Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise and add my voice to the debate. This is one of those debates that every now and again comes along and gives us an opportunity to reflect on the relationship between government, or how we are governed, and our individual lives.
I think the bill has been in and out of the House in a number of forms because people are not sure about where those boundaries lie, about how we establish our right to live independently and freely as citizens versus the need for the government to undertake actions that may intrude upon that right in order to provide another right, and that is the right to lead our lives free from the threats of death, destruction or kinds of activities that we have seen too often recently in other places.
I want to start by reflecting on how this began. Obviously there were the events of September 11, but I am reminded of the first bill we put through the House by a statement that the Prime Minister made in the House when he said that law made in haste is not necessarily good law. At that time, we were moving very quickly because of the horrific events of 9/11 to put in place a body of law enabling police forces to take additional action in order to provide protection. If we were to ask most of the people in this Chamber and certainly people across Canada if they want or expect government to provide some protection for them and to act to intercede with people who might undertake those acts, I think the answer would be an overwhelming yes.
At the same time, law is a complex issue and one needs to look very carefully at what is being proposed to try to pick apart that which is necessary in order to meet the goal of providing protection and safety for citizens and that which is sort of a natural tendency of bodies to assume as much responsibility and as much authority as they possibly can to get their job done. Always in that space there is a tension that exists between law enforcement and citizens.
I am a son of an RCMP officer. I worked in a position of social control, shall we say, when I was a director of child welfare for a period of time. There always is that area between the rights and needs of the state to function to protect people and the right of individuals to lead their lives unfettered, as long as they are conducting themselves in a lawful manner, so that they can function without fear of intrusion or problems arising from, shall we say, the over-ambitious or over-energetic activities of law enforcement.
There is another aspect to this. There is an old joke that I first heard told about university professors, although I suspect the same joke could be told about most Canadians and most of their roles. In this case the question in the joke is: How many professors does it take to change a light bulb? The answer is: Change?
We are all worried about things that change the world we have become comfortable with. In many ways, these changes are changes that have become more necessary over time as law breakers, those who act to deprive us of our rights, take advantage of new technologies, new strategies, and new ways of exchanging information, travelling around the world and financing their operations. It has strained police forces around the world to respond to them. It has left them unable to respond in many cases, simply because police do not have some of the technological capability in order to keep up.
We saw that in some of the discussion about wiretapping. A wiretapping law that attached the ability to tap to a specific phone in a specific location was fine when all phones were attached to wires and routed inside buildings, but not very effective in a regime where we are into cellular phones. That is before we get into short messaging, fax and the other forms of exchange of information if one wants to track down communication or interfere with communications between people who would do us harm.
We need to look at this very carefully. We need to pick apart those parts of the bill that are specifically involved in modernizing the tools that law enforcement has available to it in order to protect us and provide us with some measure of assurance against the real or imagined acts of others. It is that second part, the imagined acts of others, that is also important because it poses a difficult problem for us.
I just returned from speaking to a group of students who asked me how far we were prepared to go in order to protect ourselves against terrorism and how much were we prepared to spend. The problem is that we do not know.
As a result of the weather last night I had occasion to travel in from the airport with a person who works at Canada Post. He talked about the problems Canada Post was having in trying to keep track of mail going through and checking it for anthrax. It has had a number of these anthrax scares but fortunately the ones in Canada have all been false. Nonetheless, the system must respond. To build a system that would allow Canada Post to inspect every piece of mail for bacteriological agents is just beyond its financial capability and its technological capability right now. However if we wanted to be absolutely sure we would undertake that.
Similarly, in other forms of law enforcement, the capacity to spend on new technologies and new ways of intervening is enormous. The task faced by law enforcement and by us is the task of risk assessment. How much is enough in order to provide us with some level of assurance that we will not suffer the consequences of an attack?
When we speak to the experts who are involved in anti-terrorism, it seems that one of the most effective ways to do that is through intelligence gathering, to try to understand what is going on long before it becomes an event in the local community. That leads us into these activities that do necessarily begin to trammel sort of traditional rights to freedom and individual privacy.
I want to talk a bit about privacy because it will become more of a consideration as the House moves down this track. I think we need to re-frame in part how we think about privacy. There was a time when the term “privacy” meant the right of individuals to have a life private or separate from the state. As citizens we had certain obligations to fulfill but we had the right to do things that were separate from the state.
Increasingly, we began to confuse the other things with the right to secrecy. Privacy and secrecy are not necessarily the same thing. I have a simple example of that. There was a time when it could be dangerous to be a gay person in the country. Individuals had the right to be gay but it did not mean they could act out that right in any particular way, and so people tended to keep those activities secret. As public awareness and public tolerance has grown, we have seen a reduction in that need to hold things private.
The same thing was true for a Jewish person a few decades ago. A person may not have wanted to be open about that. Certainly if people were Jewish a couple of hundred years ago they would want to maintain the secrecy even though at that time they would not have had the right to a private life. Even though today people have a right to a private life and the right to live their lives free from government, they may necessarily have to keep that secret in order to enjoy that right.
I think the problem that creates for us in government is that we have allowed an awful lot of confusion between privacy and secrecy to the point where we have a culture of secrecy in government that is really quite overwhelming. It creates other problems because there are other things that flow from this, such as the right to hold one's government to account and the right to understand what one's government is doing so a person can intervene with the government when impeded upon by this need to hold things secret.
The bill, while it is in an area that is particularly emotionally charged, is one that we will need to look at very carefully and to weigh those two competing rights: the need to keep us safe and the right to live our lives in quiet enjoyment.