Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have a chance to speak to the resolution brought forward by the member for Malpeque. It is very timely, as we all know, given the recent revelations by the reports in the news media over the last several days about the activities of CSEC, with respect to what is the newest word in Canadians’ lexicon “metadata”, so-called, but what we are really talking about is the collection of information about Canadians.
I am old enough to have been in law school when legislation was brought in that allowed wiretapping, intercepting telephone conversations between two people by a third person. It is illegal, under the Criminal Code of Canada, unless one is a peace officer who has a warrant from a judge. The judge would only give that warrant if the police could convince the judge they had tried other methods that failed and had reason to believe that the person whose communications they were going to intercept was involved in the commission of a criminal offence and this would provide evidence.
That was the level of privacy and security intended by the Criminal Code then and now.
However, what we have today is this organization, which is not supposed to spy on Canadians, collecting information about where this cellphone is, what other cellphones it communicates with, where it travels, and whether it goes through this or that place. Every three seconds, this cellphone emits a signal that says where it is.
Not only do we have the calls it makes, who they are made to, the length of those calls, and how often those calls take place, but all of this is being collected. It does not seem to be a one-off. The director of CSEC said yesterday in the Senate committee that this was not anything special, that we were not targeting Canadians, that we were not targeting anybody, that we were just doing our normal collection of data, that there was no data collected through any monitoring of the operations of any airport, and that it was just a part of our normal global collection.
That is what we are dealing with. We now have confirmation that it does this regularly.
We did not know about that. We did not know it was legal. Most Canadians would not have thought it was legal. In fact, we have privacy commissioners and other experts saying that it is not legal, so what do we do about that?
Before I move on, Mr. Speaker, I will put on the record that I am splitting my time with the hon. member for Alfred-Pellan.
That is the state of play right now. We have a situation in which Canadians do not know. Part of the reason they do not know is that they are, I think, being misled when the Minister of National Defence gets up in this House and says, “Oh, we're not targeting Canadians. We are just collecting all their data. We're not targeting particular Canadians. We don't know whether they're Canadians or who they are. We're just collecting this information. We're not tracking Canadians. No, we're tracking the cellphones of anyone who happens to be moving around in airports or maybe anywhere else.”
Is that the truth? As they say in the courts, is that the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? No, it is not. In fact, it is anything but the truth. Going by Mr. Forrester's explanation, the truth of the matter seems to be that we are collecting this data as a matter of course, as part of our operations.
This is not a Canadian issue, per se. It is an issue in the United States and elsewhere. It is a political issue in the United States, this so-called “collection of metadata”. It is such an important issue that the President of the United States suggested, a week or 10 days ago, this information being collected is sometimes referred to as the “haystack”, the haystack of information, and that we might be looking for a needle in the haystack.
Instead of looking for the needle, we are actually collecting, through our governments, the entire haystack.
What President Obama has said is that the haystack is not going to be controlled and in the possession of the National Security Agency. It is going to have to be kept separate and out of its control unless it has a reason to search that data for any particular information; then it has to go to a court and get a warrant. That is what America has done in response to the concerns raised by the public as a result of the recent revelations. That how seriously it is being taken there.
This one-day debate is important. Yesterday at the Senate there was a one-day event at which senators asked their questions in public about policy and practices. However, that is not true parliamentary oversight. We get true parliamentary oversight on behalf of the members of the public who elect people to this place if we have a system to do that. As I said in my question for the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Public Safety, Australia has it, New Zealand has it, the United Kingdom has it, and the United States has it, so why do we not have it?
The national security adviser to the Prime Minister, who also appeared before the Senate committee yesterday, said he was not sure all that was needed and that there would have to be caution. No one is suggesting we throw caution to the winds. These are some serious, sensitive matters. They should be non-partisan matters. They should be matters on which members of Parliament can exercise the obligation of oversight and do our duty as parliamentarians to hold the government to account in a special way.
We do have a legislature and we have the executive. All this is in the hands of the executive. CSEC reports to the Minister of National Defence—not even to the Department of National Defence, but directly to the Minister of National Defence. The commissioner reports to the Minister of National Defence and issues an annual report.
The oversight mechanisms have been decried by privacy experts. Both the federal interim commissioner and the Ontario commissioner have spoken out quite strongly on this as not adequate, not strong enough, and not doing the job. We have to have a legislative role here.
The motion calls for a particular committee. You, Mr. Speaker, were a part of that proposal in 2004. We are not sure we need a committee of parliamentarians, as opposed to a committee of Parliament. We are not sure that this should report to the Prime Minister as opposed to Parliament. In fact, as New Democrats, we are not sure whether senators or even the Senate should be part of this at all, so we cannot wholeheartedly support the legislation as written in 2005. In fact, we have proposed a parliamentary committee to come up with the best method of parliamentary oversight. However, something needs to be done.
I cannot pass up talking about the small irony discovered in the last few hours about CSEC and the commissioner. We talk about the commission and how important the commissioner is. He is important and plays an important role, but I am not sure he has all the information he needs. In fact, the previous commissioner said that he did not have access to the information he needed, and he could not come up with the right kind of conclusion. There have been complaints by the Federal Court about how it is operating with other agencies and going beyond warrants in what information is being given.
However, the irony is this. People can complain to the commissioner of CSEC, but they can only do so by mail. The reason is that a complaint may contain sensitive information. Complaints are accepted only by mail addressed to the commissioner at a given address. It is only by mail because it is sensitive information that someone else might discover if we sent it by email.
I wonder who. I am not normally paranoid, although I have been accused of it.
Just for the sake of this great irony, can members guess what the CSEC commissioner's address is? It is Box 1984, as in 1984. If we want to complain to the commissioner of CSEC, we must send our information to Box 1984.
We can be sure Big Brother will be watching.
