Mr. Speaker, it is always a pleasure to rise on behalf of the people of Kamloops—Thompson—Nicola.
We are only about an hour and a half into today, and this is my third time rising. What an honour it is to speak in the House of Commons, not only so frequently but also on matters of such import. We are dealing with really important issues today. Sometimes we deal with things that are quite performative in the House, but I can candidly say that, today, this is an issue of fairly significant importance.
Before I start, I want to recognize one of my very good friends, who is celebrating a birthday. Philip Lee is 48 years old. He is somebody I went to high school with and have known for the past 36 years now. We have had the opportunity to travel together, and he has been a wonderful friend. I would like to wish Phil all the best in the upcoming year.
I also want to recognize two people from Kamloops who accomplished something really significant. Johnny Hicks and Brady Milburn are part of the Denver Pioneers hockey club. That club is part of the NCAA. This weekend, the team was crowned the men's NCAA champion. I congratulate Johnny and Brady, who are both Kamloops products, and the whole Denver Pioneers team. Winning the NCAA championship is a tremendous accomplishment.
What brings us here today is Bill C-22, but we have to look at the past to inform how we got here. Bill C-2 was heralded as a cure-all, a panacea, if we will, to all the things that ailed the justice system. If only we could pass Bill C-2, everything would be fine.
Unfortunately, we have heard that before in the House. For years, we were told there were no issues with bail and sentencing, yet here we are now with a so-called new government, with many of the same cabinet ministers as the old government, and we are still dealing with the same issues.
I believe the minister referenced Commissioner Carrique talking about this type of legislation going way back to 1997. In fact, Conservatives put forward legislation on lawful access and were roundly mocked by Liberals. There is a famous quote, which I will not repeat here today, that stemmed from that very debate, and now we hear there is a rush to pass this legislation. I understand why lawful access is so important, but if there was a rush, then why were the Liberals opposed to it in the last decade? If there was a rush, then why has it taken the Liberal government 11 years to bring this bill forward? If there was a rush, then why was Bill C-2 so clumsily drafted?
We are here because of Bill C-2. In fact, if we look at portions of Bill C-2, we can see that we now have two bills that stem from it: Bill C-12 and Bill C-22. Both of those bills have dramatically remodelled what was contained in Bill C-2. In fact, Bill C-12 renovated so much of the text of Bill C-2 that it underwent further amendments at committee. I believe that my colleague, the shadow minister for immigration, the member for Calgary Nose Hill, did a great deal of work and produced a number of amendments at committee that were supported by the government or the Bloc and ultimately made it into the bill. That bill was a substantially better version of portions of Bill C-2. What do we have in Bill C-22? We have parts 14 and 15 of Bill C-2.
One of the things that always strikes me is how, in the past, Conservatives heard criticisms of omnibus bills. Bill C-2 is about as omnibus as it gets. I think it would have impacted something like 11 pieces of legislation. I do not want to be quoted on that because I cannot remember, but it would have impacted so many pieces of legislation and created pieces of legislation. It is well over 100 pages. It is an omnibus bill to the point where we now have two bills that have stemmed from it, and I think we probably have three or four distinct subject matters that are contained within Bill C-2 that still have not been addressed. The part of Bill C-2 we have before us now is the notion of lawful access.
I am going to focus on what is in Bill C-2, but I will also focus on some of the concerns I have. My hope is that the government will take these concerns legitimately and that we can proceed in the spirit of open and constructive dialogue.
My colleague for Bruce—Grey—Owen Sound asked a question. He sits on the national security committee, commonly known as NSICOP, which provides secret and confidential advice to the Prime Minister. Those who are on the committee are not permitted to speak about anything that is discussed in committee, and would be subject to very significant penalties under criminal law if they did, but one thing my colleague and friend for Bruce—Grey—Owen Sound spoke about was not only the necessity, from NSICOP's point of view, of lawful access, but also what should be in that legislation.
As Conservatives, we will always take the position that initiatives to help law enforcement, initiatives that allow those in law enforcement to do their jobs more easily, is something we will always be open to, but we have to make sure that those revisions to the law are both charter-compliant and consistent with the rights of privacy that we believe all Canadians should enjoy.
In my view, the government has, in the past, tried to overstep its boundaries at times. Bill C-2, in parts 14 and 15, is an example, as it goes so far as to use language like any threat or “any action”. We saw that in Bill C-8 as well. Bill C-2 essentially wants the government to have access to “any information”. Well, that goes quite too far. I was happy to see that the government, at the very least, went back to the drawing board.
Previously, a question from the government was about how the Conservatives could have just passed this in Bill C-2. Well, no, Conservatives would not have passed this in Bill C-2 because Bill C-2 is a poorly written piece of legislation. If Conservatives should have passed it in Bill C-2, then the government should have put forward a better piece of legislation, and I would go so far as to say that the government is admitting such because it has put forward Bill C-22. If Bill C-2 had no issues, if it did not, in the eyes of experts throughout the country, take significant liberties with privacy rights and things like that, then we would not be here today. The fact that the government has put forward Bill C-22 is itself an admission that Bill C-2, in its omnibus form, is, unfortunately, poorly drafted. That is what brings us here today.
What are some of the things in Bill C-2? There are three parts. The first part we are looking at is on tools for law enforcement to access digital information. I do not believe this is going to be a controversial part of the bill. Right now, based on decisions from the Supreme Court of Canada over roughly the last 12 years, law enforcement has to write a great number of court orders, which is how I would put it. Another way to put it is “judicial authorizations”, and some people call them “warrants”. They often take the form of a warrant or a production order, such as an order to a business saying, “Is Frank Caputo your subscriber, yes or no?” Then it would say, “Please produce all the Frank Caputo subscriber information.” Those might be two distinct questions. The problem is that this takes time.
Every time somebody has to go and get a court order, somebody has to write up that court order. They have to swear an affidavit in support of that court order. That takes time. As Conservatives, we recognize that when there are inefficiencies in the law, we need to address them. That is something that I do not think people take a great deal of issue with, but sometimes the devil is in the details and we need to ask further questions about those things.
The current process in regard to subscriber information is informed by the decision of Regina v. Spencer. Now, that decision came out in 2014. Spencer impacted the obtaining of production orders, just to put it colloquially. I am sure somebody is going to be looking at the headnote of Spencer and will compare my words. I am just talking generally here, not with the legal precision that I would in court. We are looking at getting production orders for just about everything for which a subscriber may have an expectation of privacy. That would change with Bill C-22.
Bykovets was another really key decision of the court, 10 years after Spencer. I believe Bykovets was about the expectation of privacy in a person's IP address. This was significant because most people do not know their IP address. A lot of people do not even know that they have an IP address. If they do know they have an IP address, they might not even know how they get it. When Bykovets said there is an expectation of privacy in that, I believe some legal scholars said, “Okay, that's interesting.”
I am not here to take potshots at decisions. I am here to recognize what the issue is. Whenever there is an expectation of privacy, then we need a search that is authorized by law through a court order. That meant a court order was required to get an IP address, even though finding an IP address was essentially akin to finding a phone number in the phone book. That was the analogy, as I recall. Most of us in the House will remember phone books. The member for Kenora—Kiiwetinoong probably does not, but he is probably the only one. The rest of us remember what it was like to get phone books. Let us face it, phone books were everywhere. Anybody could find anything. Anybody, as I understand it, with some semblance of digital acumen would be able to get an IP address, but nonetheless, the courts said there is an expectation of privacy.
These are all issues we are dealing with right now, within the current framework, that part 1 would address. As well, let us not forget that these are often offences against children and terrorist offences. Those are the two offences that are probably of the most interest to the legislators in the House, as in how we address those things.
Let us get into part 2 a little bit. I have skipped over some of part 1 because I want to give part 2 what it requires in terms of debate. Part 2 talks about ministerial orders. I am mindful of the fact that the Intelligence Commissioner now has a role to play within these ministerial orders.
The thing that I think we need to look at or that I would want more information on, as I craft my position and Conservatives craft our position on this, is that when there is a ministerial order that is secret, the government should be prepared to substantiate why it is secret and if it should be secret in every single instance. For instance, we spoke about NSICOP recently and how everything that is about national security will be top secret. There may be a place to say yes, if it is going to impact national security, but does that mean that every single ministerial order is going to be secret or should be secret?
Furthermore, when it comes to the Intelligence Commissioner, precisely what role would that person play, and how would their independent oversight impact a number of the concerns? One of the key areas that part 2 of Bill C-22 impacts is that it compels third parties to keep information. I want to be very clear here that the information, in my reading of the bill, would still require a warrant. I believe the way the minister explained it was that the information would be kept and then could be accessed. That is, the government does not simply receive the information, but it is present in order to be accessed.
It is my view that whenever the government tells anybody, including electronic service providers, that they must keep something, including metadata, it is something we need to ask questions about. This is probably one of the biggest issues. As I understand it, the bill's intent is to require that metadata be kept. That can include location services, but it is not meant to include the content. That is my reading of the bill. I think this needs to be closely scrutinized, and I look forward to asking more questions in the next two days of debate here on that very issue.
First, I would love to hear about the constitutionality of the requirement to have a third party keep something so the government can access it. I am not going to stand here and say whether that is or is not constitutional as it is not something I have studied thus far, but I think it is a question Canadians may have.
Second, on the idea of the requirement that a person's location be kept, who is going to keep that? Where is the data going to be stored? In my riding, we have a huge data storage facility. Are there going to be requirements as to how and where that data is stored and things like that?
This is a very complicated piece of legislation. I think somebody could read Bill C-22 three times and think they are starting to get a sense of what it actually says. When we deal with pieces of legislation that are quite intricate, obviously we need to develop our positions not only in a careful way but in a way that is sound. That is what I hope to do and what we as Conservatives hope to do.
Is there a mechanism by which web browsing history can be captured under Bill C-22? I think a lot of people would be alarmed if that were the case, from a privacy point of view. The issue of data retention is not a new one. One of the principal issues that I went up against, as somebody who prosecuted Internet offences against kids, was data retention. I was speaking with police officers today, and ISP addresses, in some cases, can actually disappear within as little as 30 days. I am not saying we should not be looking at that. We should absolutely be looking at that, but perhaps there should be limits.
If we are going to impact privacy rights, maybe that should be based on the offence. If we are looking at a sexual offence, perhaps the terminology we could look at is “an offence against the person”. All sexual offences are, by their very nature, violent, and I do not mean to dichotomize there. However, with respect to sexual offences, sexual offences against children or investigations into violence against the person, if there are concerns, perhaps there could be a narrowing so there would not be simply a fishing expedition to try to find an offence. Rather, we would be looking at all offences.
I see my time is coming to a close. Before I end, I want to acknowledge three people: Kelly Hunter, a baseball and softball umpire who was inducted into the Kamloops Sports Hall of Fame this weekend; Jessica Hewitt, a speed skater who was inducted into the Kamloops Sports Hall of Fame this weekend; and Glenn Armstrong, a football coach who was also inducted into the Kamloops Sports Hall of Fame. These three individuals have made dynamic contributions to the Kamloops area in sport, and I congratulate them.
With that, I will enjoy any questions.
