues at the Department of Justice, the number of cases that are not going forward as a result of not being able to confirm basic information at the beginning of an investigation. This information has to be obtained in a timely fashion because of the nature, the speed and the complexity of the investigations that we're currently seeing.

I can't speak to an exact number for the difference that would be caught there, but I can speak in terms of the grounds to suspect. Once again, the production order itself is scoped in a way that it's not providing the content of the information or of the accounts that are being held by the individuals, but it's providing identifying information as to who the account holder might be or the services that are actually provided. This could allow for connections to be made, which could allow for assertions and corroborations to be made with other information that's been received early on in an investigation.

[Andrew Lawton, Conservative, Elgin—St. Thomas—London South, ON]

I suspect I will probably have some more questions when we get to the overarching question on clause 6, but I appreciate that on BQ-5.

Thank you, Sergeant.

[Richard Bilodeau]

I can supplement that answer to your question, if it's helpful, because I think you're asking an important question. I want to make sure that I put it in the context of...because our colleagues from the RCMP talked about this in a previous meeting. They're going to have a device number, for example, and they're going to go and ask a provider if it belongs to them—Rogers, for example. If Rogers says, yes, that's my device number, they will ask a judge to issue a production order on a reasonable grounds to suspect to get subscriber information for that particular device. It won't be associated with 50 people or 100 people, it will be directed only at that device number to get subscriber information for that device number. That will be related to that investigation.

The way you were asking your question.... It's not a basket of people that you capture. It still has to be grounded in a specific crime and specific to that information you're trying to get. I just wanted to provide that clarity.

[Andrew Lawton, Conservative, Elgin—St. Thomas—London South, ON]

I appreciate it. What I was referring to was the aggregate of people suspected of different crimes by different law enforcement bodies. I'm not talking about the Venn diagram, if you will, but the concentric circles of people caught in beyond a reasonable doubt versus reasonable belief or reasonable suspicion. However, I appreciate your contribution there.

I'll yield at this time, but when we get to clause 6, I feel like, depending on how the Liberals vote on what I think is a very good amendment, we may have further questions.