Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier.
I rise today to speak in favour of the motion from the hon. member for Malpeque, and I thank him for giving members of Parliament the opportunity of raising in this House of Commons, once again, the important issue of public oversight of Canada's intelligence activities.
Over the past year, we in the opposition have repeatedly tried to bring the need for action on this issue to the attention of the Conservatives, and each time we have been rebuffed. A number of very specific incidents over the past year have pointed to the need for Parliament to act to protect the privacy rights of all Canadians and to ensure that our national security agencies are acting within the law.
The fact that concerns have been revealed in a variety of ways, for me, only strengthens the arguments for action by parliamentarians as a necessary part of our role as elected representatives in a democratic system. It matters little whether the information has been revealed as part of access to information requests in Canada, through the revelations of the U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden, or through information revealed as part of court cases. What is important is the consistency of the problems identified.
We live in an increasingly wired world where each day more and more of our personal communication and personal business takes place through electronic means. It is a world where governments have acquired the ability to conduct surveillance on their citizens not even imaginable in the past.
Even if we narrow our concern to those agencies that deal strictly with public safety and national security, a central work that no one would argue should be neglected, Canada has grown a large number of arms to deal with this task: from the RCMP, CBSA, and CSIS, to an agency now within the Department of Foreign Affairs, to the Communications Security Establishment Canada or CSEC. We have an increasing number of Canadians employed in these national security functions, and they have increasingly sophisticated technology at their disposal. Yet, our legislation and oversight mechanisms have not kept up with these rapid changes so that we can be assured that protecting national security does not unnecessarily trample on our basic freedoms, including the right to privacy.
This is why last October the official opposition defence critic, the member for St. John's East, introduced a motion calling for the creation of an all-party parliamentary committee to determine the appropriate oversight for Canada's national security and intelligence community. New Democrats have been raising this issue in letters to ministers and in questions in the House since the previous June, without receiving any substantive response from the government.
Unfortunately, the Conservatives rejected the idea of an all-party parliamentary committee, like the one we are considering today, and they have continued to engage in pretzel-like logic to explain away the obvious concerns about the protection of privacy and whether intelligence agencies are in fact operating within the law.
I am happy that the member for Malpeque has resurrected an old Liberal motion dealing with the same issue, because it gives us a chance to ask the government to focus on solutions to this complex problem rather than on elaborate evasions. While I might differ on some of the details of this Liberal motion, I can support it as it would allow us to tackle the problem directly.
Now, of course, I do not expect the Conservatives to have a change of heart and suddenly reverse position and support this motion. The very fact that it is an opposition motion mitigates against that, as the government is not in the habit of adopting ideas from this side of the House no matter how practical and sound they might be. However, if the government will not listen to the opposition on this, it might listen to some others with expertise in the areas of national security and privacy, who are calling for the very same thing: improved parliamentary oversight of intelligence activities to ensure protection of basic rights and especially the right of privacy.
One person who many might be surprised to know agrees with the position of this motion is John Adams, the former chief of CSEC. He said in a rare interview last October that the secretive agency he headed for more than seven years needs more parliamentary oversight. He said in the interview that CSEC had deliberately kept Canadians in the dark about its operations and that the government needs to do more “...to make Canadians more knowledgeable about what the intelligence agencies are trying to do on their behalf”.
Ontario's Privacy Commissioner, Ann Cavoukian, said in two different interviews this month that action by Parliament is needed. She said:
It is really unbelievable that CSEC would engage in that kind of surveillance of Canadians. Of us. I mean that could have been me at the airport walking around.... This resembles the activities of a totalitarian state, not a free and open society.
In another interview, Cavoukian also said:
Our silence on this is unacceptable as we are now vulnerable to both indiscriminate data collection and warrantless surveillance. The federal government needs to respond by ensuring that CSEC's surveillance powers are transparent and accountable so that our right to privacy remains protected. We can, and indeed, must have both privacy and security.
These are serious and stern warnings that ought to convince the Conservatives to take this issue seriously. I want to spend the remaining time I have left focusing on CSIS rather than CSEC, which has taken up most of the debate here today. I want to do that because of two very serious things that have happened with regard to CSIS, which are directly relevant to this debate about civilian oversight of intelligence activities. One of those is the weakening of accountability in CSIS resulting from the elimination of the inspector general of CSIS.
For a savings of just around $1 million, in 2012, the minister of public safety eliminated the independent officer within CSIS who was responsible for making sure CSIS operates within the law. The very person who reported to the minister on the activities that would guarantee to Canadians that our intelligence agencies are not breaking the law was eliminated by the Conservatives. Instead the Conservatives passed this responsibility on to the Security Intelligence Review Committee, a part-time body of ex-politicians whose last two chairs were forced to resign, one for conflict of interest and the other for fraud.
The second concern related to accountability and CSIS is very serious indeed. Last November in a written decision, Federal Court Justice Richard Mosley concluded that CSIS had withheld key information from the court when requesting surveillance warrants. The information withheld included the fact that CSIS was asking for assistance from foreign intelligence agencies to carry out surveillance that is clearly illegal under Canadian law if performed by CSIS.
This is the Federal Court of Canada saying that CSIS violated the law, and this incident raises the important question of what happens when a federal court concludes that CSIS was not operating within the law. What are the consequences? To this point, there are apparently none, but it also raises the murky question of the legalities of Canadian intelligence agencies co-operating with foreign intelligence agencies.
In its annual report last year, SIRC concluded that it had no power to look into those co-operating activities. It had no ability to examine whether co-operation with foreign intelligence agencies resulted in violations of Canadian law.
Of course, concerns about this trend toward a surveillance state are not just limited to the collection of information, but they also apply to its use. Therefore, not only do we need civilian oversight to ensure privacy rights are respected and that intelligence agencies operate within the law; but we also need to protect citizens against the misuse of information or damages resulting from false information.
Not only do some of our agencies lack basic oversight mechanisms, as is the case with both CSEC and CBSA, but they also lack any complaint or dispute resolution process. The no-fly list is a good example of a security measure based on intelligence collection activities that was clearly not envisioned by existing legislation or our institutional structures.
Some individuals clearly belong on such a list. I would never dispute that, but when individuals end up on the no-fly list incorrectly, they suffer a large penalty with no recourse. An all-party committee has suggested that this motion could play a useful role in finding fair solutions for those who wrongly end up on no-fly lists, while still protecting an essential tool for protecting the travelling public.
Seeing my time is drawing to a close, let me conclude by urging all members in the House to support actions like that proposed in the motion before us today. It is time for us to make sure that democracy catches up with technological and organizational change and, in doing so, to make sure that basic rights of Canadians are fully protected, both the right to security and the right to privacy. That is the challenge that we as parliamentarians are called upon to meet.
New Democrats are up to that challenge and if the Conservatives are not, as it appears from this debate today, then on this issue they will surely be called upon to explain themselves to their constituents in the coming election.