Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak to Bill C‑22 again. I spoke about it at second reading, raising my significant concerns with the Liberals' latest attempt at lawful access legislation here in Canada. In that speech, I focused on part 2, but I want to focus this morning on part 1 and, in particular, our motion to split the bill between part 1 and part 2. Part 1 has largely been referred to as the confirmation of service portion of Bill C‑22, and part 2 is about the new lawful access, government surveillance architecture that is quite problematic, but we will leave part 2 for most of this morning.
What we are trying to do with the motion is salvage a huge mess the government has created. The government presented a bill in the fall, I believe it was Bill C‑2, with a whole host of problems. Thankfully we were able to prevent its passage. Then, instead of going back to the drawing board and coming back to Parliament with a proposal on lawful access that would be reasonable and proportionate, and that would balance the needs of law enforcement to catch the bad guys, which we all want to do, with protecting Canadians' reasonable expectation of privacy on things that are important to them, such as their location data, their metadata, whom they visit and whom they send emails and text messages to, we got Bill C‑22.
Bill C‑22 would create a whole new part 2 architecture on surveillance, which industry, technology companies and any people who know anything about tech have uniformly come out and opposed. We have not been able to hear from all those voices, because it seems to be the intent of the government to push the bill forward. We are trying to salvage a mess the government has created with Bill C‑22, because we think there are parts of part 1 that could be salvaged.
I am going to try to explain some of the problems that exist with part 1 that I think we could amend in committee. Some of those amendments are before the committee right now and will be discussed later today. If we make those amendments, then I think part 1 would be more amenable to this side of the House. We will see how interested the government is in passing a piece of the legislation, but I think the government quite clearly understands that part 2 is a problem.
Part 1 and part 2 both have problems. Let us start with the part 1 problem. Within part 1, there are, I think, three problems we want to try to solve. Part 1 would allow police to ask a whole host of providers, “Do you offer services or provide services to this particular Canadian?” Unfortunately, the type of information that police would be allowed to request, with no judicial authorization, I will note, which is different from the new production request that I will get to in a moment, also in part 1, includes a whole host of personally identifying information.
That information includes more than just someone's name. It can also include the types of services that are being offered by companies. It may be what one might, in a common-sense way, think the police are asking for, such as “Does this person have Internet with Bell or Rogers?” However, it could be far more expansive than that.
What we are proposing to do is narrow the range of the types of information that could be requested. If the Liberals are serious about the police just needing confirmation of service, okay, that is great. Let us narrow it to names and perhaps certain types of addresses, and keep the list very narrow. Right now the list is open-ended, which creates a possibility that the types of information police could get under part 1 would actually be pretty broad.
This is a point that was raised by the Privacy Commissioner in their submission to the public safety committee and the Minister of Public Safety. In fact, it was a recommendation by the Privacy Commissioner that the range of information under this provision of part 1 be narrowed, so, I believe, both the Conservatives and the Bloc Québécois proposed an amendment to do that. Unfortunately, it has not yet been accepted by the Liberals.
Worse than that, not only are the Liberals refusing to accept good-faith amendments about our concerns, but the amendment itself was proposed by the Privacy Commissioner, and they are refusing to allow the Privacy Commissioner to be present at committee when these amendments are being discussed. The Privacy Commissioner made several amendments. I just mentioned the first one. I will mention two more with respect to part 1.
During debate on this, Conservatives requested that the Privacy Commissioner be granted the same opportunity as other government-related officials who are, in the normal course, permitted to attend and to provide information to committee members and answer their questions. We asked for it as a motion. We asked for it on unanimous consent. Every time, it was denied. I have not heard a good reason why the Privacy Commissioner should not be permitted to attend committee and be available to parliamentarians, whether Conservative, Bloc, or Liberal, to answer questions about the amendments to part 1.
The second problem with part 2 is the range of providers that can be requested to provide confirmation of service. Right now, it is anyone who provides telecommunications services. That is not very well defined in the act, so it could encompass a whole host of providers beyond the normal telcos. That could include, say, a lawyer, a grocery store or the hotel someone stayed at.
Again, we have suggested an amendment, which was originally proposed by the Privacy Commissioner, to narrow to just telcos the range of who could receive this confirmation request, because that is the first thing law enforcement wants to know: Are they providing a telecom or Internet service to a particular person? Again, the Privacy Commissioner was denied the opportunity to be present at committee to answer questions on the amendment of narrowing the range of who could receive this request.
The third amendment, which I hope we will get to in committee, but I do not believe we have yet, is that once this request is made and once information is provided to law enforcement, the person who has provided the information to law enforcement should be required to produce a document that sets out what information was provided. This is so that, in case something goes wrong and we need to know what was provided, we have a document that says what they provided. Again, this is a recommendation from the Privacy Commissioner that Liberals have refused.
Those are three critical problems on the substantive side with part 1, and I will add one more to that. This is the threshold issue on the production order request, which is the second part of part 1. We have conservation of service, and then production order. The Liberals have proposed to lower the threshold for obtaining a production order, to reasonable suspicion. This would be lowered from the traditional grounds for obtaining a production order, which is reasonable grounds to believe. In this case, it would have judicial oversight of some manner, which would not necessarily have to be a judge. It could be another judicial official, such as a peace officer who is not a judge. It would not even have to be a lawyer.
For the non-lawyers or people who are not initiated in these two thresholds, I will explain that this would be an important change, because the first one, reasonable suspicion, is simply someone's subjective view that they think something bad has happened. They think a crime has been committed, so they need some information to see if they are right. That is a very low threshold. It is like a hunch. It is as if I have a hunch that someone committed a crime, so I am going to get the government to give me all their personal information. I do not think that sounds like a good idea.
What should be approved through amendment to the bill is bringing that standard back up to the standard that has been used for production orders in the Criminal Code for decades, which is reasonable grounds to believe. This means that not only would someone have to have a hunch, but they would also have to have an objective belief that there is going to be some evidence. It is not enough that someone thinks someone has committed a crime. They have to know that there is some evidence or have a good belief that there is evidence.
Through decades of jurisprudence from the Supreme Court and all common-law jurisdictions, the court has said it is not enough to just have a hunch. In the common law and now under the charter, we must have more than a hunch to invade someone's privacy and demand information about them. If the Liberals will not change that standard, then we will oppose part 1 as well.