Mr. Speaker, it is an honour for me to speak virtually, since a situation came up that prevented me from participating in person. Those are the rules of the House.
I am grateful for the chance to speak to Bill C-22. I do not have lengthy parliamentarian experience compared to other members, but I have been a member of Parliament for nearly 15 years, and I have never seen anything like what the government has done in the area of the legislation that we now have before us. It initially came to us in June as Bill C-2, and in that bill there were provisions for access and warrantless access that were combined with “strong borders” provisions, as they were then called.
I just want to draw attention to the process of the legislation, because it is highly unusual. Again, obviously there are people who have more experience. The member for Vancouver Centre, for example, has served far longer than I have, but I have never seen anything like this, for what it is worth. We started with Bill C-2, which was not withdrawn. It remained there, and then it was largely replaced, although it was not withdrawn, by Bill C-12. Now we have Bill C-22, picking up on elements of what was unacceptable in Bill C-2.
I have heard the Prime Minister in press comments talk about the ways the new Liberal majority plans to change our committee composition. Somehow there is a lot of showboating going on, the Prime Minister said, a lot of grandstanding, but honestly, the process of studying legislation has some precedents and parliamentary tradition that really do matter. One is to give a bill proper study. This is interrupted by the innovation of the government in never admitting it has made a mistake or in not amending a bill that is on the Order Paper but rather replacing it with a series of repeated starts and stops.
I am sure the hon. member for Kamloops—Thompson—Nicola, whose humour I enjoyed earlier, might make a comment on this. It is bizarre and certainly unusual. We started with Bill C-2, and then we had Bill C-12, which continued the anti-refugee rights provisions that were in Bill C-2. Now we have moved to Bill C-22, on access, and the bill of course is dealing with access to information that is important for law enforcement.
This is an unusual process, to put it mildly. Today I want to focus on what is in Bill C-22 and on the reasons that I certainly hope the government will go to a more normal parliamentary procedure, which would be to amend Bill C-22 to achieve the kind of consensus that would allow me, as a Green Party member of Parliament, to vote for it. I cannot vote for it as it is now on the Order Paper.
Again, let me step back and say, as I have said in the House before, on the record, that Bill C-22 represents improvements over the portions that were originally put forward in Bill C-2. The original access legislation would have allowed, for instance, postal workers to open our mail, and it would have allowed access to subscriber information from telecommunications companies without notice to the user.
However, while there has been much improvement in requiring warrants, the warrants would still be required to meet a threshold that the hon member for Nanaimo—Ladysmith referred to earlier in debate today. It is a completely unprecedented threshold for a warrant to obtain information and access to information: “reasonable grounds to suspect”. We find that language in proposed subsection 487.0142(2).
“Reasonable grounds to believe” is a well-understood concept. There is much jurisprudence on what is required to have reasonable grounds to believe. There is zero jurisprudence on what it means to have reasonable grounds to suspect. It is a lower threshold. It does not make sense to put legal terms in that have no foundation in law. It would undoubtedly create confusion in how the legislation would be used by law enforcement.
I note that the Liberals have changed the definition of who would be able to access, from police officer to public officer, which would mean that the same terminology could apply to a CSIS agent or a police officer. The judge issuing a warrant, under many of these sections, would merely have to determine if there are reasonable grounds to suspect. Again, there is no background in law for this.
When I say “jurisprudence”, to break that down to common sense, that just means we can go back and look up legal decisions where courts have struggled with what a word means, so the court dealing with the matter before it has somewhere to go to see what the previous judges said. The court can see the record of court cases on this matter so it knows what it is looking for. In this case, with the use of novel terminology, “reasonable grounds to suspect”, people do not know what they are looking for. A judge would have to deal with the issue for the first time, and I think we could say, at a minimum, that this is unwise in drafting.
Where does this leave us now with Bill C-22? There are many improvements, particularly in part one, but there are some concerns with part two, as has been noted by numerous commentators, from the Canadian Civil Liberties Association to a group called OpenMedia. By the way, I pay a lot of attention to OpenMedia, because it is a very impressive organization as a small non-government organization that worries about Internet access and public policy. It also happens to be headed by an executive director who is one of my constituents. I thank Matt Hatfield from Salt Spring Island for his diligence in working with an organization that represents the concerns of thousands of Canadians.
However, the concerns we have with Bill C-22 continue. The concerns are largely in the one area, and I asked the hon. Minister for Public Safety to entertain amendments on this matter, amendments to understand that if what the bill would require is surveillance capacity from Internet providers, it would mean they would have to permanently insert spyware into the platforms that Canadians use.
This would create access to information about Canadians that would be accessible not only by Canadian public officers and by Canadian intelligence officers, such as from CSIS, but could also potentially be open to surveillance, and that data could be accessed, by foreign governments, including the United States government. A number of Canadians would have concerns about having their personal Internet information accessed by foreign governments. I think that is an unintentional consequence of the way the bill is drafted that needs to be repaired. We do not want surveillance built into the permanent collection of data, which would be required under the terms of the act as it is currently drafted.
I want to make it clear that I would be very pleased to vote for the legislation. I will be preparing amendments and taking them before committee. Although, under the bizarre terms in which I operate on committees, I am not allowed to vote on my own amendments, I hope that other members of the House and members of the committee will show support, and I hope the Minister for Public Safety will improve the bill to bring it to a state where people can vote for it and get it over the finish line.