Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to stand today to address Bill C-55, An Act to amend the Criminal Code. I want to talk a bit about the specifics of the bill and the NDP's thoughts on this bill and then move to what is the bigger question, which is the balance between protecting the privacy of citizens and collecting the information we need to make proper policy decisions. Again, I will go through the specifics and then move to the bigger question. Although New Democrats support this bill in general and think it should go to committee for more scrutiny, the government has perhaps an unbalanced or inconsistent approach to these issues that is worth discussing.
Bill C-55 concerns safeguards in relation to authorization to intercept private communications without prior judicial authorization, basically wiretapping, or the state intercepting private communications. This bill requires the federal government and provincial Attorneys General to report interceptions of private communications, requires that the person who had his or her private communications intercepted be notified and narrows the class of people who can make such interceptions. They seem to be reasonable measures that would all be considered by any other country or government around the world that has to undertake these kinds of measures.
These measures seem reasonable to New Democrats, and we will be supporting this bill at least at second reading. We will see what kinds of shenanigans the committee members get up to, but we will make sure the committee has enough time to go through them.
I will be splitting my time with the member for Pierrefonds—Dollard.
Wiretapping is really what this bill is all about. Though we are calling it intercepted communications, we are really talking about wiretapping. Wiretapping has quite a long and sometimes dark history in Canada, and its proper use deserves our full and careful attention. In fact, the creation of our current Canadian Security Intelligence Service, CSIS, has its origins in this whole issue. As agents of the state, police and RCMP, in this case, illegally collected information on citizens during the 1970s. There was such an outcry, mainly from Quebec, that a number of task forces looked into it. They said the RCMP had too much centralized power, so we needed a separate security service, and that is why CSIS was established.
The problem in this case was that the RCMP overstepped its bounds and collected hundreds of hours of illegal wiretaps from Quebec citizens. Some were worthy, but others were to collect information about people at the whim of state agents, in this case the police. Records also show that this practice had been going on for quite some time, as well as outside the boundaries of Quebec. After quite an uproar across the country, CSIS was created. We have been wrestling with these issues and will always wrestle with where the boundaries lie between privacy and collecting necessary information. We need to take care that these past injustices, the misuse and maladministration of justice, do not happen again and that wiretapping only be used in legitimate circumstances and that the practice be as transparent as possible.
Returning to the text of Bill C-55, let me be clear that this bill is simply an updated version of previous Conservative-initiated wiretapping laws that the Supreme Court deemed unconstitutional. This is not a new initiative and, in fact, we are just cleaning up a bit of a mess. Due to this mess, the courts have established new parameters for the protection of privacy, and we need to ensure that this legislation meets these new requirements. We need to make sure the committee gets this right and that it is given ample time to ensure it gets it right this time.
New Democrats want to make sure the committee gets the time, especially when the government is crafting the post-committee version of this bill, because the Conservative record shows that Conservatives are prone to make mistakes in this area.
I want to talk about the whole idea of balancing the need to collect information from citizens to make policy, whether it is security, economic assessments or policy decisions in other areas, and the citizen's need for privacy and the right to protect private communications.
The government really needs to make sure it gets the balance right. We saw before that Bill C-30 was judged too intrusive. It went too far in terms of prying into the private lives of citizens. However, I want to talk about the other side, too, where the Conservatives have erred in terms of perhaps not being clear on what information is important to collect or what they are willing to do in terms of making proper policy decisions.
There are certain members of the Conservative Party, the libertarian wing, such as the member for Nepean—Carleton, who would say that the state has no business, at all, in the lives of citizens. We know that, in its pure form, cannot be true; otherwise that would be anarchy.
What we need to do is make sure we strike the right balance. I am afraid the Conservatives have got it wrong on a number of occasions. For example, the Conservatives have used the excuse of privacy to abolish the long form census. The effects of this action will be felt throughout Canada for years to come. Using the kind of smokescreen of protecting citizens' privacy, we have abolished a tool that has been in use not just in Canada but in almost all countries around the world to inform policy decisions.
Without the long form census, we still have the short form census, which is still mandatory; however it contains very little information. The long form census, which goes to a smaller proportion of the population, collects very valuable information. For example, being somebody who used to work in city planning, I know that cities need these things to plan properly: where to put a new school or what languages should be highlighted in that school. That information comes from the long form census.
Businesses looking to target a particular neighbourhood, wondering if the business will do well there or not, will not be able to target markets with any accuracy without this information. Without the long form census, policy makers will have to fly blind in many areas without these valuable statistics.
We are going to be feeling the ripple effects of not having the long form census for many years to come. Many community members felt very strongly about this, and in fact the head of Statistics Canada felt so strongly that he resigned when the long form census was abolished.
This is what I mean by balance. The Conservatives are keen to wiretap people and to really open that up and not have it be transparent. However, on the other side, Conservatives are not willing to allow the state to collect the information it needs to make proper planning decisions.
Some of my colleagues in this House have raised the spectre of the Conservatives abolishing other surveys with mandatory requirements. We have had the long form census abolished, and the reason given on the other side was that it had a mandatory reporting requirement.
For example, we have the labour force survey, which is mandatory. We have business surveys and agricultural surveys, which are also mandatory. My question for the Conservatives would be where they fall on these issues. Will the government use the name of privacy in vain in order to abolish these critical surveys, or will it cave in to its radical libertarian wing?
It is not just an imbalance between protecting privacy and the state gaining information it needs to make policy; it is also that it is a very inconsistent application. There is no single rule that the government is using in terms of making its policy decisions.
If we abolished the labour force survey, we would probably be kicked out of the OECD. This would not allow us to calculate our unemployment rate, and we would not be able to accurately report to international organizations with any accuracy.
Maybe when the Conservatives are asking questions when I finish my speech, we could have a bit of a debate about where they see the balance between protecting privacy and collecting proper information.