Harold Albrecht

[Business of Supply, February 28th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak to this motion which points out the fundamental nature of privacy in Canadian law and calls on the government to ensure that the legislation it proposes engenders a respect for privacy. It is on this point that I will speak. I will highlight some of the ways in which Bill C-30 would reflect continuing respect for the privacy and civil liberties of Canadians.

One of the most consistent themes in Bill C-30 is privacy with precision. Every investigative power would have specific and appropriate privacy safeguards in place, calibrated to the level of intrusiveness of the techniques for which the power is designed. In plain language, the standard for authorizing an investigative technique would be directly related to its level of intrusiveness. Bill C-30 would move Canada away from a one size fits all approach where a single investigative power can authorize a wide range of investigative actions toward more specialized investigative powers drafted with particular investigative actions in mind.

I will give a few examples of how Bill C-30 would promote privacy with precision. The first of these is production orders. A production order is a court order that requires a third party who has possession or control of certain types of data or documents to deliver this material to the police within a specified period of time. Production orders are used in cases where it is more practical to have the holder of the documents or data retrieve information for the police rather than having the police conduct the search themselves with a search warrant. The use of production orders not only offers the police increased efficiency in protecting all of us, but also provides increased privacy protection for all Canadians. Third-party holders of computer data are best placed to be able to locate the requested information precisely and without inadvertently collecting information that is outside the scope of the request. Therefore, as an investigative technique, production orders actually help to minimize inadvertent intrusions on privacy. Production orders enhance privacy.

Production orders already exist in the Criminal Code. There is already a general production order as well as one that relates to a narrow set of financial information. Because of the broad nature of a general production order, it has a higher judicial threshold than the financial production order. To use a general production order, police must satisfy a judge that they have reasonable grounds to believe that an offence has been committed and that the information requested would provide evidence of that offence. However, most investigations are not general in nature. Often the requirements of an investigation are quite targeted. In those cases, it makes sense to create specific tools that would allow police to obtain the specific data that they are looking for and which are designed to reflect the expectation of privacy associated with that kind of data.

Bill C-30 proposes the creation of three new production orders that have been designed with specific investigative techniques in mind. We are proposing to create a production order for data related to the routing of telecommunications, which would be known as transmission data; a production order for tracking data; and a production order designed to trace specified communications.

This last type of production order would be a very important tool for addressing the complexities of modern communication. It would allow police to trace the origin of a communication that may have gone through several different telecommunication providers before it reached its final destination. It would protect Canadians from inadvertent intrusions into their privacy.

I cannot stress enough that all of these production orders would have important built-in privacy protections. For example, both a production order to trace specified communications and a production order for transmission data relate to transmission data. Transmission data is a term clearly defined in the Criminal Code to expressly exclude the content of communication. Not even the subject line of an email would be available using either of these powers. It is important to stress that. We hear about people being concerned that others would be able to access the content of our emails. Not even the subject line would be available for these powers.

Information in the possession or control of an individual that does not fall under any of the specialized production orders could be obtained by the police using the general production order. However, the police would need to satisfy a judge of the higher belief-based standard. The same applies today.

Important privacy safeguards have been included throughout Bill C-30. Each investigative power in the bill has been carefully designed to strike a balance between the safety and security and the rights and liberties of all Canadians, such as preservation orders. This kind of tool is essential to our ability to conduct effective investigations in an era where crucial evidence can be deleted in the blink of an eye. Police officers will be able to do their jobs without fear that the data they need will be lost or deleted either intentionally or inadvertently as a matter of regular business practice during the period it takes to obtain a warrant or production order for that data.

If a police officer does not get a court order or search warrant to obtain the preserved data before the demand expires, any data that would not be retained in the ordinary course of business would be destroyed. The data would not be provided to the police without a court order or warrant. Should the preservation demand need to be extended, police officers would have to obtain a preservation order from a judge or justice. The order would then give them up to 90 days to get a production order or search warrant to obtain the data that had been preserved.

If the police are unable to get the production order or warrant by the time the preservation order expires, the person in possession of the preserved data is required to destroy it unless his or her business practices otherwise require that it be retained. What this means is that only specific data would be preserved under this scheme for a limited period of time and only for the purpose of the investigation. An even more fundamental privacy safeguard of this scheme is that data which would not otherwise be kept by a business would be destroyed as soon as it was no longer needed for an investigation.

These safeguards exemplify our efforts to respect privacy throughout the bill and respect privacy rights under Canadian law.

With regard to respect for privacy, let me quote Matt Torigian, Chief of Waterloo Regional Police Service and president of the Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police. His statement clearly rebuts the fears expressed by the opposition. He stated:

We (the police) would also, en masse, be the first group to speak out on anything that has the potential to violate the integrity and the rights and freedoms of Canadians.

These are just a few examples of how Bill C-30 would promote privacy. As I have noted, the government's approach is one privacy with precision, well-defined investigative powers with strong privacy safeguards that will have been carefully calibrated to a particular investigative context. Our government believes we have proposed legislation that will ensure Canada's laws adequately protect Canadians online.

We also, however, expect Parliament to conduct a thorough review of our proposed legislation to ensure that we do strike the right balance between protecting Canadians from crime while respecting Canadians' privacy rights. I would ask hon. members to exercise due diligence in that review.

I will highlight the need for this legislation. Chief Torigian has noted that Bill C-30 would require the same types of judicial approval as old-fashioned wiretaps and would in cases even increase the regulatory burden. However, as Chief Torigian said:

We need to ensure that investigative bodies in Canada have the necessary tools to safeguard institutions, public bodies and private individuals.

As a grandfather of nine grandchildren, I cannot overstate the need to update our laws so they adequately protect all Canadians from online exploitation.

[Business of Supply, February 28th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague for his speech, and the public safety minister and the department for the good work they are doing to bring balance back to the issue of the safety and security especially of our children. We read about child exploitation rings, and it is important that our law enforcement officers have the tools they need to intercept if, unfortunately, these situations occur and to bring these people to justice.

My question relates to a question that was raised by an NDP colleague earlier this morning. This legislation was tabled by the Liberal government in 2005, and was reintroduced in private members' bills subsequently. The deputy prime minister and minister of public safety at that time, Anne McLellan, stated:

We consulted extensively to ensure this legislation strikes the right balance between the needs of police to maintain their investigative capabilities and the business considerations of the industry, while respecting Canadians’ privacy, rights and freedoms.

Why does the member think the Liberal Party today is trying to make this look as though we are somehow going beyond what was originally intended, which is to provide a balance between privacy and ensuring the safety and security especially of our children?

[Petitions, February 28th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, I have the honour to table a number of petitions signed by over 200 residents from the Waterloo region, Toronto, Manitoba, northern Ontario and British Columbia.

The petitioners are calling on the government to meet the public health challenges posed by suicide by adopting legislation that would recognize suicide as a public health issue, provide guidelines for suicide prevention, promote collaboration and knowledge exchange regarding suicide and promote evidence-based solutions to prevent suicide and its aftermath.

[Standing Orders and Procedure, February 17th, 2012]

Madam Speaker, it is obvious that we need to see our leadership role, the visionary role the House of Commons plays across our country, as extremely important. That is one of the reasons why some of the initiatives have come forward in the last number of days in the House, as they relate to private members' legislation. It is simply a matter of a leadership role.

However, I am sure my hon. colleague would agree that there are situations where there are no similarities. We just had a question earlier about the Senate and the Senate bills. Obviously, provincial houses do not have that issue to deal with.

This party, on our side, is very committed to modernizing the Standing Orders so they reflect modern reality. We have already indicated that we would welcome input from members on all sides of the House, and we have committed to doing an in-depth study of this at the procedures and House affairs committee. We are not going to hobble consideration of this to just a couple of meetings but are going to give it as much time as we need to get it right. It is important that we get it right because this will help to improve the efficiency of this place.

We have been sent here to get work done on behalf of Canadians, and too often I hear, and I am sure my colleague hears as well, that things seem to move so slowly here. Like the one case I used as an example, if we could improve our efficiency by 60%, that would be fantastic.

[Standing Orders and Procedure, February 17th, 2012]

Madam Speaker, these are the kinds of suggestions that are important to get on the table today and throughout the course of our study at the procedures and House affairs committee. All of us here know that as private members we have the option to introduce one private member's bill per session. Generally speaking, if a member is in the early party of the draw, he or she will have the opportunity to do that. In addition, we also have the opportunity to sponsor one of the bills coming from the Senate.

I am more than happy to discuss how that procedure is currently mandated, with a view to possibly amending it in a way that would still make it possible for those bills to get here without their necessarily always taking precedence over some of the important legislation that private members in this House have already put on the table.

[Standing Orders and Procedure, February 17th, 2012]

Madam Speaker, we do have a good working relationship at the procedure and House affairs committee. It is one of the committees of this House that really works in a non-partisan way for the advantage of the House of Commons and for the efficiency of the House. However, it is important that we do study.

One of the NDP members commented that the reason we are doing this review is that things are not working. Any level of government, whether a school board or a municipal or provincial or federal government, has the obligation to review its procedures. If we think these procedures are good for all time, it certainly negates our need to be here.

However, as it relates to the question the member raised, I would point out that she was talking about private members' bills but I was speaking about ways and means motions, which obviously relate to government bills. My position is simply that we should have equal treatment of that system all five days of the week, not have it available for two days only, Mondays and Fridays, but on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays be hobbled by the necessity of leaving that for another potential sitting, which could be one day, two days or a number of weeks later.

[Standing Orders and Procedure, February 17th, 2012]

Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to discuss the Standing Orders. We have already heard many good suggestions today that warrant further discussion at the procedure and House affairs committee.

I will bring forward a couple of new suggestions in my presentation, suggestions which I also plan to raise as we serve on that committee. The suggestions which I will bring forward have one simple goal, and that is to make this House run more efficiently.

Before I do that, I want to take note that preparing for this debate only affirmed for me the importance of having this discussion and actually trying to simplify the Standing Orders, because a read through the Standing Orders is very painful and difficult.

Therefore, it is appropriate for me to preface my comments with some thanks. First, your office, Madam Speaker, and the office of the Clerk play an invaluable role to the functioning of this Parliament. Hon. members can only make sense of some of the complicated rules and the maze of procedures with the help of the clerks and analysts, and that does not just apply to this House, but for me as a member of Parliament serving on a committee, I cannot say enough about how much I appreciate, and we appreciate, the work of the clerks who serve there, the work of the analysts and much of the research that is done to help us do an effective job as parliamentarians. My thanks to each of them for that.

I also want to offer thanks to those Canadians who are watching this debate today, if there are three or four, and who might read Hansard.

While the Standing Orders are complicated, they do set the rules of the game for this House and they are vitally important. For that reason, I also want to thank journalists who are following the proceedings of the House who face the challenge of making sense of all of these procedures for their audiences.

To begin with, there are many small alterations to the rules that could make a big difference to the efficient operation of this House and the convenience of its members. Often it is a simple matter of how the order of certain proceedings are presented in the Standing Orders or our order of operations, if you will.

For example, prior to 2001, the order of business for routine proceedings was arranged in such a way that the rubric “Statements by Ministers” came before the rubric, “Introduction of Government Bills”. If the government wanted to make a ministerial statement on a bill that it had just introduced and wanted to do so in the House, it would have to wait until the next day, since it was against the rules to divulge the contents of a bill before it was introduced in the House of Commons.

In 2001, the Special Committee on the Modernization and Improvement of the Procedures of the House of Commons looked into this. The committee's suggestion was to re-order routine proceedings to allow for the introduction of government bills prior to statements by ministers, a sensible little change that opened up a positive opportunity to members of this House.

We now have a similar situation with respect to the process for bills based on ways and means motions. Before taxation legislation can be read a first time, a notice of ways and means motion must first be tabled in the House by a minister of the Crown. The minister, usually on the same day the motion is tabled, makes a request to the Speaker that an order of the day be designated for consideration of the motion on a subsequent day. Waiting the next day to vote on something that was just tabled makes perfect sense. That day allows members an opportunity to review legislation before they are called to vote on it.

After a ways and means motion is adopted, it stands as an order of the House to bring in a bill or bills based on the provisions of that motion. It is at this stage where I believe we can improve the efficiency of the procedure relating to the introduction of taxation legislation.

Our current difficulty is that on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, introduction of government bills comes before government orders. Ways and means motions can only be moved during government orders, so if we vote on a ways and means motion on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, we cannot introduce the bill based on that ways and means motion until the following sitting day. Depending on where we are on the calendar, the delay could be days, weeks, or even months, and I believe this delay serves no benefit.

While the ways and means motion contains the tax measures in the bill, there are other components associated with the proposal that may be contained in the legislation. In these cases members do not get the whole picture on the same day the ways and means motion was adopted.

In our current rules, there are two days of the week where we could vote on a ways and means motion and introduce the tax bill on the same day: Mondays and Fridays.

I do not want to speak for all the party whips in the House, but as deputy whip for the government, I can honestly say that voting on Mondays at 10:00 or on Fridays is not ideal. I am not suggesting a privileged process for bills based on a ways and means motion. The 48-hour notice required before a bill can be introduced would continue to apply to all bills. What I do want is the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs to examine the peculiarity of an additional delay to introduce bills based on ways and means motions on some days of the week but not others.

It should be noted that the timing for the introduction of bills that are not based on ways and means motions, whether they be government bills or private members' bills, is the same for each sitting day of the week.

Here we have an opportunity whereby altering the order of business, as was done with ministerial statements and the introduction of government bills in 2001, could increase the efficiency of the House by 60%. As I said in my opening comments, the primary reason to examine the Standing Orders is to improve the efficiency of the House of Commons. In this case, our efficiency and effectiveness would improve by making what is now possible on only two days of the week possible on all five days of the week. In this case, we may not want to move routine proceedings or government orders on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, but we could achieve the same result by simply allowing one proceeding to follow another proceeding, which is not currently allowed under our rules.

My suggestion to the procedure and House affairs committee would be to come up with a proposal that following the adoption of a ways and means motion would allow a bill based thereon to be introduced and made public immediately. If the current rules allow these bills to be introduced on the same day following the adoption of a ways and means motion on Mondays and Fridays, there is no reason not to extend that same convenience and efficiency to Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.

That is my first idea.

My next suggestion deals with the continuance of committee memberships. Currently in the Standing Orders the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs is charged with being a striking committee which presents a report to the House outlining the memberships of standing and standing joint committees. When this report is adopted by the House, a notice of meeting is sent so that the business of the committee can begin with the election of a chair.

Standing Order 104(1) stipulates that this is done at the beginning of each session of Parliament, which is entirely reasonable. However, it also requires that the same procedure happen again after each Labour Day. Unlike the situation at the start of a session at this time, after each Labour Day committees already will be in operation. The only result of this requirement is a needless interruption of committee business. It is not clear to me how it helps the committees to fulfill their mandate from the House to have their work interrupted in this way.

The procedure and House affairs committee has the ability to change memberships at any time without being required to do so at a particular point in the calendar. It only makes sense to maintain the current practice at the start of each session, but eliminate the requirement to do it after each Labour Day. This is just one example of some relatively small changes that I believe the procedure and House affairs committee should consider in its deliberations.

I am looking forward to our committee's review as we work to make this House more efficient and modernize our Standing Orders.

[Petitions, February 17th, 2012]

Madam Speaker, I have the honour to present a number of petitions signed by over 500 people from the Waterloo region, northern Ontario, Manitoba and British Columbia.

The petitioners call upon the government to recognize the challenges posed by suicide by adopting legislation that would recognize suicide as a public health issue, provide guidelines for suicide prevention, promote collaboration and knowledge exchange regarding suicide, promote evidence-based solutions to prevent suicide and its aftermath and to define best practices for the prevention of suicide.

[Suicide Prevention, February 17th, 2012]

Madam Speaker, I rise to thank members of this House for their strong support of Bill C-300, an act respecting a federal framework for suicide prevention.

Bill C-300 enjoyed the unanimous support of my own Conservative Party, the NDP official opposition, the Liberal Party and the hon. members for Saanich—Gulf Islands and Edmonton East. I thank each and every one of them.

One week ago the House debated this bill. In that short week there have likely been 350 hospitalizations due to suicidal behaviours, 1,500 visits to emergency rooms, 7,000 attempts at suicide and, unfortunately, 70 of those likely ending in death.

Before the vote, Tana Nash of the Waterloo Region Suicide Prevention Council expressed her hope that Parliament would continue this vital conversation.

On behalf of Tana and the many others working on the front line to save lives, I extend my heartfelt thanks to this House for supporting Bill C-300.

[Petitions, February 15th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, I have the honour to present a number of petitions signed by over 300 people from the Waterloo region, as well as from Vancouver, British Columbia.

The petitioners draw the attention of Parliament to the fact that suicide kills, on average, 10 Canadians each and every day, which means there are almost 4,000 preventable deaths each year.

Suicide is not just a mental health issue, but also is a public health issue. Actions to prevent suicide by communities, governments, organizations and individuals across Canada would be enhanced by coordination and information sharing.

Therefore, the petitioners are calling on Parliament to meet the public health challenges posed by suicide by adopting legislation that would recognize suicide as a public health issue, provide guidelines for suicide prevention, promote collaboration and knowledge exchange across sectors, and promote evidence-based solutions to prevent suicide and its aftermath and to define best practices for the prevention of suicide.