Mr. Speaker, I am very happy to have the opportunity today to talk a bit about Bill C-22, which deals with lawful access.
Lawful access is, of course, critically important in the modern era with respect to the investigation and prosecution of crime. It is encouraging that we are talking about lawful access here in the House of Commons today. However, I would be remiss if I did not talk about a few things before dealing with the substance of the bill.
First of all, I will talk about how we got here, which many colleagues in the opposition have done. They have talked about how the Liberal government tried to force the bill through in an earlier version, Bill C-2, which was a gigantic, omnibus piece of legislation. That piece of legislation had many flaws, and a huge number of problems and issues were raised. There were so many that, under the pressure of the opposition parties, the government was forced to split the bill into parts that could be studied and supported, and the rest is coming now in Bill C-22.
This becomes especially important when we look at where we are today. We are now on the cusp of a Liberal majority government, with which the Liberals may choose to ram through pieces of legislation like this without any scrutiny.
Why do I raise this concern right now, at this moment? It is because it has been interesting to listen today to the Liberal parliamentary secretary to the House leader denigrate the Conservatives who have the audacity to get up and speak about this particular piece of legislation. He is suggesting that we are filibustering this piece of legislation, when I have listened to many opposition colleagues get up today and give well-reasoned arguments for why this piece of legislation is problematic and why it deserves additional study.
We know debate is part of the way in which we bring issues forward. The Liberal parliamentary secretary to the House leader seems to find it inconvenient and unsettling that opposition members of Parliament can get up in this chamber and identify significant and serious issues with a piece of government legislation. His view seems to be that we should be just a rubber-stamp chamber, where everything the Liberals decide to put forward is perfectly crafted and we should just move it along. That seems to be his argument all the time. It is almost as though he believes this chamber serves no purpose other than for him to get up and speak to every single piece of legislation, which he does, and then ask questions of every opposition member who has the audacity to stand up and try to exercise the same right.
Why is this deeply concerning? It is deeply concerning because Canadians might be looking at the dystopian future of that kind of attitude being brought forward into the entire House of Commons as the Liberals move toward a majority government.
It looks likely that the Liberals will reorganize committees to have a majority so that, once again, they can ram through pieces of legislation without any study. They can use all kinds of procedural tricks to do that. They can use a programming motion that limits the amount of debate on legislation and the amount of time it spends at committee, deems it adopted at certain stages and passes it on to the Senate. They can do that. They can use time allocation to end debate. They can use closure motions to end debate. They can take committee meetings in camera whenever they want, because they have the votes.
Imagine if the Liberals had had this power back in the fall, when they tried to bring Bill C-2 forward. The opposition would not have had the power to get that bill split so that we could take out the problematic sections for it to be debated and further studied.
The attitude being displayed by the Liberal parliamentary secretary to the House leader and many members of the Liberal caucus is that any time an opposition member has the audacity to stand in their seat, to which they were democratically elected, and raise issues about a piece of legislation. it is is obstruction or a filibuster, yet we have watched Liberal members get up today to speak to this particular bill immediately after the parliamentary secretary to the House leader accused a Conservative member of filibustering by daring to stand in his place to speak on this particular piece of legislation.
Canadians should be listening very carefully to this, because it tells us what is about to happen. The government is going to ram through pieces of legislation because it thinks it can do nothing wrong.
Let me tell this House something. The government has done a lot of things wrong in this Parliament, and did a lot of things wrong in the previous Parliament. For example, it was found to have illegally invoked the Emergencies Act. It is a government that has a tendency to use heavy-handed approaches, overreach and trample over Canadians' charter rights and freedoms.
Now the government is going to have a majority in this House, and potentially a majority on committees, and it is going to use that to stifle debate. We know that because of the questions the Liberals ask and how they answer questions in question period. A day does not go by when the Liberals do not get up to say, “The opposition is obstructing what we are trying to do,” so we know what they are going to try to do when we get to their majority government.
That is deeply troubling with a bill about lawful access, because lawful access is going to determine the extent to which the police and other security agencies can access Canadians' data. Let us be very clear about this. Most Canadians now have extraordinary digital footprints. With that comes the extraordinary need to maintain Canadians' privacy. This is not a government that has shown itself to be shy about overusing or abusing its powers. We have had members of the Conservative caucus get up and very clearly state how much scrutiny this legislation is going to need in order to safeguard the rights of Canadians. A huge part of that is debating right here in this chamber, much to the chagrin of the parliamentary secretary to the House leader, who would like us all to just sit down and let the Liberals continue to have their own speakers get up and speak to this.
I want to make it abundantly clear that Conservatives, when they speak to particular pieces of legislation, are not filibustering. They have been duly elected by millions of Canadians from coast to coast to coast to fight for their rights. That includes their right to privacy.
As we look at this lawful access bill, there are all kinds of things that Canadians should be concerned about, including access to metadata. I remember being a litigation lawyer 20 years ago, talking about preserving and using metadata during discovery. It was quite new 20 years ago. It is not new now. In fact, the amount of metadata the average Canadian has is enormous, and the potential abuse of that is deeply problematic.
We could almost go back to when we were going through the COVID-19 pandemic, when the Liberals wanted to track our movement data, which is a form of metadata. They would have gotten a lot more data than just where people were moving around. They talked about how they would take that data and randomize it so that even if there was a data breach, no one would be granted access to it, but experts came to committees and said that was absolutely not true. No matter how the data is randomized, someone can put that data back together.
When we look at the kinds of extraordinary powers the government is seeking to give not just police, but security agencies, we have to make sure that our data is protected and that the privacy of Canadians will be protected. This takes us to a deeply troubling thing that my NDP colleague raised several times today, which is the fact that the government did not consult the Privacy Commissioner on the drafting of this legislation. It is is deeply problematic, because the Privacy Commissioner is going to have a lot of concerns about this particular piece of legislation.
Going back to how this is a majority government, and we are back at Bill C-2, which was an omnibus piece of legislation. The government did not consult the Privacy Commissioner. It has a majority. It can do whatever it wants in the House of Commons and at committee. This is deeply troubling for the future of Canadians and the future of Canadians' data.
Whenever Bill C-22 goes to committee, if the government has reconstituted the committees to give itself a majority, which Canadians did not vote for, it will be able to pass this piece of legislation without amendment. In fact, it could pass it after hearing from one or two witnesses. The government could pass it without hearing from any witnesses, because it is going to have complete control of committees. The attitude displayed by the parliamentary secretary to the House leader and the contempt he seems to show for debate give me great concern for what would happen at committee.