Mr. Speaker, it is with great pleasure that I get up to speak to a bill that I think we absolutely need to send to committee. We are already very tardy on lawful access. As my fellow parliamentary secretary mentioned just a moment ago, all of our other Five Eyes partners and all of our other G7 partners have modernized laws with respect to lawful access.
Our government entered office with a couple of main priorities. One of them was being laser-focused on the economy and one of them was instilling a sense of safety in Canadians. In order to instill a sense of safety, we need to make sure that police, CSIS and all of our security community stakeholders have the effective tools they need in order to confront organized crime, threats of terrorism, interference from abroad and all of the other modern threats that exist in today's digital age, which did not exist 20 years ago.
That might have been done with the combatting hate act that was just adopted through the House and is now before the Senate. It would give police the tools they asked for to better combat hate. It was done through a bill we adopted with a significant majority to deal with making it harder for dangerous criminals and repeat offenders to get bail. It is being done with respect to a bill we are now debating at the justice committee that talks about intimate partner violence, femicide and images that are being shared. It is also being done through making sure that police have the necessary tools to deal with threats that are coming across our networks.
I used to have the privilege, before I was elected, of being the general counsel and chief administrative officer of a tech company. I frequently dealt with Internet service providers and telcos. This bill deals with solving the issues we are now having with respect to getting information from telcos and ISPs. That is the core of the bill.
The bill has three parts. I want to talk about the first part of the bill, the core of the bill, which deals with the new measures to help law enforcement deal with obtaining information and combatting crime in the digital age.
The first issue we need to confront is how law enforcement find out which telco or ISP has the needed information for them to then ask for a warrant to obtain more detailed information. The law that we now have, after the Supreme Court case of R. v. Spencer in 2014, means that telecommunications providers are generally only providing information once a court order is obtained. However, if law enforcement cannot figure out which telco has the phone number, the ISP address or the email that is tied to the potential violation or the feared violation of the Criminal Code, then they are stuck in limbo because they need to know who to go to, and have the reasonable grounds to go there, before they can get a court order.
In this bill, we created an amendment called the confirmation of service demand. It basically says that law enforcement can fill out this form and the service provider will have to answer if they are, for example, the provider of a specific number or email address. All that would be provided is a very rudimentary list of things to identify whether they have this information or not. That could be the address associated with the account, the email address, the telephone number, the amount of time the service has been going on and the type of service they provide. There would be no detailed information given without a court order, but this would resolve the issue from the R. v. Spencer case which made it inordinately complex, in my view, to get basic information from a telco.
When I was young, there was something called the White Pages and the Yellow Pages. We could find everyone's telephone numbers, addresses and names there. If the police was looking for a telephone number, they could find it in a phone book.
Those no longer exist now, with the advent of cellphones. Perhaps they still exist somewhere, but they are rarely used. I would not even know where to find one. I know that we can find information in the online 411 service.
If the information is in the public domain, it is not necessary to go to court to get an order to access it, because it is already available online.
We had another judgment of the court that made it confusing as to whether an Internet service provider or a telco could provide information that was available in the public domain without a court order or whether the police could use information that was in the public domain without a court order. There was also confusion as to what would happen if a good Samaritan, a company or anyone voluntarily offered law enforcement information that would touch, for example, what the billing address of a phone number was that was thought to be behind, for example, fraud.
We have all of these people who call us all the time in this country who are attempting to defraud us. I do not know how many times I have been called by Windows, not Microsoft, but Windows, with somebody telling me that my computer was broken, and I should give them my password for them to fix it. They are calling from a phone number and are attempting to defraud me. That same phone number has a senior scam where they call seniors and say it is their grandson or their granddaughter. They say they have been in an accident and need the grandparent to give them money, but no, no, no, they should not tell anyone else in the family.
I have heard from many people who have experienced this grandparents scam. They should be able, if somebody has that information, to give it to police. If the company, the telco, wilfully gives the information to police without a court order, the police should be allowed to use it. This bill clarifies that they can. It would also allow us to deal with information, such as phone numbers, email addresses and other information, that may be located abroad.
I would imagine that many different telephone numbers and email addresses are used to contact Canadians from abroad. We know that a lot of fraud happens in India, including many fraudulent calls directed at Canada. There are also attacks originating from Russia. Until now, it has been very difficult to obtain information from a foreign country under the law. The bill will give us that power and will enable other countries to request information from Canadian courts in a more equitable and fair way. If, for example, France is the victim of fraud committed by a number or person in Canada, then we should also help France obtain information. This is a very good start, in my opinion.
This bill would also clarify the issue of the police's right to use information in the event of an emergency. For example, if there is a terrorist attack, we certainly do not want police to have to get a court order to obtain the information they need to attempt to thwart a terrorist attack on Canada or a cybersecurity threat. These matters are all dealt with in the bill. One of the things I think we have pretty much unanimous agreement on, from all the recognized parties in the House, is that this should go to committee to be studied properly by a parliamentary committee.
I think everyone agrees that a committee should examine this bill, hear from witnesses and determine whether amendments are needed. It is very important to give our law enforcement and security agencies the tools they need.
I will wrap up, and I welcome any questions from colleagues.