Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague for his thoughtful comments and questions.
One of the confusing parts of the bill is that the government chose to introduce Bills C-46 and C-47 at the same time, and they interrelate.
It is quite complicated and difficult to untangle which particular clause deals with which particular bill.
One of my colleague's concerns was the ability of police to get subscriber information from telecom service providers without a warrant. With respect to my colleague, that provision is in Bill C-47, but he can be forgiven for being confused about that. We were all confused about that because of the way the government chose to combine these bills.
The bill before us, Bill C-46, does not, from our reading, contain any provision for police to get any information from anyone without a search warrant. That is Bill C-46.
However, with regard to Bill C-47, he is exactly right. New Democrats will be opposing Bill C-47 on that very basis. That bill allows police to get very personal information about people without a search warrant, and we will stand firm against that. However, this bill does not do that.
One thing the member is correct about though is that this bill does create the concept of a preservation order so that telecom service providers will have to, upon the request of police, preserve certain data. I believe the member is quite right to point out the serious privacy reservations we have with that. At committee I think we will be looking very carefully at that area.
I guess the difficulty is that with electronic crimes, evidence of which can be created and then erased, there has to be some mechanism, the argument goes, to preserve that data. Otherwise a crime can be committed and the data is gone.
Therefore we have to look for a way to see if we can balance that need with the need to protect Canadians' privacy rights. The member is quite right and I thank him for pointing out that very important balance that must be struck. We will work in committee to see if that balance can be achieved.
If it cannot be achieved, then we can always come back to the House at third reading and vote against the bill.