Mr. Speaker, today, I will speak on Bill C-22, the lawful access act, which asks Canadians to accept something very significant. It asks telecommunications providers across this country to build and maintain systems that would allow government-authorized access to their networks. It would expand expectations around the collection and retention of so-called metadata: the time, the location, the connection, details attached to the messages and the Internet activity. It would give ministers the authority to shape how those systems are designed and enforced. This is not a small technical change. It is structural in nature. It is a structural shift in how digital infrastructure is designed and who ultimately controls it.
Let me speak plainly. Before this bill, if a government wanted to access people's private communications, listen to their telephone calls or read their messages, they had to go to court. They had to make their case to a judge. They had to show why it was necessary. Judges and our judicial system were and are a critical safeguard to our privacy. This is a foundation of our democracy.
This bill would change the system around that process. It would require telecommunications companies to build this network that is ready for access, a lawful access network. It would allow governments and government ministers to set the rules of that lawful access network. Also, it would set how this system operates. It would do that not through a parliamentary process, but backdoor channels in regulation. Instead of access being something that happens only after a judge carefully considers it, we would now be building a system where that capability is always ready to access. The system of access would be largely created not by Parliament, but by ministers behind closed doors.
I want to bring members back to Bill C-2. Colleagues should remember the uproar over the concern Canadians had, which was raised over the real issues about how governments could access their personal, private, confidential, most intimate and personal communications. Now what the government has done instead is to take a particular section out of Bill C-2 and put it in Bill C-22. It deals with the same issue of access to information.
To be fair, there have been some changes made to Bill C-22 from Bill C-2. The government could no longer directly obtain consumer information. That is something I am proud of. Canadians stood up and fought for that because it is important. The government now could only ask a narrow question to telecommunications providers, "Does this consumer have an account with your company?" If they wanted more information, then they would have to go to court to obtain a production order.
Here is what Canadians also need to understand about Bill C-22. This bill is not just about whether the data can be accessed. It is about who designed the system that made the access possible. How has the system been designed? Right now too much of that system has been designed and built behind closed doors, through regulations and without parliamentary oversight.
However, there is also a deeper issue here. Bill C-22 does not operate in a vacuum. It is arriving in a country that has deeply unequal infrastructure when it comes to digital infrastructure.
Nowhere is this more evident than in rural Canada. In many urban centres there are millions of people who share dense networks, which are layered on top of each other. Thousands of users are connected through the same infrastructure at any given time in a large city. Metadata, in that context, is spread across large populations, so it is harder to isolate and attribute specific data to a specific individual.
However, that is not the case in rural areas like mine. In Haldimand—Norfolk we would face a new and different reality from the legislation. We have a population approaching 130,000 people, spread across more than 2,900 square kilometres. That is a density of roughly 40 people per square kilometre. In Toronto, for example, the number is over 4,500. That is 4,500 people spread over a square kilometre versus 40 people spread over a square kilometre. That is a difference in density of 100 times.
That difference matters when it comes to privacy, because data collected in rural Canada is not diluted across thousands of users. It is concentrated. In many parts of my community, a single tower or wireless node may serve only a few dozen or a few hundred households. When it is connected and when the connection is logged in a rural area at a certain time, it does not point to a crowd per se; it can point to a handful of homes, the privacy of which is then compromised, especially in low-density rural areas. Over time, that could also reveal patterns, such as when someone is home, when work on a farm begins or when a small business is operating.
When the government tells Canadians that metadata is not personal, this may be true in theory, but in rural Canada it is easier to identify which data is connected with which particular user.
There is something else fundamentally out of order. The government is moving to ensure that every network can be accessed, but ensuring that every Canadian can have access to the network was not a priority. In rural Canada, people are still struggling with basic Internet access and connectivity. In my community of Haldimand—Norfolk, students are still trying to complete their homework with unstable Internet. Seniors are being pushed into digital systems they cannot reliably access. Small businesses are competing in an economy that assumes connectivity, while they are still waiting for it.
However, instead of focusing on closing that gap between rural and urban Internet access, the government would be creating new obligations on top of systems that are already uneven. Bill C-22 would apply the same rules across the country, but the impact would be greater in rural communities, where fewer users share the network, as I previously said. Costs are higher per household, privacy risks are greater and infrastructure is still incomplete. When the government says the bill is about balance, rural Canada has to ask, “balance for whom?” The law that ignores the realities of rural Canada is not balanced. It is blind to those realities.
I recognize that we need modern and responsive systems in the digital era; however, we must ensure that the systems we build do not create unintended harm, especially in rural communities that are already underserviced.
I have searched high and low, and I could not find a rural impact assessment that addresses Bill C-22. Without an impact study, we need to ask a deeper question: Who is this system being built for? Bill C-22 needs to address proportional requirements of smaller providers. If we take the rural Canada situation, we will see that in rural Canada, Internet providers are much smaller and they do not have deep pockets. Imposing this system on them is going to cause undue financial hardship.
I must state that we also need commitment from the government that infrastructure expansion, not surveillance capability, is going to be the priority and that infrastructure expansion comes first, before the surveillance capability of the government. Canadians should not have to choose between being connected and being protected. Rural Canadians should not have to carry a disproportionate burden for a system designed without their reality in mind.
It is not enough to say that Parliament will review the system later. Under the bill, the review would happen after three years. By that time, the system is already built. What is the point? The regulations would already be in force. What is the point of reviewing a system that could cause privacy issues after it is built? Let us do it right the first time. The system and the practices would already be entrenched after three years.
There need to be checks on the system. There need to be checks on government encroachment on our freedoms. The same way that we raised concerns about Bill C-2, concerns need to be raised about Bill C-22, if it is encroaching on freedoms. We need to ensure that whatever system is built for lawful access, it does not encroach on privacy. We cannot accept lax rules around the government being able to access our phone or our messages. These are things that we have grown, in Canadian society, to see as sacred, and now this bill would allow governments to have access to this.
Clear oversight after the system is in place is not real oversight. It is confirmation, and that is not acceptable. In a free and democratic society, it is not enough to ask whether the state can access our data. We must also ask who decided that the data should exist and be retained in the first place. Who is accountable for that decision? If the government is going to design a system that governs Canadians' data, then Parliament must be involved before those decisions are made, not after. This is only logical.
This is not just about access to data. It is about control over the system that defines our lives. Once these systems are built, they do not just respond to decisions. They shape decisions. They determine who has access, who has ownership and who benefits. It is very important, because the system that is constructed is going to be what informs the judges and what the judges look at when they say what data could be applied to the order that is being sought. It is very important that we understand that it is not just about data. It is about power.
The question before us is simple: Will Canadians have a stake in the system that defines their lives, or will they simply be surveilled and managed by this system?
