Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for Mount Royal.
Before I begin, I would like to comment on two phrases that have repeatedly emerged from the other side of the House. The first phrase is, “we are told”. The second phrase is, “we should trust”.
This is what the motion is all about. It is to turn “we are told” into “we are satisfied that we know” and “we should trust” into “we can trust because we have the oversight of a body made up of those for whom people in Canada voted and then sent to this House of Commons”.
There are two premises upon which I think we should be debating today.
The first is that Liberals have always been vigilant about the need to protect Canadians' security, and any assertion to the contrary would be, in my view, disingenuous. We are the ones who introduced anti-terrorism legislation after 9-11, and we supported recent amendments to this legislation. These were controversial, of course, but we believed that they were the right thing to do. We supported the amendments and believed that they achieved the appropriate delicate balance between constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties and the need to protect Canadians' physical security from the harm terrorists would cause us.
The second premise upon which we should be debating is that Liberals respect the judicial system. We do not introduce legislation that we know will be negated or nullified later on by the courts. It is not only a waste of time to approach the drafting of legislation in this way, with an eye to ideology rather than to established legal principles, it is counterproductive as well, often setting the putative objective even further back than when the particular legislation was passed.
As an aside, I would like to mention that the committee we are proposing is the committee that was proposed under the Martin government previously, but the legislation was not debated or adopted.
I would like to mention that this committee would also overlook the activities of CSIS and the RCMP. We are not just talking about CSEC. We have been talking a lot about CSEC today, because it has been in the news. However, there are other security establishments in Canada that require that we have some kind of oversight to ensure their accountability to democratic principles. Therefore, there would be not only a double benefit but a triple benefit from this committee.
We know that these agencies are not perfect. We know that people are not perfect. They can wilfully break the law, or if not technically break the law can violate the spirit of the law or even violate the letter and spirit of the law without necessarily knowing that it is what they are doing.
In the United States, for example, there have been many reported cases of private communications being unlawfully intercepted on very flimsy or totally unwarranted grounds, despite safeguards that have been built into the system. The BC Civil Liberties Association and others have provided many examples of these breaches.
We are talking basically about technology. The thing about technology is that it begs to be used. It was created to be used, and it is very seductive in this way. We have to create safeguards to ensure that it is used appropriately and lawfully. However, creating and enforcing safeguards is an ongoing challenge that constantly requires new defences and new legal and institutional tools, like this committee we are proposing.
I would like to look at the incident that took place earlier but that was reported by CBC last weekend. CBC reported that communications were being tracked at Canadian airports by CSEC. I would like to look at this from the point of view of citizens like me who are not part of the organization and who are not in the ministry that is managing this organization. I would like to look at it from that point of view and try to understand what it all means and what is going on in this complex, mysterious, and murky new cyber-reality.
We are told time and time again that CSEC is not allowed to spy on Canadians, so we ask ourselves, what was it doing tracking Canadians in their airports? The response seems to be that CSEC can track Canadians if it is tracking foreigners who happen to be engaged in communications with Canadians.
However, how does CSEC know who is Canadian and who is not at a Canadian airport? Can we not assume that most are Canadians travelling to points within Canada? To that, CSEC might say that it was doing nothing more than conducting a digital traffic survey for model building purposes, just like looking at cars passing through an intersection and observing licence plates without knowing who the cars belong to.
To that we might ask, why are they following those cars for two days after they leave the intersection? CSEC might say there is no law against that, but do we want to live in a society that follows its citizens around, whether on the ground or in cyberspace? This is not the former Soviet Union; this is Canada.
Another question is, why was CSEC doing this on Canadian soil when its mandate does not allow it to operate in Canada and to track Canadians directly? Yesterday the answer that seemed to be offered at the Senate committee was that this was not done on Canadian soil, but by monitoring traffic on servers located outside of Canada. In other words, this traffic, which includes traffic at Canadian airports, is on the open seas, as it were. These are technicalities and loopholes that fuel Canadians' growing distrust. We are in essence being told, sorry we should have read the fine print. That, as in other areas, fuels resentment, bitterness, and distrust.
There is a question that I would like to ask the government. Why is it so opposed to this rather simple proposal? Other countries have mechanisms for oversight of security agencies that are made up of elected representatives. General principles of democratic accountability maintain that no one can act without the authority of the people or some kind of democratic licence being granted by the people, which they will grant in exchange for accountability that prevents abuse and allows them to judge if they wish to withdraw that licence later on.
There is virtually no cost to creating a national security committee of parliamentarians. First of all, it would not meet every week. Second, it would likely not travel. I doubt that it would do site visits in this cyberworld that we are concerned about. A Library of Parliament clerk and researchers could be seconded from other committees, say the Public Safety committee or the National Defence committee. Existing MP staffers would provide support to individual committee members. Members also would be bound by some measure of confidentiality, such that the government would not need to worry about being criticized or embarrassed in question period on any given day.
In other words, what is the downside for the government in creating such a committee, other than having to agree with what was originally a Liberal proposal under the Martin government? If the other side wants to be non-partisan, why not simply agree to an idea that came from a previous government just because it is a good idea? Is the government that prideful and that insecure and defensive that it feels it would be compromising itself, its cherished brand that it supports through taxpayer advertising, by doing what is right in respect of fundamental democratic principles?
Our security depends not only on the abilities and competencies of our national security authorities, but on the co-operation and backing of the Canadian population. We are told this constantly by CSIS and others, that they need the co-operation of the people of Canada. However, how are they going to maintain that co-operation if they cannot win people's trust?