Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague for his work on this very important file. I was pleased to take over for him. I have a lot of ground to cover, considering all the work he did.
To answer his question, indeed, it is quite contradictory for the government to claim to be introducing a wonderful bill that does everything to protect Canadians' privacy, when in fact, there is another bill that supposedly deals with cyberbullying and contains 60 or so pages on lawful access alone. The government is in the process of broadening the circumstances under which personal information can be obtained without a warrant and increasing the number of people who can access that information.
We know that the government alone has already made 1.2 million requests for information. I ask Canadians to imagine the impact that the change in definition will have on the number of requests for access to personal information made to telecommunications companies without transparency and without the need for a warrant.
This is a serious problem and I sincerely hope that the Conservatives and Liberals will take the first step in protecting Canadians' privacy today by supporting our motion to correct the flaws in the bill.