Mr. Speaker, I would like to begin my speech by thanking OpenMedia, the Canadian Constitution Foundation and privacy lawyer David Fraser for their excellent work on Bill C-22. The analysis I am about to offer closely mirrors their own, and if the Liberal government members would simply listen seriously to these civil liberties groups, they would not have to hear from me on this bill, but they have not, so here we are.
At around age 13, I was horrified to read the following excerpt from chapter 1 of George Orwell's 1984:
The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made...would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision...he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in...was guesswork.
That gave me a chill down the spine 27 years ago. Could people really live with the government listening to their every utterance, watching their every move? How could the human spirit ever flourish in the utter absence of basic privacy? Even at a much younger age, I knew it was basically wrong for my sister to go through the things in my room or for me to read her diary, not because any authority figure ever told me it was wrong, but because I knew it in my soul. One cannot develop one's thoughts, one's feelings, one's self under prying eyes. That was just respect to my friends and family. What if a power as great as the government or the police violated our privacy? I knew that my mother and her family had escaped a Communist regime in the 1960s, but back then, telescreens were science fiction. Could my family have managed to plan their escape if a telescreen had been in their home?
I knew vaguely that there had been revolutions in East Germany and throughout the U.S.S.R., but even in 1989, when those revolutions started, the telescreen idea remained in the realm of science fiction. Fast-forward to today, I am more horrified today. We now have the technological capability to make telescreens. I have a phone in my pocket and an Apple Watch on my wrist. I am most horrified because, with the legislation before us, the Liberal government is attempting to make possible the 1984 telescreen out of every cell phone, AirPod, Apple Watch, smart TV and automobile, anything that is connected to the Internet. To quote the excerpt from 1984 again, “There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment.”
I know the members opposite will consider my views outlandish, but they are not. Let me please take them through their own law to show them how they are doing the exact thing they swore they would never do.
Proposed subsection 5(2) says:
The Governor in Council [which means the government] may make regulations respecting the obligations of core providers, including regulations respecting
(a) the development, implementation, assessment, testing and maintenance of operational and technical capabilities, including capabilities related to extracting and organizing information that is authorized to be accessed
In plain English, this means a back door. Right now, it is my understanding that my watch listens to everything I say. If I say, “Hey, Siri”, it sends whatever speech follows to the cloud for processing. If I do not say, “Hey, Siri”, nothing goes to the cloud. Proposed paragraph 5(2)(a) allows the minister to require that Apple build in the ability for authorities to listen to my Apple Watch whether I say, “Hey, Siri” or not. The same would go for my phone and my AirPods. Yes, they would need a warrant to actually listen in, but this bill takes the huge first step of building the surveillance architecture in the first place. Once it is built, it will be ripe for abuse either by the government or by hackers. Once it is built, it will not be unbuilt. We are at the stage where the government builds all the telescreens and puts them in our home, but promises to only use them if we have been bad.
What is worse is this bill, as pertains to electronic service providers under proposed section 7, such as Apple, Signal, Telegram or Tinder, may be forced to keep that back door secret. Proposed section 15 says:
An electronic service provider and any person acting on its behalf must not disclose any of the following information
(c) the fact that the electronic service provider is subject to the order;
In plain English, this section sets out the fact that the government has ordered construction of a back door to be kept secret. Once this bill passes, our cell phone manufacturer, our messaging service, our dating app may receive a secret order to build a back door into the service for the government to check in on us, and we might never be alerted. Our excerpt from the 1984 says, “How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in...was guesswork.” Why? Why, if everything here was above board, would the bill include the ability for the public safety minister to build secret back doors? I do not happen to be one of them, but some Canadians might say it is okay to read their Tinder messages, that they do not care, but to at least tell them if the government is going to do that. This bill specifically allows a minister to do it secretly. Why?
Just on these points alone, the construction of a backdoor surveillance architecture and that they intend to keep some parts of this architecture secret, the Liberals should hang their heads in shame. Liberals are supposed to fight against this sort of excessive government reach. They are not supposed to be its source, and it only gets worse.
As set forth in proposed paragraph 5(2)(d), in addition to demanding that secret back doors be constructed, the government's ministers can order all electronic service providers to collect and store all metadata for a year. Metadata means many things, but the most important thing to me is location. This bill goes even further than the telescreens in 1984. It would turn every Internet-connected device into not just a listening device, but a tracking device as well, and it would cause that location data to be admissible in a court of law.
Let me just give a couple of examples for why I find this concerning. We just had a pandemic, in which some governments went way too far restricting human rights in unscientific ways. Do people remember the red zones and the green zones or the six-person bubbles? It may surprise the House to learn that I never broke a single COVID rule, even though I was a strong critic of their unscientific basis, but I know that a lot of people did. I know that some people sitting on the government side of the House did. It is a matter of public record that Justin Trudeau broke COVID rules and broke the Reopening Ontario Act by attending a Black Lives Matter protest here in Ottawa.
If Bill C-22 passes, when there is another pandemic with some silly rules, any police officer could say they suspect that the member for Winnipeg North broke pandemic rules, get a warrant and see his location for every moment of the last 365 days. If he ever stepped into a red zone or ever broke quarantine, it would be game over. This capability would not be merely for COVID laws. It would be for every law. Chrystia Freeland was once found guilty of going 30 kilometres an hour over the limit on the highway to see her dad. Once she was convicted of that, a police officer could check to see her speed for every moment of the 365 days preceding.
Do not ask for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. As the head of Joseph Stalin's secret service said, “Show me the man and I'll show you the crime.” If everyone here is surveilled 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, every one of us will be liable to be found guilty of something. If the government of the day passes this bill in its present form, I fear that the Liberals may live to see the day when its provisions are used against them. I swear it will not be me doing it, but who knows who will be prime minister in 2046. I fear her last name may be Trudeau-Perry.
The Liberals will rue the day they torched all our collective privacy rights. I urge them to correct course. We can catch bad guys without violating the privacy rights of every single Canadian.