Madam Speaker, thank you for giving me the opportunity to rise here today to support Bill C-46. This bill proposes amendments to the Criminal Code, the Competition Act and the Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Act. These amendments would serve to update offences and investigative powers, to ensure they are in line with modern technologies.
The Minister of Justice has already briefly outlined Bill C-46, but I thought I would take this opportunity to expand on a few particularly important and innovative aspects of these Criminal Code amendments.
As we have shown on many occasions, the safety of our communities, our families, and particularly our children is something that this government takes very seriously. As part of a responsible government, a member of Parliament and a citizen, I am concerned about the safety of our communities.
Before I continue, I would like to briefly explain what the lawful access initiative is all about. Lawful access has nothing to do with listening to private conversations or monitoring the Internet browsing or emailing habits of Canadians. This initiative aims to ensure that law enforcement and national security agencies have the technical and legal ability to keep up with changes in communications and computer technologies.
New technologies are powerful and useful tools. However, criminals and terrorists can use them to endanger public safety. Current technologies provide numerous benefits. We applaud innovation in computer science and technology. However, we recognize that modern technology can facilitate crime, such as the distribution of child pornography, and make police investigations very difficult and complex. This bill will help by providing law enforcement organizations with the tools they need to fight crime in today's environment. The bill updates various offences and creates new investigative powers.
Our justice agenda has recently been the target of criticism. We have chosen to take these actions because we believe that justice reform is necessary. Canada was one of the first countries to establish criminal provisions for computer crimes. However, no significant amendments have been made since 1990. As I said, technologies have evolved considerably since then, but Canadian laws have not kept pace with the changes.
These increasingly complex technologies are challenging traditional investigative methods, and criminals are taking advantage of the situation by using complex technology to carry out illegal activities and endanger our citizens. Fighting crime means overcoming major challenges. Modernizing legislative tools, such as the Criminal Code, is essential to enabling law enforcement organizations to investigate criminal activity effectively while protecting the privacy rights and civil liberties so important to Canadians.
Right now, law enforcement personnel can get a warrant to intercept communications on conventional phone lines. The legislative measures in this bill will bring the legislation up to date by including cell phones and other wireless technologies. These measures will require Internet service providers, ISPs, to have interception capability in place.
When law enforcement officials try to prevent a crime or conduct an investigation, ISPs do not give them all of the basic client information they need.
The measures in this bill allow them to obtain that information in order to protect children from online predators and to prevent other types of cybercrime. We believe that these measures are very important and necessary. We have to protect our children from these predators, especially as our children now surf the Internet at an increasingly younger age. These measures are very useful.
The proposed changes create a data preservation demand that requires an Internet service provider to protect and not delete information relating to a communication or a subscriber if the authorities and the police believe this information could help in their investigation.
Allow me to elaborate more specifically and in greater detail on preservation demands and orders, on modernizing the current provisions regarding warrants for tracking and on the new concept of “transmission data”. I think that each of these tools will have a truly positive influence on investigations in Canada.
Let us start with the new preservation demands and orders, which create new investigative powers for criminal offences under the Criminal Code and offences under the Competition Act. Their purpose is to ensure that volatile computer data is not deleted before the police have the chance to get a warrant or an order to collect the data for investigation purposes. The need for these types of tools is obvious in this day and age. Not only is computer data easily erased, but it can also be lost through negligence or simply through ordinary working procedures. A preservation demand or order will legally require a person to keep computer data that is essential to the investigation for enough time to allow the police to obtain the necessary warrants and orders to get the information. This tool will allow the police to begin the investigation without losing elements of the evidence when the loss can be prevented.
Some people might be concerned about the repercussions of these changes on the right to a reasonable expectation of privacy. They may have heard about the European data conservation systems and are worried that our legislation will import those systems to Canada. That is not what Bill C-46 is about in any way.
Data retention can make it possible to collect a large amount of data over a long period of time on all telephone and Internet subscribers, regardless of whether they are linked to the investigation. Bill C-46 does not provide for data retention. It provides for the preservation of data, which is completely different. This would allow for the preservation, for a limited period of time, of specific data related to a specific investigation and to specific individuals. It is important to note that the data will be handed over to the police only if a warrant or order has been issued. Furthermore, data that would not have been preserved as it is no longer useful to the investigation. That is quite a change.
This will ensure that the system put in place by this bill will not inadvertently lead to the type of retention that exists in European countries, as I have explained. So we can see that the preservation system we have created here is very limited and targeted. It was developed to be a temporary solution, so that the warrants and orders obtained by the police to gain access to information are not rendered useless because the data was erased in the time that it took the police to obtain the orders. That is what happened in the past.
Another important amendment proposed by Bill C-46 will update the current Criminal Code provision regarding the warrant for tracking. This warrant was created in 1990, over 19 years ago. The police were able to obtain and use the warrant to locate persons, vehicles or other objects. However, tracking techniques have changed dramatically. Their accuracy and persistence in locating objects has improved. This means that the current type of warrant is no longer suitable and may result in more serious breaches of privacy than before. Consequently, Bill C-46 proposes to increase the protection of personal information for the use of the most intrusive tracking techniques.
The bill establishes a double warrant system for this purpose. The police can obtain the first type of warrant in the usual manner: by proving to the judge that they have reasonable grounds to suspect that the warrant will assist in the investigation of an offence. They would use this warrant to locate objects, vehicles and transactions, as was done in the past.
When a more invasive technique for tracking individuals is required, police must obtain the second warrant, which provides greater protection of privacy than the first. Thus, there would be stricter requirements. According to Bill C-46, to obtain this warrant, the police will have to prove to the judge that they have reasonable grounds to believe—not to suspect, but to believe—that the warrant will assist in the investigation of the offence. Legally, this criterion is much more difficult to meet, and therefore it provides more protection of personal information than the warrant for tracking objects. This is an important legal distinction.
This approach to the tracking warrant provisions is very innovative because it provides stronger protection of personal information where it is really needed while retaining the current tool, which is effective for investigations where expectations with respect to the protection of privacy are not as high.
Lastly, I would like to talk about the new warrant for transmission data. For 15 years, police have been able to obtain a warrant under the Criminal Code for information such as the telephone numbers dialed to and from a suspect's telephone. That is what used to happen. Police could obtain such a warrant if they had reasonable grounds to suspect that the data could help them investigate a crime. Today, this type of data, which experts refer to as call identification data, include not only telephone numbers, but also technical data that all sorts of more sophisticated calling mechanisms can generate on a network.
The fact that the distinction between conventional telephones and the Internet is blurring also poses a problem for police in using the current warrant to obtain call identification data. For example, most cell phones can be used to access the Internet. And in a sense, the opposite is also true. Millions of subscribers use voice over IP to make calls on the Internet. The result is that technologies use IP—or Internet protocol—addresses in addition to telephone numbers; it is a sort of mixture. This has created a gap in what the current warrant can cover. The type of address data police need for their investigation can no longer be obtained using phone records or conventional equipment such as telephone number recorders.
And why should criminals be treated differently just because they use voice over IP to make calls instead of a conventional phone? That is an important question.
Clearly, we need a new legal concept that reflects 21st-century technology. Bill C-46 creates the concept of “transmission data”, which applies to Internet routing data as well as telephone numbers.
For the sake of clarity, I would add that this new concept applies exclusively to this type of data. “Transmission data” applies only to some parts of what is known as the “header”, which includes the email address and information about the email servers that transmitted the email.
This concept was carefully developed, specifically to exclude the contents of messages in order to minimize privacy infringements. This means that the police cannot use this power to read what people have typed in the “Subject” field. Moreover, the police will not be able to use this power to read what people have typed in the body of the email, which is very important.
Like the other amendments I just discussed, the power to intercept transmission data will provide the police with the investigative tools they need to fight crime in a world where techniques are constantly evolving. Like all of these tools, this power was specifically designed to fulfill this purpose with minimal infringement on privacy.
I repeat that our government wants to ensure that law enforcement officials have the tools they need to bring criminals to justice.
The proposed bill will ensure a fair balance between protecting public safety by giving police essential investigative powers and protecting the privacy and the rights and freedoms of Canadians.
I therefore urge all members to fully support Bill C-46, which will update our Criminal Code for the 21st century.
