Debates of Oct. 26th, 2009

Investigative Powers for the 21st Century Act

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

Madam Speaker, I find that comment by the member opposite very curious. I will start my comments by saying that I think he has forgotten who caused the last election. It was in fact the Prime Minister who walked over to the Governor General's residence and precipitated the last election, therefore killing every bill on the order paper, including a bill dealing with this very matter which was introduced by the Liberal member for Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine. I find the member's comment curious that he is blaming the frequency of elections, every single one of which the Conservatives precipitated in the last two instances, and using that as an excuse for why this was not adopted.

A point that bears mentioning is that in 2005 the Liberal Party introduced the modernization of investigative techniques act, which is essentially the same bill that we are working with here today. With very minor modifications, it is essentially the same legislation, so why would it take four years essentially to deal with the same bill that we had written so many years ago?

The member talked about things like voice over Internet protocol in terms of changes to Internet service provisions. All of those things were present four years ago when that work was done, yet the government refused to introduce it. Even recently, when this was brought back, the decision that was made by the government was to bring it in at the end of the last session. It was in the last week immediately leading up to the summer recess when suddenly this was a priority put on the order paper. It languished there for months and months and now the government is bringing it back. And the Conservatives have the audacity to try to talk about us delaying bills. The Conservatives themselves have had their crime bills sitting on the order paper, not only for months but in some instances for years, only to bring them back when they are a hit politically.

What they do is when there is a scandal, the most recent one being the cheque scandal, they decide to resurrect their crime bills that they have been ignoring for months on end. Suddenly it is an imperative national priority to deal with whatever particular crime bill they put on the table at that particular moment, when we all know that the real objective is to change the political channel away from whatever political troubles they are having. In this particular instance, it is the cheque fiasco. As this bill has been ignored and ignored and left to languish and we have been calling again and again for it to be dealt with, we can know that is essentially what their strategy is.

Now they have come to this bill and said that it is important to deal with it but only after we have been pushing for it for four years. I hope something does not distract them and we do not find this bill suddenly being lost yet again.

It is important to mention that the bill we have been advocating for the last four years is badly needed by police. Technology has changed and evolved in many different ways. While criminals have evolved with it, our legislation simply has not. For the last number of years while the Conservatives have been sitting on this, whether the criminals are involved in cyber fraud or are using technology like BlackBerries in the commission of crimes, to which the police cannot get access, the criminals have had a huge advantage against the law enforcement agencies.

One of the areas in which they have had a great advantage is in their anonymity. People are able to do things on line and police are not able to uncover who exactly they are, even if they know they are committing acts of a criminal nature. Police have been calling on us for years to change that and only now are the Conservatives bringing something forward to do something about it.

I have had many conversations with police, not just about things that were mentioned by the hon. member, but about other things, such as child pornography. Obviously child pornography is a deep concern and we want to root that out and give police every tool to be able to go after those individuals. I have also spoken with the police about instances where a criminal is known to have a particular phone and his whereabouts cannot be ascertained. The police want to be able to use the GPS tracking device in that device in order to figure out where the individual is. The current laws do not allow the police to do that.

I was talking to the chief of police in Calgary who was expressing deep frustration at the number of dial-a-dope operations. Individuals are using cell phones almost like a pizza service to deliver drugs to people's doors. When the police find these cell phones they are unable to access them because of the encryption software. The maker of the device is under no obligation to help open it up to reveal all of the phone numbers and the client base. It is a crime that is almost impossible to catch someone doing because it is locked behind that wall of encryption. That has been going on for years and the Conservatives have been refusing to give the police the tools they need to deal with it, even though solutions are present.

At the same time, it is important to mention that one of the things we are going to have to look at and study in committee is to ensure that there is balance. A number of people have expressed concerns that a law of this nature could be misused to allow access into people's searching history and people's personal messages or could be used maliciously by somebody to gain access to people's Internet search records and history. We have to ensure that balance exists. We have to protect individual rights to protect people's freedom to do what they want without somebody being able to go through willy-nilly, without warrant, their information. At the same time, we have to provide police with the opportunities to chase those individuals who we have reasonable grounds to believe have committed a crime.

It is worth mentioning as we talk about this bill, that the Conservative approach to crime is, I think, in general, disingenuous. We listened all day today to speeches by members about how the Liberal Party had held up a variety of bills. Of course, factually, that is entirely incorrect.

If we were to talk about the Liberal Party record in this session of Parliament in terms of bills that we have supported and helped to accelerate, I can list the following: Bill C-2, which was an omnibus bill which included provisions from Bill C-10, Bill C-32, Bill C-35, Bill C-27, and Bill C-22; Bill C-14; Bill C-15; Bill C-25; and Bill C-26. It is important to mention that in every instance we tried to get those bills accelerated and pushed forward.

That does not stop the Conservatives from talking about other parties holding up their crime bills. The problem is the facts do not match their rhetoric. In this specific instance and many others, the reality is the exact opposite of what they have said. In many instances, the Conservative crime bills have been languishing on the order paper, forgotten. They are sitting there waiting to be implemented. The Conservatives are not waiting for the right time for the public interest, not waiting for the right time to ensure there is adequate information to get the bills passed, but they are waiting for the right political moment to put the bills forward to try to turn the political channel.

If that were not bad enough, the other reality is that they are fundamentally letting down the Canadian public by only offering one solution to crime, and that solution invariably is to lock up people.

I do not have any problem with the notion of tough sentences. We have to have harsh, stiff sentences for people who commit serious crimes. However, if tough sentences were the only answer, then places like Houston, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Detroit would be some of the safest cities in North America. In fact, we know the opposite to be true.

The reality is that places with the stiffest sentences are more often than not some of the most dangerous cities in North America. Why? The Americans are being crushed under the weight of their own correctional system. They are literally in a position where there are so many people pouring into the prisons that they cannot possibly keep up with the costs of building all of the prisons, let alone the programs and services to ensure that people do not repeat offend. In fact, in California the situation has become so bad that its rate of recidivism is now 70%. They are creating crime factories. People go in for a minor crime and come out as a major criminal. It is like putting in a butter knife and getting out a machine gun.

That is the strategy the Conservatives are trying to bring here: a failed Republican strategy in dealing with crime that we know as a fact does not work. They are trying to apply it here to change the channel, to use it as a political game changer. If they are in trouble with the cheque fiasco, they talk about locking up people longer. If they are in trouble because a minister is caught in a fiscal indiscretion, they talk about locking people up longer. That is what they do.

I think most of them, I would hope most of them, realize that it is a disastrous strategy, that it leads to less safe communities, that it leads to billions of dollars in additional costs, and that it is exactly following down the road that even Republican governors say was a huge mistake to walk down. If anyone doubts that, I will point quickly to what has happened specifically with incarceration in the United States compared with Canada.

In 1981, before the United States began a similar agenda on which the Conservatives are now embarking, locking people up longer and longer, the gap between the rate of incarceration in Canada and the U.S. was much narrower. In Canada, 91 per 100,000 people were incarcerated, while the figure in the United States was 243 for every 100,000 people.

By 2001, Canada's rate had grown only slightly in terms of the number of people who were incarcerated, to 101 incarcerated for every 100,000 people, while in the United States that rate had soared to 689 for every 100,000, a rate almost 700% higher than that in Canada. In that same period of time, Canada and the U.S. had the same decline in their overall rate of crime. Imagine that.

The United States' rate of incarceration went up 500% over ours, and yet over that same period of time we had the identical reduction in the amount of crime. The only difference was that 500% more individuals were being incarcerated per 100,000 people, and it cost billions of dollars more.

In fact, if we continue to follow this model suggested by the Conservatives and we extrapolate to the same path that the Republicans took the United States, where they put them right to the brink, we are talking about roughly $9 billion a year in additional costs to have the same rate of incarceration.

As for the difference for public safety, well, unfortunately, I wish I could say it just kept it the same, that the only impact of that was the loss of $9 billion a year, but we all know that that $9 billion a year has to come from somewhere. We have already seen where the Conservatives' priorities are on crime. Let us take a look at the crime prevention budget.

Since 2005 the crime prevention budget has been slashed by more than 50%. That is actual spending. At the same time as they are increasing sentences and chasing after a failed Republican model, the Conservatives are slashing the money that is given to crime prevention. It is crazy. Anybody who would look at it objectively would say that this is a path to disaster, and yet that is exactly the road they have decided to head down.

There are opportunities here to be smarter on crime, to listen to police, to talk to them about what the real solutions are, to invest in prevention, to invest in making sure people turn down the right path instead of the wrong one. I had the opportunity to go around with the former chief of police in Regina and see a neighbourhood which is designated as one of the most dangerous in Canada. He was able to show me a home that had no septic system, no heat and where the child in that home was going to school hungry. That same child predictably, just scant years later, could be committing his or her first crime by starting to get involved in drugs.

For more than 60% of our inmates, addiction is the root cause of the problem and yet they do not get help. They get thrown into prison and forgotten about, and they come out worse because the core problem was never addressed. In this case it would be an addiction problem that sent them there. They go in for a minor crime, usually break and enter, and they have an addiction. They go into a system that is not providing them any rehabilitation services, and they come out and commit worse crimes. So goes the cycle. It is a constant cycle of things getting continually ever worse.

When we look at our prison system and we ask where these criminals come from, not often enough do we take a hard look at that. Imagine. Sixty per cent of those in prison face addiction issues. Over 10% face serious mental health issues. Not only are our prisons turning into crime factories, but the Conservatives are trying to use them as hospitals, by sending people with serious mental health issues into prisons. The prisons are so ill-equipped to deal with them that they are putting them in solitary confinement. They are often released directly from solitary confinement into the general population, only to reoffend again. Whether it is the facilities in St. John's, Grandview or different facilities across the country, we see this time and time again.

The reality here is we have a bill that has been called for by police for years. The government is only now finally bringing it forward, after its having been on the table since 2005. It is trying to use crime as a political game changer, misrepresenting what crime is really about and how to stop it, and at the same time it is taking us down a path that has been tried and failed before in the United States.

We need to do better than this. We need to be honest on crime and offer real solutions.

[Larry Miller, Conservative, Bruce—Grey—Owen Sound, ON]

Madam Speaker, I was listening to my colleague across the way and I have a couple of questions for him.

Number one, the past Liberal government clearly showed that criminals' rights meant a lot more than victims' rights. I wonder if his views have changed on that in any way. I hope they have towards the positive.

The other thing is I know most of us in this chamber know or are related to somebody in the policing business. I have a brother-in-law and lots of friends who are police officers. The one thing I hear constantly from policemen is that they work hard to make a case against a criminal; they go to court, and it is like pulling teeth to get someone convicted. They have to make sure all the i's are dotted and the t's are crossed. They do all this work and if they are fortunate, the criminal is put where he should be, behind bars, but then our system allows him to be out on the street in no time. I hear time and time again about the low morale in police forces.

Does the hon. member think he can address that problem? He has to have heard the same thing I have.

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

Madam Speaker, the problem is that my interests are in preventing a victim in the first place. Focusing only on punishing people who commit crimes is a model that has been tried and failed. We could look at it in Texas or in California, where the governor is saying that the system is collapsing under its own weight, and it is such a disastrous failure that they do not even know how to get back to where they were before they implemented the disastrous policies the government now has.

The reality is that wherever possible, we have to stop that crime from happening in the first place. When I talk, for example, about addictions, let us think about that number: 60% of prisoners are facing serious addiction issues.

I was on the Durham Regional Police Services Board. I had the opportunity to work with police officers every single day, and to talk with them about what the root causes of crime are. The root causes of crime come down more often than not to addiction problems. More often than not they come to socio-economic issues and socio-economic problems. We are creating crime factories, both in our prisons and in our communities. We are sending people down a path that of course does not guarantee crime. However, when somebody is born in a ghetto in Detroit, there is a chance they will get out, but if they have no hope, if they have hope stripped away from them, if they have no opportunity for a good education, if their only role models, the people who break through, are drug lords, the chances the person will be a criminal are pretty darned high. I say we need to shut down the crime factories and stop the crimes from happening in the first place.

[Serge Ménard, Bloc, Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC]

Madam Speaker, I see that the debate has gone off on a small tangent, but since we have gone there, I think that this bill will have to be very carefully examined. In any case, after listening to the previous speaker, with whom we obviously share a number of opinions, I have an additional question for him.

Considering everything that he believes, how can he agree to support the current government, which wants to take away a tool judges often use to avoid putting first-time offenders through the criminal process? I am talking about conditional sentences. When a judge felt that prison could be a valid option, these sentences made it possible for the judge to nevertheless impose conditions on that individual at home, allowing the offender to continue to work, raise a family, go to school, and to stay out of that place where crime prevails: prison.

How can he support the government on such a crazy initiative?

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

Madam Speaker, I thank the hon. member for his question. It is a bit tangential but it is an important question.

Let us make no mistake about it. We believe that when somebody has committed a serious crime, there should be a sentence that reflects that. We have no problem with the notion that there are certain areas where it is important to remove judicial discretion because the nature of the crimes is serious enough to warrant sentences that reflect that. We support that notion and have no problem with it.

The problem I have is that the current government is slashing funding for crime prevention. It is slashing money and not investing in the things that reduce recidivism. Right now our rate of recidivism in Canada is 36%. If we continue along the route we are on, we only need to look at California to see where it will end. It has a recidivism rate, the rate at which people reoffend, of 70%.

There is nothing wrong with giving tough sentences. The problem is that if doing so is the only solution, it becomes a total disaster.

The focus has to be on stopping crime before it happens. That has to be our first priority, and there are 1,000 ways to do that before it gets to the point where somebody commits the type of offence that is so serious that we have to remove judicial discretion in order to send out the right message about the severity of that crime.

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague from Ajax—Pickering for a very clear and lucid presentation.

I am just wondering if my colleague would consider that perhaps he is being a little too hard on the Conservative government. Perhaps some of what he outlined could be, as seen through the Conservative government's own kind of warped world view, a form of national housing strategy. Just as the Americans have tried to lock up an entire generation of young black men, the Conservative government seems hell-bent and determined to follow that folly and lock up a whole generation of young aboriginal men and women.

I would like to put on the record a statistic I recently read in a book by Pierre Berton. The book was about 1967, the last time Canada was happy. At that time, 100% of the inmates in the women's penitentiary in Kingston were aboriginal women. Every single inmate was an aboriginal woman.

I wonder if perhaps my colleague wants to reconsider his remarks and entertain the notion that perhaps this is the Conservative government's concept of a national housing strategy, to lock up a generation of young aboriginal people, given their overrepresentation in the penal system.

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

Madam Speaker, I think I will leave that matter. I think probably the best way to respond to it is just to leave that.

Of course I am very concerned with the high proportion of aboriginals who are there, but I think the characterization by the member is not right, and I will not respond.

[The Acting Speaker, NDP, Denise Savoie]

It is my duty pursuant to Standing Order 38 to inform the House that the questions to be raised tonight at the time of adjournment are as follows: the hon. member for Hull—Aylmer, Automotive Industry; the hon. member for Don Valley West, Public Transit.

Resuming debate. The hon. member for Marc-Aurèle-Fortin.

[Serge Ménard, Bloc, Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC]

Madam Speaker, the bill we are studying has a title that does not at all describe what it is about. It has various objectives that all have to do not so much with cybercrime, because it likely would have been given that sort of name, but with the use of not only computers, but virtual means of communication to help the police fight criminals who use these means.

The bill deals with a number of subjects. It includes amendments to the Criminal Code and several other laws. It is a complicated bill, with 72 pages but only 45 clauses. It has many explanatory notes, and some clauses are several pages in length. Consequently, it is a very long bill, and it is very late in coming. Once again, God knows that it was not the opposition that delayed the government's bill. The current government bears full responsibility for the recent delays.

This bill originated with the convention on cybercrime that was signed in 2002 following lengthy negotiations that had begun in the 1990s. The convention was drafted by the Council of Europe with the active involvement of Canada, the United States, Japan and South Africa. It is clear that in the mid-1990s, countries were well aware that criminal organizations were making extensive use of the new means of communication. Telegraph, mail and long-distance calls were things of the past, because criminals were using modern means of communication. In addition, new types of crimes were being committed on the web.

Obviously, we think mainly of child pornography, but also of all kinds of fraud. The horrible consequences of identity or information theft were also talked about. Moreover, they came up again last week when a new bill was introduced. In 1995, it was already clear that developed countries needed to enter into agreements to help each other fight such crimes and prosecute major criminal organizations. Wiretapping was agreed to with some reluctance. As we will see a bit later, the guidelines for wiretapping were much better than the guidelines the government wants to give the police under this bill for using these new means of communication.

Nonetheless, without wiretapping today, I do not think we could have penetrated major organized crime groups the way we did with the Hells Angels and the way we do with the mafia, whose structure is more fluid. It would have been difficult to penetrate major organized crime groups in general without the use of wiretapping.

All these countries felt that the police needed updated methods, but with limits on how much police action was necessary.

We do not want the government to control the web, the way China does, since the web was originally designed as a tool for scientists to allow them to communicate freely amongst themselves. However, those who used it for unlawful purposes needed to be stopped and caught.

The convention on cybercrime had little impact until 2001. We all know what happened on September 11, 2001. People again began to take an interest in electronic technology as well as the need to fight organized criminals that might be operating in a number of different countries using modern communication devices.

The person who spoke before me said that this type of bill had already been introduced in 2005 and that this was not new. I have not yet compared the current bill to the one from 2005. On the face of it, there does not seem to be much difference except for some changes to account for the evolution of the technology over the past few years. Why did the government not introduce this sooner? However better late than never. Since the government is introducing this bill, it can count on our cooperation for a serious study of it.

A serious study. That means that we start with the conviction that this legislation is needed to fight modern criminal organizations that may use these technologies and to fight new types of crimes made possible by modern communications. But we must also ensure that we do no more than is necessary. We have to strike a balance. The government speaks a great deal about this balance with respect to the protection of personal information. They talk about the protection of fundamental rights; however, in this case, we are dealing more specifically with personal information. Unfortunately, in other legislation, this objective was reflected more in the government's speeches than in specific measures proposed, with the ever-present tendency of increasing powers.

Organizations that defend human rights, in this case the right to privacy and confidentiality of communications, have raised a number of points that must be examined when we study this bill. It is difficult work that, of necessity, will take some time. The bill itself is long and has many complex provisions. By the way, this may be just the thing for those who suffer from insomnia. This type of legislation can easily put you to sleep. Moreover, the impact of certain provisions on others is difficult to gauge.

We want to take the time to thoroughly study the bill, examine all aspects and hear from police organizations, among others, although I have the impression that the government has probably heard a lot about it from them. I, too, have heard many things from police forces. Organizations concerned with protecting human rights have also undertaken the arduous task of studying this bill. They must be heard. They must be given, as must we, the time to reflect and to ensure that this legislation really does strike a balance.

The provisions of this bill will make it possible to track an individual's movements wherever they go. The provisions will make it possible, on mere suspicion, to access all of an individual's online communications, or information about each time they use a computer or the Internet. Someone will be able to see what certain people do, what they like, what they read, what they want to read, who they are in contact with.

In fact, modern methods allow the government to go beyond the possibilities in futuristic novels that scared us so much, like 1984 or the many other novels that described a future filled with totalitarian regimes.

I hope that the government will understand that the reason we want to carefully examine this bill is not because we are defending the rights of criminals, as the government side keeps senselessly claiming. We are not defending the rights of criminals. We are defending the rights of all individuals, even when they have been accused of a crime.

I think that the Canadian public as a whole expects us to do this. About 20 or 25 years ago, I remember that some cases at the Supreme Court foresaw that technology could make it possible to monitor a person's life, which I almost thought sounded like something out of a fantasy novel. I must say that these judges, who were much older than I was at the time, had a vision of the future that seems to be coming true.

We will have to pay very close attention to the system that gives the police certain permissions—the system of warrants—and to the justifications that will have to be provided in order to penetrate an individual's personal life so deeply. We need to ask ourselves if it is really worth it.

Something like this worries me about the current government. I see that they still plan on reinstating some provisions. In the Anti-Terrorism Act, some provisions were deemed to be so drastic that they would be re-examined in five years. That was done. We suggested that they be abolished. The previous Parliament refused to reinstate them, but this government still wants to go back to it.

In other words, what concerns me is that when this government talks about a balance between individual rights and the necessary powers of state, it always thinks more about the powers of state. We should therefore be entitled to expect that there will be—and I hope there will this time—productive discussions, and that those who want to defend individual rights, those with questions about the scope of police powers, will not again be treated as though they are defending the rights of criminals, when that is not what we are trying to do.

Indeed, they need to clearly understand what we are trying to do. I think they really do understand, but they prefer to pretend that they do not. One thing is certain: as long as we continue seeing crime bills modelled on the American example in recent years, we will oppose them, because we know that that is not the right approach.

The member who spoke before me gave some figures that confirm the trends I have noticed.

It depends somewhat on what years we look at, but the trend is always the same. The United States currently has the highest incarceration rate in the world. It is a democratic country. Does it also have the lowest crime rates? Not at all. It also has one of the highest homicide rates, that is, three and a half times higher than Canada and, I might add, five times higher than Quebec. Quebec, like some of the maritime provinces, has focused more on rehabilitating young offenders, and its police officers also have a different attitude. Instead of always promoting force and the use of force, they have focused more on developing community police forces that are involved in their communities, that dedicate much of their resources and energy to prevention. I would not say they dedicate as much energy, because when you are the only one responsible for preventing crime, it takes a great deal of energy. Indeed, we note that these provinces have lower homicide rates that those who do not seem to care as much about prevention.

As long as the Conservatives keep on aping the Americans and introducing minimum sentences left, right and centre in bills, a model that does not work and that 22 states are currently backing away from, we will keep on raising objections.

Moreover, I know why they have introduced their “get tough on crime” provisions and minimum sentences. It is because such measures are popular, but the Conservatives should remember that there have been great leaders of the Conservative Party. The fact that I have questioned him harshly does not mean that I do not respect Brian Mulroney's great qualities and what he did. In his speech celebrating the 25th anniversary of his coming to power, he said something that struck me. He said that just because something is popular doesn't mean it is right. He said that government should not make policies just to please people, but that it had to have a vision that sometimes went beyond popular opinion. Politicians had to take measures that gave their vision life, because when one is in government, one knows things that ordinary people do not.

The Conservatives do not seem to realize that there is a science that allows us to measure the impact of criminal actions. That science is criminology. The government's only justification right now for proposing new legislation with minimum sentences is that it is listening to the people. The only thing that matters to them is their popularity.

I do not think that is the right approach. In matters of health we would not say we will take a certain measure because it is popular or, since most people do not believe in the vaccine, we will not have a vaccine. In health, we rely on science. Relying on science in matters of crime means relying on criminology. Criminology is not one of the hard sciences, no more than psychology. However, just because it is not a hard science does not mean it is not a science, that it does not have solutions to our problems, or that it cannot judge some solutions to be better than others.

As long as the Conservatives introduce legislation like this, which responds to a real need, they can count on our support and our help to improve it.

[Guy André, Bloc, Berthier—Maskinongé, QC]

Madam Speaker, I would like to congratulate my colleague on his excellent speech that touched on cybercrime. We will support this bill because it strengthens a number of police powers, thus facilitating investigation. I would like my colleague to talk about prevention. We hear about cybercrime and cyberbullying. Thanks to a new means of communication, the Internet, people are committing all kinds of economic crimes and crimes against children. This medium is relatively new to many of us. It has not even been around for 100 years. We have been using it for about 20 years.

Does he believe that people, children and adults alike, are sufficiently informed to protect themselves from the kinds of crimes that can be committed via the Internet? Are there other preventive actions the government and the House can take to better protect people?

[Serge Ménard, Bloc, Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC]

Madam Speaker, there are two perspectives to consider. The first is the public perspective and the second is the family perspective. Of course parents have to be aware of what their children and teenagers are looking at. They may not always succeed, but I think that families should talk about what their kids are learning.

The public perspective is similar. Early on, crimes committed via the Internet were never punished because they were never discovered. That is why we need surveillance measures. I myself have often proposed setting up on-line reporting sites for people to report child pornography. We need measures like that, but that is not really what we are talking about here. We are talking about the fact that law enforcement personnel need to be able to get inside these new technologies to track the criminals who use them and possibly prevent crimes.

[Peter Stoffer, NDP, Sackville—Eastern Shore, NS]

Madam Speaker, one of the things I wish to advise my colleague is that for many years there was a bill before the House of Commons on child Internet pornography. It was first introduced in 1995 by Mr. Chris Axworthy, who was a long-time member of Parliament and became the attorney general of Saskatchewan.

The government was asked to introduce legislation through this bill or any bill it wished that would make ISP providers partially responsible to monitor their sites and when they noticed any that may have child pornography, they would be required to report it to the authorities. That is basically the bill in a nutshell, as well as certain amounts of time offenders would have to serve.

Child Internet pornography, in my own personal view, is one of the most despicable crimes perpetrated upon unsuspecting children. I have worked with OPP and RCMP officials on this and when I speak with them, they get quite emotional and concerned when they speak about what they have seen on these sites.

As a Parliament we need to do everything we possibly can in order to ensure that we mitigate, reduce and eventually stop this action. I know people are concerned about privacy rights. In fact, most ISP providers I have spoken to do not like me very much because of the fact that a bill such as this would force them to be partially responsible to monitor their sites.

I would like to ask the hon. member, who I know is an extremely intelligent and well-versed person on justice issues, not just in Quebec but in Canada, what does he think about asking ISP providers to be partially responsible, through legislation, to ensure that any pornography on websites can and will be reported to the authorities so they can do their job properly?

[Serge Ménard, Bloc, Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC]

Madam Speaker, that is certainly the type of solution legislators come up with. We think that such matters can be solved with laws. However, I doubt that those working in the computer field and ISP providers are qualified to spend long hours poring over these sites.

That is why I have always called for reporting sites, among other things. Such sites are useful not only in cases of pornography but also in those involving potential killers. I am thinking of the horrible events at Dawson College, in Montreal, where young Anastasia was murdered. In the days that followed, some people contacted the police to report a certain site. The police arrested three or four people.

I truly believe that people know that they are doing something illegal. We could draft another bill to tell them that it is illegal, but we have to provide the tools to deal with them. I believe the best way is to use hackers, those who like to go from one site to another on the Internet. They have to be informed that they can contact the police if they stumble across a child pornography site or the site of a gun-crazed maniac, which could foreshadow a massacre. Although I have been told by the Sûreté du Québec that they have officers to respond to such complaints, I have never known the government do this with the RCMP or other forces.

Our objective is to identify the best solutions. At times, it may be legislation, but quite often it is also the enforcement of the legislation, the actual police work.

[Rob Clarke, Conservative, Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River, SK]

Madam Speaker, I am proud to rise in the House today to speak about the important piece of legislation which updates criminal offences for the new technological environment and gives police officers the tools to conduct their investigations in a world which has moved beyond old-fashioned telephone calls and snail mail.

The world is changing and so is the way we communicate. It used to be that we could find a pay phone on every city block. That seems quaint to us now. Now we just reach into our pockets or our purses for our cellphones and make our calls on the spot. It used to be we could send a letter to a friend in England or other parts of the world, and it would takes days or weeks to get there. Now we can turn our computers on and send a message in a matter of seconds. We can do it while we are in a coffee shop or while we are walking down the street or even in the House of Commons.

The world is changing in other ways, too. We do not have to go to a store anymore to buy a new pair of shoes. We can sit in our living rooms and buy them online from a store in Paris. When we want to do research on World War II, we can haul out our old dusty encyclopedias or we can look it up on the Internet. We can look at whole books online. Even if people prefer to go into the library to pull a book off the shelf, they will probably look it up on a computerized card catalogue first.

Not only are the new technologies useful and efficient, but they are also unavoidable. They are present in every aspect of our lives. It is clear that criminals are taking advantage of the new technologies as much as anyone else. They use these technologies to facilitate their criminal activities.

Criminals use email and websites to distribute child pornography. Members of organized crime use mobile phones to plan their drug deals. Hackers can access bank records by electronically spying on computer activity.

New technologies give rise to new crimes and they provide new ways of committing old crimes. They create key evidence of crimes, old and new. Most importantly, for the bill before us, they create new electronic forms of evidence.

So, it is obvious that police officers need a way to obtain this evidence to do their jobs. They could be stuck in a telephone world while criminals operate on the Internet. That is why the Minister of Justice tabled Bill C-46, the investigative powers for the 21st century act on June 18.

We need the legislation to give police officers the tools they need to investigate crimes, whether they are facilitated with a traditional land-line telephone or a laptop. We need the legislation to give them the tools they need to collect evidence no matter what form it takes. We need legislation to prevent the Criminal Code from lagging behind the criminals. We need the legislation to ensure that our investigative techniques are as modern as the crimes they are investigating.

I am pleased to say that Bill C-46 does exactly that. Let me say a little bit more about Bill C-46. This bill does a few different things, some of the most extensive changes found in this bill are the Criminal Code amendments. Some of these amendments create new offences. For instance, the bill criminalizes certain forms of child sexual exploitation facilitated by the Internet.

There are also updates to some existing offences to ensure, for instance, that crimes traditionally committed using regular mail will now be punishable if they were committed using email. Finally, the bill creates and updates investigative powers to ensure that the tools available to police can meet the requirements of modern investigations.

I will talk more about these Criminal Code amendments in a few minutes. Before I get into that, I would like to briefly address the other legislation amended in Bill C-46.

Bill C-46 will also update the Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Act to allow us to co-operate with global partners more effectively in the fight against cyber crime and other crimes that exploit modern technologies. These changes will ensure that Canada's treaty partners have access to new investigative tools in the Criminal Code.

The Competition Act would also be amended to ensure some of the important investigative tools created in this legislation are available to its investigations under that act.

One of my colleagues will go more into detail about some of these amendments when I am finished. Right now, I would like to tell members a bit more about the Criminal Code amendments themselves. As I mentioned, some of the amendments update the offences in the code, while some of them update investigative powers.

I will begin by telling members some of the important changes we have made in the area of child sexual exploitation.

The first one is communication for sexual offences against a child. Bill C-46 would create a new offence prohibiting people from using the Internet or another method of telecommunication to make arrangements with another person to sexually exploit a child or to agree to such arrangements. An offence of communicating with a child in order to communicate a sexual offence against that child was adopted in 2002. The police have found this offence to be a good tool in the fight against sexual exploitation.

However, concerns have been raised about this provision not going far enough to tackling this very pressing issue. Therefore, the proposed offence would add to what we already have by prohibiting communications between adults for the purpose of facilitating child sexual exploitation. This improvement would help police in conducting undercover investigations of child sexual exploitation crimes. A person convicted under this provision would face up to 10 years of imprisonment.

The next amendment concerns false information, indecent communications and harassing communications. As I mentioned, the Criminal Code would also be updated to ensure that new technologies are reflected in a number of existing offences. For instance, the crimes of false information, indecent communications and harassing communications were previously recognized only when committed using old technologies, such as the telephone and telegraph. Now, these crimes would be punishable when committed using email, text messaging and any number of other mediums.

These amendments would be useful in the fight against cyber bullying, an issue that has become particularly worrisome of late. Cyber bullying is 21st century bullying. It is bullying using email, text messages or posting threats and defamatory messages on websites. It is an issue that has affected many Canadians, school children and teachers. Although the Criminal Code currently contains many useful provisions for fighting cyber bullying at its worst, these amendments would provide incremental tools for those situations that the Code does not quite reach yet.

Those are just two examples of the kinds of updates we have made to our Criminal Code offences, but new technologies affect the criminal law in many different ways.

Many traditional crimes often leave evidence in electronic form. The police must be able to capture this evidence in order to complete their investigations. Therefore, we have created a series of new investigative powers to deal with the aspect of changing technology. These powers are designed to target electronic evidence, yet tailored to ensure minimal intrusions on privacy and civil liberties.

Preservation demands the preservation orders. Two of the tools we have included in our package are the preservation demand and the preservation order. These would require the person subject to the demand or order to preserve a specific set of data long enough for police officers to get a warrant or court order to obtain the data. I would like to emphasize that preservation should not be confused with the types of data retention schemes we see in Europe and elsewhere.

This bill does not require Internet service providers, or ISPs, to collect everyone's information and keep it on hand indefinitely--

Suspension of sitting

[The Acting Speaker, NDP, Denise Savoie]

I am sorry to have to interrupt the hon. member.

Apparently the translation is not working for those who are listening to the French. We will therefore suspend the sitting for a minute or two to restart the interpretation system.

(The sitting of the House was suspended at 5:26 p.m.)

(The House resumed at 5:40 p.m.)

Sitting Resumed

[The Acting Speaker, NDP, Denise Savoie]

I will speak in English just to check if the system is working. The translation is coming through.

Can everyone hear me in both languages?

All right.

Resuming debate. The hon. member for Desnethé--Missinippi--Churchill has 10 minutes left.

[Rob Clarke, Conservative, Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River, SK]

Madam Speaker, what a preservation demand or order would do is require a person or business that is not the target of the investigation to preserve and prescribe a set of computer data for a limited amount of time in order to conduct a specific investigation.

We might want to think of this as a do not delete order because it is simply asking that the person preserve or save information already in their possession when a demand or order is made for a short period of time. This kind of tool is vital for our ability to conduct effective investigations in an age where crucial evidence can be deleted with a stroke of a key.

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Barry Devolin]

Order, please. Some confusion remains with the sound system. I understand that when we are speaking English, the French translation is working.

When I speak French, is there an English translation?

It seems to be working.

I apologize to the member for Desnethé--Mississippi--Churchill River. Once again, please continue.

[Rob Clarke, Conservative, Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River, SK]

Mr. Speaker, the preservation demand and the preservation order would provide police with enough time to go to a judge and get the warrants or orders they need to obtain this evidence. They can do this without fear that the highly volatile data they need will be lost or deleted, either inadvertently or in the manner of regular business practice during the sometimes long periods it takes to obtain a warrant or production order for that data.

Also, as I have mentioned before, we have built important privacy safeguards into these powers to ensure an appropriate balance is struck between providing for the safety and security of all Canadians in ensuring that their rights and liberties are respected.

Although a court order is not required for the preservation demand, the duration of the demand is limited to 21 days. This means that if a police officer does not get a court order or a warrant for the preserved data before the demand expires, the data will simply be deleted. The data will not be provided to the police without a court order or warrant.

The police can also obtain a preservation order from a judge or justice. The order will give them up to 90 days to get a production order or warrant to obtain the data that has been preserved. Again, if they do not get the production order or warrant by the time the preservation order expires, the person in possession of the preserved data is required to destroy it unless his or her business practices otherwise require that it be retained.

What this means is that specific data will be preserved only for a limited time period for the purpose of an investigation. Data that would not otherwise be kept by the businesses would be destroyed as soon as it is no longer needed for an investigation. This safeguard is an example of our efforts to respect the privacy of rights throughout the bill and is consistent with Canadian privacy law.

We have also updated the production order regime to tailor it to the needs of modern investigations. A production order is a judicial order that requires third parties to provide police with documents containing certain data in connection with an investigation we currently have to production orders in the Criminal Code.

There is production--

Suspension of Sitting

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Barry Devolin]

Order, please. The technical problems continue with the translation so we will need to suspend again. If the system is fixed in the next few moments, we will continue. If we are unable to repair the system, we will suspend until 6:30, at which time the votes will be taken and we will do that in both languages manually here on the floor.

We will suspend again, resuming once the problem is fixed or resuming at 6:30 for the vote.

(The sitting of the House was suspended at 5:45 p.m.)

(The House resumed at 5:59 p.m.)

Sitting resumed

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Barry Devolin]

Order, please. Colleagues, it is my understanding that the sound system is functional now. It is my understanding that the translation is working from English to French. Is the translation coming through in French?

Is there an English translation when I speak French? Very good.

Colleagues, it is my understanding that half of the microphones are now working, every other microphone. It is my understanding that this will be sufficient for us to proceed and it is also my understanding that the translation is working in both English and French. We will give this one more try. If it works, then we will proceed until 6:30, when the vote will be taken as scheduled. This is the last try. If this does not work, we will suspend and we will then wait until 6:30, when we will still proceed with the vote, doing the translation manually.

With that, I give the floor to the hon. member for Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River.

[Rob Clarke, Conservative, Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River, SK]

Mr. Speaker, I hope that I have not set the record for the longest 20 minute speech in parliamentary history. I will keep on going.

We currently have two production orders in the Criminal Code. There is a production order for financial information as well as a general production order for any other types of data that might be needed in furtherance of an investigation. In this bill, we have created more specific production orders for more specific types of data. This will allow police officers to target exactly what they are looking for in an investigation with tools designed to reflect the expectation of privacy associated with the data being sought.

We like to call this kind of tailoring privacy with precision. Instead of using one big hammer to hit every size of nail, we are providing several hammers that are precisely suited for specific types of nails. In addition to the two production orders that we currently have, we are proposing to create production orders for the transmission of data and tracking of data. We will address these concepts in more depth in just a few moments.

We have included a production order to trace specified communications, which is a really interesting tool because it allows police to trace the origin of a communication that may have gone through several different service providers. It is a very current tool that addresses the complexity of modern communications.

We have made some changes to the powers of the Criminal Code that will make investigations more effective while taking into account people's rights to privacy. One of these changes has to do with tracking warrants. Police have been able to get tracking warrants for over 15 years now. As one can imagine, technology has changed a lot in that time.

Where we were once able to track people with only a moderate amount of accuracy, there are now technologies that exist that can track objects or people much more closely. We are proposing to increase the threshold necessary to get a tracking warrant in situations where one is going to be able to track people more closely. This means that now, when police officers apply to the judge or justice for a warrant to do this more continuous and accurate type of tracking, they will have to meet a stronger test to convince the judge that the tracking warrant is needed.

However, the existing lower threshold warrant will also be retained to allow police to obtain less privacy-invasive tracking information. Specifically, police will continue to be able to obtain information related to the tracking of objects, vehicles and transactions at the current lower level. This dual approach will allow police to retain the efficiency of the lower threshold warrant while increasing the privacy protections in situations where there are greater privacy interests at play.

We have also updated what is currently called the dial number recorder warrant. The name in itself should explain why this tool needs to be updated. When we think of dialing, we think of old analog-type telephones, but people do not communicate with these types of telephones anymore. We communicate with cellphones, text messaging, email and numerous other methods that are emerging faster than I can keep track.

We need to be able to capture the routing information that these new technologies produce. The transmission data recorder warrant would allow us to do just that. Where we could previously get the phone number that someone was dialing, we would now be able to get parallel updated forms of communication and destination information like email addresses as well. The warrant would provide for a much needed update with respect to new technology, since technology has moved well beyond simple telephone dialing.

I want to emphasize that we would not be getting the content of people's emails, text messages or phone calls under this warrant. We would not even be able to get the subject line of the email. We have other provisions in the Criminal Code to deal with access to the content of private communications and this bill does not affect those processes.

This bill allows police officers to get information about where a communication is coming from or where it is going, but that is the only information they are getting with this warrant. We have taken privacy very seriously in creating this legislation. There is nothing in this bill that would allow police to obtain information without a current court order or authorization. There are important privacy safeguards built into the preservation demand and the preservation order. Each investigative power has been carefully tailored to reflect the expectation of privacy associated with it.

Before I conclude, I would like to take a minute to discuss the global nature of many of these issues and the importance of ratifying the Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime and its additional protocol on xenophobia and racism.

As I mentioned before, it is clear that technologies like cellphones and the Internet have had a huge effect on our lives. We also know that these technologies have, in a sense, made the world a much smaller place. Thanks to the Internet, it has become possible to commit a crime in Japan while sitting comfortably in an armchair in Sarnia.

The international community started thinking about these issues relating to computer crime back in the mid-1980s when personal computers started appearing in people's homes. Since then, the use of the Internet has become widespread, once again changing the rules of the game. The international community has been studying the challenges posed by these developments and working on solutions.

I am pleased to say that this bill would allow us to ratify the Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime and its additional protocol on xenophobia and racism, which are the only existing instruments at the international level to combat computer-related crime. Ratification of this convention would allow us to co-operate with other signatory countries in the investigation of cybercrimes when, for instance, a Canadian falls victim to a crime committed in France. The convention would also help us access evidence that, due to the nature of Internet technology, can actually be found on a different continent.

Again, one of my hon. colleagues will tell the House a little more about the convention in a few minutes, but for now I would like to leave everyone with a few thoughts.

We have created an effective and efficient set of tools, which will allow police to conduct complex investigations in a modern world. As we know, this government is committed to combating crime in all its forms. We have also been particularly active in the fight against organized crime and the sexual exploitation of children. Bill C-46 is an important contribution to all of these battles.

We conducted extensive consultations when creating these amendments with all kinds of people and organizations. We heard from privacy advocates, police, industry, and regular folks who really care about the safety of their communities, as well as the protection of their rights. With their input, we have created legislation that achieves the right balance between promoting Canada's safety and security, and protecting the rights of Canadians.

[Scott Simms, Liberal, Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to begin my question with a little background by saying that I have always been inspired and very interested in speeches in the House where people draw upon their previous experience before arriving here. Many people bring compassion and some very reasoned arguments as a result of their previous experience.

I thought one of the interesting parts of the member's speech was about cyberbullying, which is close to my heart because in this century, certainly with the advent of technology and social networking on the Internet, that is a very pertinent issue.

I would like the hon. member to draw upon his previous experience as a front line officer, as he has in his speech, and perhaps provide the House with an example of why this bill is needed now.