Madam Speaker, it is an absolute honour to rise in this chamber to talk about a very serious matter: those who are and are not addressed in the bill before us, Bill C-8.
Let me hearken back to a previous parliament when I had my first opportunity to work with the splendid member for Parkland. We were both on the industry committee, and during our time on that committee, Ottawa had a tornado incident. This tornado scared a lot of people and caused a lot of damage to Ottawa. Many people were quite surprised that after about eight or so hours, they were not able to use their cellphones to get in touch with their loved ones. This surprised me, because most people assume that in an urban centre such as Ottawa, there is continuous service, even after a strenuous event such as a tornado. I can only imagine someone trying desperately to reach their family and loved ones or to connect with work to say why they could not be there. To not have the ability to do that caused a lot of consternation in the community.
The member for Parkland put forward a motion for us to study this further, and some of the things we found out in regard to it were not reassuring. For example, there is no regulation surrounding what telecommunications companies have to have as backup. Essentially, a telecommunications company, such as Rogers or Telus, often have backup generators, but there is no provision to say for how long. We saw a system strained by a tornado, and the damage and fear were compounded by the telecommunications companies not having sufficient gas in generator tanks for them to continue service after the tornado incident. This is a small example of the vulnerabilities that currently exist within our system that hopefully Bill C-8 will address.
There are two components to this particular legislation. One, as I was referencing, refers to the Telecommunications Act, and the other would create new provisions surrounding cybersecurity.
I think most Canadians understand the dependence we now have on our ability to communicate with one another and access information quickly. If the systems that we so heavily depend on in our modern life were to become compromised, the disturbance that could have is not just about the inconvenience of, for example, not being able to access Environment Canada's weather reports. There could be other issues when it comes to banking. One only has to think about the incident in Toronto when suddenly Rogers flickered and no one was able to access their accounts. In fact, business owners were not able to do Interac transactions, and of course, small and medium-sized businesses had no way to take payment, because many of us rely almost exclusively on credit and debit cards. When most people stop and think about how dependent they are on technology and how interdependent these systems are, they quickly come to the conclusion that there should be something there.
I believe, as every member in this place would probably believe, that the government has a responsibility to protect its own systems. That has been done over time. Has it been perfect? No. There have been privacy breaches and attacks by entities. The NSICOP reports talk about how we are frequently targeted by authoritarian regimes. For example, the Communist Chinese regime in Beijing is cited in the reports, as is Russia.
There are also non-state actors who will try to hack into our different systems, so it makes sense to people when we say that the government should protect our information, health records, tax records and any personal information we have. People understand that, and they want their government to be secure, particularly when we start talking about national defence or our different security and intelligence systems. However, people do not always assume that the same protections that government encourages and codifies in its own practices are being done in the private sector. Bill C-8 would create a set of provisions to do that.
Conservatives believe strongly in the need to protect our national security and to make sure these critical systems we depend on will function when Canadians need them the most, during times of emergency or if we are attacked by our adversaries abroad. I believe the government understands this issue and is trying to find the legislation necessary.
That is where I am going to stop saying what I agree with and point out a few things.
It seems the government has smartened up a bit and adopted certain amendments that were pushed by Conservatives at committee stage in the last Parliament. That is a good thing. A good idea should be seen as such, and it should not matter which side it comes from. That is a problem we have in this place. Too often it is on who proposes an idea that one decides the merit of it, and that is wrong. It should be on the merit of the idea for the betterment of Canadians.
What I will say is when a party, particularly the governing party, is given tremendous powers and uses that authority for its own purposes, that becomes a problem. I can already see some of my friends across the way starting to waver, wondering where I am going with this. When the Prime Minister dropped the writ and effectively launched an election this past spring, there were consequences. The fact that this bill did not make it through and become law is 100% on the Liberal government today.
I wanted to make sure I stated that for the record, because when a Prime Minister puts his own government's interest ahead of the public interest, it should be called out, and they should be held accountable. I think the Liberal Party needs to listen, in a minority government, to other viewpoints that say this should have happened and it should have passed. Maybe the Liberals could have waited a bit longer, but they did not. They decided to put their own electoral interests ahead of societal interests.
It is important to know that it rests with the government, but we are here now. We are offering similar critiques and are happy they were listened to, in part, in the last Parliament and have been incorporated into the bill, but there are still some oversights.
For example, with respect to privacy, in a previous Parliament when I was on the industry committee, Statistics Canada ordered Canada's banks to give it holus-bolus a large amount of information, everything from mortgages to debits. We called on the chief statistician to account for this new collection of a massive amount of information. By the way, to their credit, someone at the big banks leaked it to the media. That is the only way we would have known about it. We brought the chief statistician of the day forward, who assured the committee that Statistics Canada was going to, basically, anonymize all of the information. Within four questions, that argument crumbled.
It crumbled, and so did the collection exercise, because it became quite apparent that Statistics Canada had not informed the minister that it was doing this, something it is required to do under law. I was very lucky to have some privacy experts reach out to me and give me some direction about what to ask, and the chief statistician's whole argument crumbled. He basically said that even though Statistics Canada would anonymize the data, it was very simple to reassemble it, to realign it and have someone's complete information.
I can tell members that Canadians care very much about their privacy rights. In a world where we are more interconnected and utilize technology all the time, where our digital thumbprint, so to speak, is everywhere, people care about where that information goes. Under this regime, the government has given itself almost a complete pass when it comes to the management of the privacy of Canadians.
The government would essentially do the same thing Statistics Canada did, saying they could take the information, order the information and use it however they want without any oversight. That is wrong.
Conservatives at committee are going to be talking about privacy rights, even if the ministers and the members on that committee do not want to talk about this, because we are there to make sure—