Mr. Speaker, it is a great honour, as always, to rise on behalf of the people of Elgin—St. Thomas—London South.
This is an incredibly important issue, and it is one that, as lawmakers, we cannot afford to get wrong. On one hand, we are talking about ensuring that the people enforcing the laws that we set out in this place have the tools, resources and laws in place to do their jobs. On the other hand, it is about being a guardian of the most fundamental rights and freedoms Canadians have: the right to due process, the right to privacy and the right to freedom from search and seizure. I am someone who understands and greatly values both of these things.
I have the great privilege of sitting on the justice committee, where Conservative colleagues and I worked vigorously to ensure that real, tangible reforms to the bail system were put forward in the government's bail bill, Bill C-14, not so long ago. The bill was inadequate, but it did something. In fact, law enforcement officials had been telling us that they wanted more. They had been telling us that the Liberal government had actually caused the bail problems in this country and that they wanted more to fix them. We were happy to do that.
I have also been, as many people would know, very vocal, even before I was elected to the House, in calling out decisions and bills by the current government that would erode not only trust in institutions but also civil liberties of Canadians. I have seen this first-hand since I had the great privilege of being elected, just shy of one year ago.
The government's very first bill was presented to Canadians and to the House, Bill C-2, as a border security bill. Again, I have been among the people talking for years about how the government has allowed the borders of this country to become a joke. I welcomed the Liberals' recognizing that there was a problem, but when we looked into the bill, we saw that lawful access provisions had actually been snuck in.
We also saw that the bill, which, again, was presented to Canadians as being an answer to the border crisis, inexplicably had a proposed ban on transacting in cash above a certain amount. That is not something Canadians wanted and is actually something that Canadians rejected so vociferously that the Liberals, thankfully, decided to, among other things, pull it aside and not proceed with it.
Bill C-2 also would have given the ability to, without a warrant, inspect Canadians' letter mail. Even letters that Canadians send to us as members of Parliament and letters that someone might send to a loved one across the country would have been subject to warrantless scrutiny by Canada Post. Therefore, we had to look into the details of Bill C-2, and in doing so we found that it could not be supported.
Then there was Bill C-8, which, again, on the surface is something we want and welcome. It is legislation that would deal with very real threats to cybersecurity infrastructure that companies and countries face. This was something that, again, I thought we would be able to find common ground on across party lines, but the devil, as always, is in the details.
We looked at Bill C-8, and I thank my colleague from Kitchener South—Hespeler and my colleague from Kamloops—Thompson—Nicola for their work on this. We saw that the bill would actually give the Minister of Industry and cabinet members of the Liberal government incredible power to take people or companies off-line, with no oversight and no scrutiny.
I am so proud to be part of a team that understood that enforcing the law and protecting Canada from threats cannot and need not come at the expense of fundamental rights and freedoms and at the expense of civil liberties. Conservatives worked collaboratively with our colleagues in the Bloc, and we put forward amendments that would deal with these challenges.
However, now there is Bill C-22, a bill that repackages a lot of what was already in Bill C-2, a lot of what had already been rejected by Canadians, and it puts it forward for review. Fortunately, the Liberals have finally understood the essence of some of these challenges. I am very grateful that in part 1 of the bill, they have eliminated some of the most problematic components. I will give credit where it is due. Again, the Liberals should have been more keenly aware of these things from the get-go, but there have actually been significant improvements.
That being said, the lack of oversight on some parts of Bill C-2 very much warrants scrutiny here. Why I bring this up and why it is so important is that the reason there has been such push-back with respect to Bill C-22 so far, from civil liberties groups in particular, on the left and on the right, is that the Liberal government has squandered the trust that Canadians have and can have in government, specifically in the current government, due to the way that it has eroded civil liberties in the past.
Again, as I say this, I am reminded of the fact that a few weeks ago the Liberals filed an appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada on their Emergencies Act usage just over four years ago. That is relevant because what the Federal Court and Federal Court of Appeal found is that the government violated the charter rights of Canadians not only by unlawfully invoking the Emergencies Act but by using the fake emergency to justify freezing people's bank accounts.
Now, this was one of the reasons that our amendments in Bill C-8 included conscience and speech protections, because recent Liberal government history has revealed precisely why those protections are necessary, and why, when people come up with scenarios, we do not actually take the Liberals seriously when they try to dismiss those scenarios by saying that would never happen and it would never get there. We have seen them go there already. We have seen them go down roads that most people never would have thought possible, using plain language that we must take at its word and at face value.
The Liberal government has not been constrained by the charter, and it has not been constrained by norms. That is why Canadians from the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group to the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms have raised concerns about Bill C-22.
That being said, I do have to acknowledge the very real demands that law enforcement have made. I have taken on the responsibility, not just as a member of the justice committee but as the member of Parliament for Elgin—St. Thomas—London South, to talk to law enforcement and to speak to them exactly about the shortcomings they feel exist in the current system. Now, one thing I will point out is that they welcome having expanded powers and clear authority. They welcome a lot of what is in Bill C-22.
Last week I spoke to Chief Thai Truong of the London Police Service. It is a very large police service given London's size. I also spoke to Chief Marc Roskamp of the St. Thomas Police Service. I have spoken to other frontline officers and I am happy to continue doing this work because, unlike the Liberal government, this party has a history of listening to law enforcement when they say they do not want anything to do with the Liberal government's gun confiscation scheme, when they say they need real bail reform so they are not arresting the same people over and over again, and when they say there are tools and clarifications they need to do their jobs. We will continue to do that.
The men and women of law enforcement in my riding and across the country want to take bad guys off the streets. We, as a party, want to make sure they have the tools and resources to do that. It is not entirely accurate to say that Canada has no lawful access regime. Police have been able to access subscriber data, they have been able to access electronic materials and they have been able to get warrants to search people's computers, phones and accounts. The issue is the speed they need when dealing with it. We welcome anything that provides an opportunity, lawfully and with judicial oversight, to access the type of information at play here.
We cannot look at any of these things in isolation. We cannot look at simply being able to confirm subscriber data, perhaps for an offender or a suspected offender who is possessing, producing or disseminating child sexual exploitation and abuse material, and say that that will solve the overall problems.
We have to look at lawful access in the same vein as we look at other things in the criminal justice system that would interact with that suspected offender, such as the sentence they are going to get. This week the justice committee is reviewing Bill C-16. We are saying that the Liberal government is jeopardizing mandatory minimum sentences for people who peddle in child sexual exploitation and abuse material. We believe wholeheartedly that the government needs to have robust punishments to vigorously go after these heinous predators.
What the Liberal government has been doing, and not just on lawful access but on other justice bills that have come before them, is selectively deciding when they want to listen to law enforcement and when they do not, selectively deciding when they want to hide behind this stakeholder or that stakeholder and when they do not.
We are the lawmakers in this chamber. It is an honour I do not take lightly. We have to listen to all stakeholders and come to a reasoned constitutional position that balances the rights and needs of a free citizenry in this country with the practical expectations and needs of law enforcement to effectively discharge their duties. That is a balance that we need to get right, not only because it is simply our duty but also because the last thing we want to do is pass a law that we will have to somehow find a way to fix years later if a court finds it to be unconstitutional. This is the tricky thing we have to deal with here. We cannot pass law that will not withstand charter scrutiny.
Interestingly, with regard to Bill C-8, I mentioned the tremendous work of my colleagues on the public safety committee and other colleagues in caucus. Bill C-8 had been amended by Conservative efforts, with the support of the Bloc, to have judicial oversight for some decisions that the minister would make, and that was so important. In the end, it was unfortunate that this was ruled out of scope when it came back to the House because that would have been an incredibly important safeguard that would have told Canadians we are not giving unchecked power to cabinet ministers representing a government that, by the way, does not have a great track record on upholding civil liberties and that when cabinet ministers say to just trust them, we might as well play the laugh track from a 1990s sitcom because that is about as much as it is worth. We are always going to approach anything that looks like surveillance or a violation of privacy rights with a level of skepticism. When the Liberals bring forward bills that touch on these issues, they should not dismiss these very real and, I would say, good-faith concerns that people across this country are making because of that lack of distrust that I was talking about.
When we look at some of the details, there is a blanket retention of metadata, but so much of our personal information is captured and so much of what is in metadata is not as anonymized as people may think. For example, in comparing this to other jurisdictions, in the United States, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act allows for preservation of metadata on demand, but it does not require blanket retention. It does not even allow blanket retention. The Court of Justice of the European Union has declared that blanket retention of metadata is incompatible with the fundamental rights that Europeans have, especially when it comes to privacy.
When we look at electronic service providers, specifically the applications in part 2 of the bill, we do not have a definition of what a service provider is. We only have the expectation that the government will come up with a definition down the road. This category could actually include email providers. It could include messaging apps. It could include other cloud services and storage systems. It is not just about whether one has a Telus account or a Rogers account. It could extend to the accounts that have content. That is where accessing someone's electronic information is truly accessing a window into their lives, their most intimate experiences, thoughts, conversations and photos. Therefore, we cannot afford to not get this right.
I would much rather see a cohesive definition of what that category would be, not something that could be redefined based on the whims of not just the current government but future governments. As we well know, if we are talking about any legislated power for government, for cabinet, for law enforcement, we have to imagine what that power will look like in the hands of another government that comes beyond. This is not a partisan issue. It is where I look beyond the left versus right on this. I do not want my colleagues on the left to be concerned about how a theoretical Conservative government would abuse civil liberties, which is certainly not the Conservative governments that we are putting forward for Canadians to choose, but how another government might use it.
That is why we must always constrain government power to protect the vital privacy rights and autonomy of individual citizens, and the lack of oversight remains a very key problem in Bill C-22. It would enable secret ministerial orders to any digital service Canadians rely on, with no public registry, no parliamentary approval and no right for Canadians to even know it is happening. That is the architecture of a surveillance state. That is something that we must always protect against.
I believe we must all come to an agreement on where we go forward, because we are being told by the Liberals that this is all fine and to just pass the bill through. We have been down that road before, and again, I do support, if the bill gets to committee, vigorously scrutinizing it, debating it, calling witnesses, looking at the ins and outs and going through it line by line, but there is a very real challenge, especially if I situate my remarks today in the broader political context of our time, in that bills can go into committee and come out worse than they went in.
The government can expand its power. We saw this recently with Bill C-9, where a flawed bill went into committee and an outright dangerous one came out, so we have to be very mindful of whether the Liberals have signalled an intention that goes beyond the text of the bill. That is why we cannot look at Bill C-22 without looking at things that the Liberals failed to advance in Bill C-8 and Bill C-2. Those have actually been pretty good indicators of where the Liberals want to go, where they think they can go and perhaps, if they have unchecked majority power in this House of Commons, where they are likely to go.
I go back to the comments I have made about law enforcement and how I am fully committed to listening to the perspectives of frontline officers and the perspectives of police leadership. I actually have a meeting coming up with the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, which as timing worked out, I wish I had done before I had the opportunity to speak today, but it did not work out that way. However, I will listen to law enforcement, not just on lawful access, but on the whole suite of reforms to fix the last 11 years of Liberal justice legislation, which the police have been demanding, to make communities safer.
I will just end on why this is so important. I was speaking to a grade 10 class a few weeks ago about my job and about the work that we all do in Ottawa, and like anyone else speaking to a group of grade 10 students, it is not always as engaging to talk about politics. I choose to believe it was politics that was boring them and not me, but nevertheless, I was trying to make politics relatable to them. I was trying to actually come up with a way to provide them a window into why the work we do here matters to them, and I brought up two things. I brought up employment. I asked how many of them were having trouble getting a job, and every hand went up. Then I asked them how many of them feel safe walking around downtown, and they all laughed. They all laughed, truly. To them, safe streets are a punchline, and that is the record of Liberal so-called justice laws over the last 11 years.
If we are going to listen to law enforcement, let us actually listen to law enforcement and let us start opening up the door to undoing the harmful reforms that have gotten us to where we are. If the Liberals want to know why people are so skeptical of lawful access regimes coming from the government, they need to look in the mirror and see why Canadians do not trust them to not abuse power, abuse authority and violate the rights of Canadians.
We will always stand firmly behind that. We will support law enforcement, but not at the expense of the charter, as the Liberals have a record of doing.
