Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise on behalf of security conscious Canadians in the vigilant riding of Algonquin—Renfrew—Pembroke to speak to Bill C-22, a bill respecting lawful access.
The Conservatives support giving law enforcement the tools it needs to combat crime and keep communities safe. At the same time, these powers must be accompanied by strong safeguards, clear limits and independent oversight to protect Canadians' rights and freedoms. Conservatives support sending the bill to committee for careful review.
The bill represents a major test for the Prime Minister and his ill-gotten majority. Had Canadians collectively decided to actually elect a majority government last year, we would not even be debating this bill. The Liberals would have used their majority to force through Bill C-2, which was the Liberals' first attempt at a lawful access bill. It was only because of a minority government that the Conservatives were able to prevent the Liberals from passing it.
If the Liberals had gotten their way, they would have had the power to limit Canadians' use of cash. Bill C-2 would have allowed the Liberals to open people's mail without a warrant. The bill would have allowed Liberals to demand any data from any service provider, without a warrant. That would have applied to telecoms and companies, as well as to hospitals and banks. Even Canadian dry cleaners would have been subject to this law. Bill C-2 was an obvious overreach.
The absence of those provisions in the new bill proves only that Conservatives were right. Just as with the first bill, the new version is not perfect. There are troubling issues related to metadata retention and the legal thresholds for asking for Canadians' private information. It may be possible to address or correct those issues in committee. Whether or not the Liberal MPs on the committee will be willing to adopt those corrections is the test. Will this be a typical Liberal majority under a typical Liberal prime minister? How the bill is handled will provide Canadians with the answers.
By the time Jean Chrétien was in his third majority, journalists were writing books with titles such as The Friendly Dictatorship. After Justin Trudeau was given a blank cheque by Jagmeet Singh's NDP to govern as if he had a majority, he illegally invoked the Emergencies Act and violated Canadians' charter rights. The only thing worse than a Liberal prime minister with a majority government is a Liberal prime minister who has convinced himself he is serving in a time of a unique crisis requiring new powers.
Jean Chrétien nearly led us to the breakup of the country. He used that to justify emergency spending on Canadian flags in Quebec. He told himself that he did not need oversight. He was saving the country. When the pandemic finally arrived in North America, Trudeau's first instinct was to seek two years of unlimited spending power without parliamentary approval. He told himself he did not need oversight, because he was saving the country. Now we have a new Prime Minister claiming we have a new crisis. He told himself that only he could solve it by answering fewer questions than any prime minister in history.
Rather than hiding on YouTube, the Prime Minister should be giving his forward guidance advice to Canadians from the floor of the House of Commons. That the Prime Minister's instincts are to hide from the House makes me think he will fail the test the bill represents, but the test falls onto the shoulders of every so-called Liberal member of Parliament. Too often, they seem to think they are Liberal members of government.
During the last election, we knocked on, collectively, hundreds of thousands of doors. Not a single voter told me that their first priority was ensuring that telecoms retain a year of metadata on all their customers. I bet that is true for every Liberal member too, yet even before new MPs had a chance to find the bathrooms, the government was tabling extensive legislation to give the state vast new powers. The bill was tabled for the same reason we have a fentanyl czar: The Liberals thought it would appease the Trump administration.
The former bureaucrat, turned Prime Minister, asked the federal bureaucracy to draft legislation to make America happy again. Before his ministers could staff their offices with the type of people who might ask what stakeholders such as the Canadian Civil Liberties Association would say about the law, it was tabled. It was only the opposition's holding a majority that prevented this first rushed and flawed legislation from becoming law. Thanks to unprecedented acts of self-interest, Liberals have a hair's breadth of a majority.
Will the newly empowered Liberal members use this opportunity to work collaboratively, or will they force the bill through quickly to rack up a political victory? Do the so-called Liberal MPs think provisions in the bill that would require service providers to retain all metadata for a year are justifiable?
Metadata information about the file itself is contained within many computer files. Emails that Canadians send contain extensive metadata, including who sent the email, the time it was sent, the software that was used to send it, the type of hardware used to send it, the sender's IP address and every IP address that every server in an email was routed through. People's cellphone calls create metadata that includes who called, who answered and the time and duration of the call; the cell towers used during the call; and even the GPS coordinates for the caller.
Telecom companies retain this data for billing purposes, but they do not keep it beyond that point. Canadians, collectively, make 100 million cellphone calls every year. Forcing companies to maintain databases containing information on over 36 billion phone calls would present a systemic privacy risk.
Beyond maintaining this vast secret database for the government, the companies would also be required to maintain systems that allow government to easily search and collect this metadata. This is often referred to as a back door. The concern has always been that creating a back door for the government also creates a back door for criminals and hostile foreign states. The Liberals will tell Canadians not to worry. They will point to language in the bill that says the government would not be allowed to ask for any back doors that company officials believe would create a hacking risk.
Unfortunately for the Liberals, they tabled the bill just weeks before the world learned that the AI company Anthropic had built an AI model so advanced and so dangerous that the company has limited the access to it. The danger was that this new AI model had discovered thousands of new vulnerabilities in some of the most popular code. One of the most widely used operating systems for routers had a vulnerability that had been undiscovered for 27 years.
The government is asking Canadians to trust Bell, Rogers and Telus to know in advance if the government is putting our privacy at risk. I should clarify something. I do not know whether Bell, Rogers and Telus would be covered by the bill. It is a reasonable assumption, or in the language of this bill, I have a reasonable suspicion, that the big three telecoms would be included. The actual list of providers can be found under schedule 1 of the bill. That page is currently blank.
It would be left to cabinet to decide which companies would be covered. Cabinet would decide what measures companies would have to take to provide access to the company's information. In making these regulations, cabinet would be required to consider the cost of the regulations, the feasibility of the regulations and the impact of the regulations. However, just in case those factors ended up limiting the government, cabinet would have the power to also consider any other factor cabinet thinks is relevant. How convenient that is for the Liberal cabinet.
That is just one example of one loophole in a substantive bill. This is why Conservatives support moving the bill to committee. The intent of the bill is to allow police and CSIS to do their jobs. The committee must be given the time it needs to hear from witnesses. It needs the time to provide the level of scrutiny that such a bill demands.
We know that the Prime Minister is impatient. He is used to people just following orders. We have already seen how he mis-characterizes legitimate opposition as wasting time. Even the Liberal-friendly Toronto Star is allowing expressions of concern that the Prime Minister has an authoritarian streak. That is why the bill is such an important test for the ill-gotten Liberal majority. It could be an example of parties' listening to each other and to Canadians to improve the bill, or it could be that desperate Liberals grasping for accomplishments will jam it down Canadians' throats.
The Prime Minister has already failed the test he set for himself. There is no comprehensive deal with the U.S. Food prices are the highest in the G7. We do not need forward guidance to tell us the deficit is already higher than he projected six months ago. We need a prime minister who will pass the test of democracy.