Mr. Speaker, I congratulate you for your rigour and thank you for rising to call for a little more order.
I was saying that it is a great privilege for me, and I will likely never experience this again in my career, to work on a bill that will profoundly change the way we approach public safety and privacy. Basically, Bill C-22 will change investigative practices and give police better tools, but it also involves invasions of privacy. Our challenge in committee was to determine how to support law enforcement agencies so they could lay criminal charges more easily, especially in the modern Internet era, while ensuring privacy protections under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Honestly, this was a difficult bill to study.
It quickly became apparent that the government had already made up its mind, and since it had a majority, it was hard for the opposition parties to feel that their input was valued and sought. I must say that at some meetings, other than one or two colleagues on the government side, a number of colleagues across the aisle took off their earpieces and talked among themselves, showing little interest in what we had to say.
We have often heard the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons say that the Conservatives engage in a lot of filibustering. Personally, I am not in favour of filibustering. However, it is still a parliamentary tool that can be used as a last resort when one feels that, no matter what people say, the government's primary goal is to run out the clock, hold a few hours of debate, and then, after about 20 hours, bring in closure and claim that the opposition parties are wasting their time.
We could have wrapped up Bill C-22 in a single sitting if, from the outset, we had known that the government had little interest in listening to both civil society and opposition members, even when they were proposing good ideas. As a member of the Bloc Québécois, I was nevertheless quite fortunate. The seven amendments that were proposed, discussed, and debated were those put forward by the Bloc Québécois. Of the seven proposed amendments, only one was adopted, after being amended by the government. All the amendments I proposed came either from the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, the Quebec Bar Association, or the chair of the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency. I did not propose far-fetched amendments. They were based on expert testimony that sought to help us strike a balance.
Representatives from the Barreau du Québec said, among other things, that they could live with part 1 of Bill C-22, but that part 2 was more problematic and would have required further study. My Liberal colleagues said there was no point in devoting more time to study it because the Conservatives were filibustering. However, when we have the impression that speaking is pointless because we know in advance that the government just wants to run down the clock so it can then justify invoking closure, filibustering makes sense.
That is what really bothered me, because I truly wanted to study Bill C-22 thoroughly and make a valuable contribution. The minister had assured us in the House that the government was open to amendments. When the debate on Bill C-22 is finally over, in the end, very few of the opposition's amendments will have been adopted, actually not really any. I find that very disappointing. Perhaps I am too much of a dreamer, too positive and too eager to collaborate. Since securing a majority, this government comes across as far more arrogant. Perhaps it was so aggrieved from having a minority that now it is making up for that. That is broadly how I see things.
There are Liberal Party members I enjoyed working with because I found them to be very sincere in their work as well. Sometimes, as members of Parliament, we have an idea and we defend it. Our whip, our leader or party authorities give us instructions. In the case of the Liberals, the Prime Minister may be the one giving instructions. Sometimes, government members have to remain silent and toe the party line. The government wanted us to pass Bill C‑22 from the get-go.
What irritates me about today's motion is that it is a super closure motion. Closure motions do exist. The Speaker confirmed that it is a procedural tool. I was here in 2006 when the Conservative government was in power. The Harper government also frequently invoked closure to pass legislation. It is a strategy. However, there is something that irritated me and that I found insincere. It struck me that the government had included in its motion the requirement that amendments be submitted by Monday at 4:30 p.m., yet it moved the motion at midnight on Monday night. When I read the motion on Tuesday morning, I nearly fell out of my chair, and I was given a bit of a scolding by the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Public Safety.
I do not think that is fair. That part of the motion is not right. In my opinion, it is unprecedented and akin to what is known in finance as insider trading. It is odd, but on Tuesday morning, I received amendments from the government. I wondered how government members knew that they could table amendments before 4:30 p.m. The reason is that they were told so. That, to me, is unacceptable. That is what irritated me the most in the Speaker's ruling on the point of order that I raised with my Conservative colleague.
I was expecting a closure motion. I thought that the government would eventually want to pass the bill and would run out of patience. It never occurred to me, however, that it would do so before the parliamentary session ended. I expected it would do that in the fall, because I thought we deserved some measure of respect, and because the bill that we were preparing to pass was by no means small.
I want to come back to this motion, which imposed a retroactive deadline for submitting committee amendments. I would have had to present my amendments the day before I received the motion. That is really unacceptable. I know Liberal members who serve on the same committee as I do, and I am sure that, if we had them take a polygraph, we would find out that they disagreed with this move just as much as I did. I reacted by raising a point of order because this goes against my values. It is the government's right to impose closure if it so chooses. It can do that. However, I think it was wrong of the government to include this retroactive deadline.
We wanted to improve the bill, but that proved difficult. I asked questions. I am not a lawyer or a computer scientist. Quite a bit of expertise was required just to be able to ask relevant questions about this bill. I wanted to delve deeper into the subject, but that was not easy. I would have liked to hear from software architects, for example. I would have liked to hear from IT experts who could explain to me encryption and the consequences of weakening encryption.
I would have liked for someone to explain this to me. If we store data for a year, are we creating back doors? Back doors are created to make the work of police officers easier, but do they also give cybercriminals access to that data?
There were civil servants at committee to answer our questions, but they are not IT specialists or IT experts. They drafted a bill in line with the government's expectations.
I wondered why it was so urgent. I have asked this question many times. My colleagues here in the House who have worked on this with me know that. Police have been waiting for this bill for 30 years, so here is what I asked them: Would it be an issue if we dealt with part of it now and finalized the bill a little later, given that it is such a big undertaking?
I could sense some pressure. I am going to put forward a hypothesis about that pressure. I do not have any inside information, so this just is a hypothesis. I think much of the pressure is coming from the United States, which would like to share intelligence with Canada. Currently, we cannot exchange information because Canada is the only country of the Five Eyes that cannot do so. With the lawful access bill, we will be able to share intelligence with other Five Eyes nations.
However, I have issues with what the Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons said. He is telling us that Canada is lagging behind. What exactly are we comparing ourselves to? The United Kingdom does not have a charter protecting people's rights, and neither does the United States. They have street cameras in the U.K. that film people. It is a country that intrudes heavily on people's privacy, so, to me, it is not a model. It is even worse in the United States. It is the Wild West over there.
They say that the other Five Eyes nations are scolding us because we are lagging behind and cannot share intelligence. We are comparing ourselves to countries that are not necessarily models when it comes to protecting privacy. We are also hearing about Australia, where things are happening as we speak.
In fact, as part of the study, we received 100 written briefs and 70 or 75 letters from members of the public. I think there were about four submissions in favour of the bill. The rest of the submissions were against the bill, either in part or in full, but often only partially. I learned a lot from reading those briefs, because we did not have a chance to ask any questions of the representatives from the Five Eyes or Australia. Australia is actually reviewing its legislation on lawful access because it has been abused. There have been incidents that should never happen again. People in the United Kingdom are also reconsidering things, and civil society is taking action. My question, then, is why are we rushing this?
The prime example always given is that, if lawful access had been in place, a criminal who abused children could have been arrested. We are also told that it would have been easier to stop an organized network of pedophiles operating on the Internet. I asked if that means that such criminals cannot be arrested today, because we do not have a law on lawful access on the books. The answer is no. That said, it is true that such arrests are difficult, and I do not want anyone to think that I am against lawful access.
We think that police tools need to be modernized and that they should be up to the task of countering cyber-attacks. Most serious crimes often take place online. Criminals have more advanced tools than the police do. The police need more advanced, more suitable and more modern tools to stop the crimes being committed today. However, that is no reason to rush things to the point of not taking the time to hear certain witnesses.
I will give an example. The Privacy Commissioner came to testify before the committee. He spoke as though we already had his brief in hand. His brief contained amendments. There is a major problem with the translation service. It took two weeks to translate some of the briefs and provide them to the committee in both official languages. We did not receive them in a timely manner because the work wrapped up so quickly. We did not have the opportunity to review them or even invite certain witnesses.
In my opinion, the commissioner is a leading authority on privacy protection, because that is his mandate. We did not have the opportunity to ask him about his amendments because we did not have them in front of us.
However, he had submitted his brief a week in advance, and when he testified, no one had received it. We then asked the government if the commissioner could come back. What was happening was that department officials were completely dismantling all of the amendments proposed by the Privacy Commissioner. It is easy to understand why I was a little skeptical. I wondered if the commissioner and his team had really been that wrong.
We asked for unanimous consent for him to return, just to defend his amendments, which we had not had a chance to review, but the Liberals refused. There were plenty of small gestures the government members could have made to signal their openness. It would then have been justified for them to get all worked up over the Conservative filibuster, but honestly, I saw plenty of outstretched hands. There were proposals from the Bloc Québécois, the NDP and the Conservatives. They were all rejected out of hand.
I want to conclude by saying that I really enjoyed working with my colleagues. I learned a lot.
I also want to take the time I have left to thank the interpreters. I am a unilingual francophone. When I am in a committee meeting that starts at 3:30 p.m. and ends at midnight, it is hard for me. It is much easier with support from the interpreters. I want to thank all the interpreters who worked on the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security during its study of Bill C‑22. We worked very hard, and they worked very hard too. Without them, my participation would not have been as meaningful.