Dany Morin

[Business of Supply, May 5th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I am troubled by the Conservative government's behaviour. I do not know what people think of a Big Brother state, but personally, I am very worried about a state like that controlled by the Conservative government opposite. The government has a long record of acting unethically and cheating during elections. I am not comfortable with the government using the tools it has to invade people's privacy.

People might remember that former minister Vic Toews introduced a bill that would have done basically the same thing we are talking about today: spy on people to find out what they are doing on the Internet. We were criticized for opposing that bill. Mr. Toews even said that we were siding with pedophiles. What an utterly reprehensible thing to say.

Canadians are not stupid. Overall, they obey the law. People in other countries think we are good people, even naively nice people.

The government is collecting information about our lives without a mandate and without judicial or police authority, regardless of what kind of legal activities we are engaged in. It is important to point out that, so far, no Conservative member has shown that charges or convictions have resulted from most of the 1.2 million government agency requests for Canadians' private information. That makes me wonder if the government even sent requests to my Internet service provider, Vidéotron, to spy on me.

We know that this government likes to divide and demonize its adversaries. Just think of all those who opposed the proposed pipelines that could result in environmental disaster. They consider anyone who opposes the pipelines to be environmental terrorists, which is simply appalling. That worries me.

I think that people at home should also be wondering whether the government has made confidential inquiries about them.

We, as MPs, do not ask, but when the authorities who are tasked with protecting Canadians' privacy ask the government or the nine Internet service providers what happened, how much data was shared and if they can get the details, those Internet service providers keep silent. Only three of the nine Internet service providers gave the Privacy Commissioner information about the number of requests made by the government and its agencies.

I have a lot of questions. There were 1.2 million requests for personal information; that is a lot of Canadians. Why were those people targeted? For what reason? There is still a lack of transparency. We still do not know why those requests were made.

Members on the other side of the House of Commons are saying that it was to put criminals in jail or identify cases of fraud. Normally, when the police or the RCMP investigate, they have the tools they need to conduct a proper investigation and avoid creating a Conservative Big Brother state.

The government says that there could be cases where a person's life is in danger. We know that, luckily, the RCMP is able to intercept, via the Internet, a message of distress from someone who wants to commit suicide. I can understand why, at that point, they do not get bogged down in the details and request a warrant. There is not enough time. The federal government has a good relationship with Internet service providers, so police can act quickly and save the life of someone in distress.

I doubt that the Conservatives would have us believe that 1.2 million Canadians wanted to commit suicide in 2011. That is not the only statistic we have. However, for 2011, the federal government and its agencies made 1.2 million requests to access information from Internet service providers.

These companies provided the government with responses 784,756 times. We conclude that for some requests, the Internet service providers did not provide any results. In the meantime, as I was saying earlier, only three of the nine Internet service providers wanted to talk about the number of requests they received from the government. If we apply the rule of thirds and extrapolate, we can therefore say that the number of requests made by the government is somewhere in the millions.

That is why the NDP felt the need to move a motion today. My colleague from Terrebonne—Blainville is doing excellent work to try protect people's privacy from the Conservative government.

Let us be honest. I get the impression that we are increasingly in the “far web” instead of the “far west”. The Conservative members across the way are comfortable with the idea of the far west, but to them, the “far web” is version 2.0.

That is why I am proud to support my colleague's motion, which I find quite reasonable. I hope that my Conservative colleagues will vote in favour of the following motion:

That, in the opinion of the House, the government should follow the advice of the Privacy Commissioner and make public the number of warrantless disclosures made by telecommunications companies at the request of federal departments and agencies; and immediately close the loophole that has allowed the indiscriminate disclosure of the personal information of law-abiding Canadians without a warrant.

I do not see what could be controversial about this motion. In light of how the Conservatives have been talking about it, I get the impression that they will vote against it.

I think it is important to note that law-abiding citizens are not subjected to investigations without a warrant. There were problems after the events of September 11, 2011, all over the world and in the United States and Canada. People would show up at the border only to be turned away for reasons that were unclear. People wonder how border officials had access to that information, and that is very concerning.

For anyone watching at home who just turned on their TV and who is wondering what we are talking about, we are talking about the absurdity of disclosing private information on Canadians to government agencies 1.2 million times.

On April 29, 2014, Interim Privacy Commissioner Chantal Bernier revealed that telecommunications companies had disclosed astronomical amounts of data to government agencies, including the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, the Canada Border Services Agency and certain provincial and municipal authorities. For example, telecommunications companies said that they had disclosed personal information to the federal government 1.2 million times in 2011.

I want to talk about IP addresses, which have come up a lot in the debate today. This address is like our identification card or business card when we are on the Internet. Every time a person goes on the Internet, whether it is via a computer, laptop or cell phone, they leave a stamp with an IP address on each site they visit. This information is also shared with the Internet service provider.

This means that when someone uses the Internet and does anything they legally have the right to do, a file is generated on their activity. Unfortunately, if the government can analyze and compile this information, this is a huge invasion of privacy, and I am very concerned about that. I think we deserve better than that in Canada.

I hope that the government will backtrack and allow people to live in peace.

[Petitions, April 29th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, like my colleagues in the House of Commons, I also wish to present a petition from the iCANdonate campaign. Canadians are calling on the government to change the legislation and allow homosexual men to donate blood and organs. These archaic regulations date back to the 1980s, and scientific evidence has shown that these kinds of regulations are no longer needed.

Along with the people of Canada, I am calling on the government and Health Canada to review these regulations.

[Protecting Canadians from Online Crime Act, April 28th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, thank you for allowing me to respond to my colleague.

To begin, I would like to commend the initiative in his riding. He mentioned that there are groups in his riding that help young people deal with bullying. That is wonderful. That is why the fourth pillar of my national bullying prevention strategy called on the government to provide more financial and other types of support to front-line organizations that are already doing good work across Canada. We do not need to reinvent the wheel.

To prove just how important this is, and I will end with this, here is a quote from a 2012 Kids Help Phone report:

...cyberbullying can be very damaging to young people’s mental health and well-being. According to recent research, cyberbullying has a range of negative social, emotional, and educational outcomes on victims, from anxiety, to poor concentration and lowered school performance, to hopelessness or helplessness, to depression and suicidality.

Clearly, the government needs to do something, something more than just Bill C-13.

[Protecting Canadians from Online Crime Act, April 28th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague from Sherbrooke for the question.

The government needs to listen to the opposition members, even if it does not agree with them, and it needs to listen to the Senate. I feel this is an odd thing for me to say. However, about two years ago, the Senate published a report on cyberbullying. As we know, the Senate has a Conservative majority. The report's first recommendation was to create a national bullying prevention strategy.

The report was published shortly after the government rejected my motion. When I read that report, I realized that even the Conservative senators wanted a national bullying prevention strategy, just as I had proposed to the Conservative members in the House. It really saddens me that the government voted against it for partisan reasons. Perhaps it needs to reread the Senate's report. It is a good report.

[Protecting Canadians from Online Crime Act, April 28th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, as is the case for the vast majority of my colleagues in the House, the subject of cyberbullying and bullying in general is something I am deeply concerned about. This issue is so important to me that I decided that my one and only bill to be debated and voted on in the House would be about bullying. That is why, almost two years ago, I introduced a national bullying prevention strategy. The Conservatives and the Bloc Québécois voted overwhelmingly against it.

Ten minutes is not a lot of time for me to say everything I want to say about this. Before I begin my speech, I would like to respond to my Conservative colleague who has just finished her speech and answers. The parliamentary secretary talked about how proactive her Conservative government is when it comes to dealing with bullying. That is a lie. It is not true. This is 2014 and we are debating Bill C-13.

In 2011, 15-year-old Jenna Bowers-Bryanton took her own life. She lived in Truro, Nova Scotia. When the media reported the news, Jenna's parents, family and friends spoke about what this young woman had gone through. They said that she had been bullied via social media. She was receiving vicious messages and comments from anonymous sources. In these messages, she was even told that she should kill herself.

According to her parents, Courtney Brown, another Nova Scotian, was bullied via Facebook in 2011. She too committed suicide when she could no longer deal with the situation. These are two cases of young Canadian women who, in 2011, were victims of Internet bullying, which is called cyberbullying. The Conservative government, which was in power at the time, did nothing.

Meanwhile, the opposition introduced two bills. We are proactive in the NDP. I spoke about how my initiative to implement a national bullying prevention strategy was defeated. The bill introduced by my colleague from Dartmouth—Cole Harbour focused strictly on closing loopholes in Canadian legislation to prevent the distribution of intimate images without consent. The Conservatives voted against this measure twice.

I therefore do not believe the Conservative member when she says that her government is proactive. That is not true. This debate has been very emotional for me. I was talking about this earlier with my parliamentary assistant, Steve Slepchik. We sent some messages back and forth about how sad we felt when preparing my speech, which is still somewhat off the cuff. We researched the number of young people who had committed suicide as a result of bullying since we were elected in 2011. Some took their own lives as a result of cyberbullying. Others were bullied at school. We in the House of Commons know the difference, and we know that bullying in schools falls more under provincial jurisdiction. However, we also know that telecommunications fall under federal jurisdiction, and that is why the federal government must play its role in that regard, a role that goes beyond the measure this government has proposed.

I would also like to remind members that the NDP is in favour of this bill since it is quite similar to a bill that we ourselves proposed. What is more, when it comes to cyberbullying, we agree with the part of this 75-page brick that closes the loophole with regard to the distribution of intimate images without consent. However, cyberbullying has a much larger scope than that.

I have another example, and it always makes me sad when I talk about it. Todd Loik, a youth from North Battleford, Saskatchewan, also took his own life at the age of 15. He was being taunted and teased online, but it was much more than that. He was threatened and bullied on Facebook, until the night he decided to take his own life because he could not take it anymore. Even his mother, who read with great sorrow the Facebook messages to her son, called them disgusting.

She even said that he received these insults on his cell phone and home computer.

The cyberbullying of young people in Canada and around the world is more than just the distribution of intimate photos without consent. Passing Bill C-13 and giving it royal assent will not give the Conservatives—who boast about enforcing law and order, but actually do very little about it—bragging rights about having done something to set limits on and curtail cyberbullying in Canada. The distribution of intimate photos without consent is just one aspect of cyberbullying.

Youth suicide is covered extensively by the media, but that is just the tip of the iceberg. Parliamentarians in every Canadian province and territory have admitted that they were victims of bullying. I am one of them. We have to do something. We must adopt a national bullying prevention strategy that will give parents more tools.

In Canada, parents who know that their child is a victim of bullying or cyberbullying do not have the tools to deal with it. The government can use the means at its disposal to inform the Canadian public and to provide parents with documentation that will help them do their job and defend and equip their children.

The Conservatives' approach would simply have us criminalize cyberbullying instead of preventing it. Unfortunately, bullying leaves scars. When a young person is the victim of bullying over the course of months or years, the harm has been done, even if the bully is punished. However, the victim is sometimes no longer even alive when the bully is punished. Is that fair? I do not think so. The families and loved ones of bullying victims, even those who do not resort to suicide, are left with scars.

I would not want any young person in Canada to be the victim of bullying, but bullying most often involves young people. It could be a matter of carelessness or cruelty on the part of these darling angels who are not aware of how much their actions can hurt others. Some young people imitate their parents or loved ones. When they see their parents saying negative things about a colleague or being mean-spirited, the children absorb this information and emulate this kind of behaviour at school, on the bus or on the Internet.

I wish we could pass legislation requiring Canadians, teens and children to show love for one another, so that we can put an end to bullying and cyberbullying, but I know that is unrealistic.

However, it is not too late to take action, and the government must not rest on its laurels. After it passes Bill C-13, it must move forward and impose further controls on cyberbullying. We need to work on prevention.

For example, the committee should look at meaningful measures to ensure that a teen who is bullied via text message, Facebook, Twitter or email can access a government-run website to complain. The teen could take a screenshot and indicate where the bullying took place, so that the police can investigate it. By working with Internet service providers, we could track down the bully and send an email warning to the owner of the IP address, which is likely the parents. That way, the parents could do their job and talk to their child about what they have done.

Those are some concrete ways to combat cyberbullying that the NDP would like to work on.

I thank my colleagues for taking all of this into consideration.

[Protecting Canadians from Online Crime Act, April 28th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my Conservative colleague for mentioning the names of some of the young people who, in the time since we were elected in 2011, unfortunately took their own lives to end the pain caused by bullying.

These days, many cases of cyberbullying do not involve the non-consensual distribution of intimate images. What does the member's government propose in Bill C-13 for those particular cases of bullying?

I read this voluminous, 75-page bill and I did not see any measures for protecting our young people from cyberbullying that does not involve the non-consensual distribution of intimate images.

Can my Conservative colleague elaborate on that?

[Protecting Canadians from Online Crime Act, April 28th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. Conservative member opposite mentioned that the government's approach was better than the approach taken in the two bills introduced by the opposition, the NDP.

Based on my motion calling for a national bullying prevention strategy, we could have tackled many different kinds of cyberbullying. The Conservative bill deals only with sharing intimate photographs without people's consent. Many young people in Canada are being bullied in ways that do not include nude pictures being passed around. This can include hateful or threatening comments. Unfortunately, the government bill does not cover that.

Not only does the Conservative bill not meet Canadians' expectations, but it covers only one small part of the equation of cyberbullying.

Given what I just said, how can my Conservative colleague say that the NDP approach, which was more comprehensive, was not as good as the government's approach, which covers only the sharing of intimate photographs without consent?

[Protecting Canadians from Online Crime Act, April 28th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, the NDP will be voting in favour of this bill, because it is very similar to the bill introduced by my colleague from Nova Scotia. However, I find the lack of prevention included in the bill really unfortunate.

I understand that the government wanted to focus on criminalization, but could the bill not have been improved by placing greater emphasis on prevention, as well as criminalization?

The House of Commons wants to protect as many young people as possible from the scourge of bullying, and right now, I do not see much in the way of prevention in this bill.

[Health, April 8th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, perhaps the Conservative government should listen to seniors' groups, which are complaining about its cuts to health care funding. According to a survey conducted by the Canadian Medical Association, seniors' access to health care is a top priority for Canadians.

Needs are growing, but what is the federal government doing? It is making massive, unilateral cuts to health care funding. There will be 12% less funding over the next 25 years. That is a huge cut, and our seniors will suffer for it, even if the Minister of Health does not think so.

Will the government finally agree to work with the provinces to develop a pan-Canadian strategy for seniors' health care?

[Health, April 3rd, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, the government is obviously trying to take people for fools. In the past, the minister clearly stated that drug safety reviews would be made public. Now she is planning to keep a significant amount of the information that people are entitled to secret. Doctors count on that information to make informed decisions that have a significant impact on the health of Canadians.

How will keeping 80% of the reviews secret enhance patient safety?