Madam Speaker, I am very pleased to speak to Bill C-46 today.
At the outset, I note a quieter tone in the House today than when the debate began on this bill yesterday. We had a number of attack dogs from the government's side getting up and accusing members of the opposition, particularly the Liberal opposition, defenceless though it was, of trying to initiate an election, a $300 million waste of time, and blaming the Liberals for the fact that somehow this bill was finally getting debate when in fact this bill, in its previous incarnations, had been around for a number of years now, actually going into past Parliaments.
I thought it was something that the government should refrain from doing because the reality is that it is this government that actually passed legislation for fixed election dates some two or three years ago and then went about ignoring its own legislation. Just shortly after it passed the legislation, it desperately looked for ways to circumvent its own laws and called an election one year ahead of schedule last year, causing that same $300 million useless expense that it is blaming the Liberals for right now.
Given that today we are in a much calmer environment here, this is an example of all three parties working together and I believe this is yet another bill that the government is going to see action on. The NDP will be supporting this bill to get it to committee and I would say that as with any bill, there are questions about particular parts of the bill, interpretations of the bill, and those are issues that we will deal with at committee.
I firmly believe, after having a number of years in elected office, that it is always better, if possible, to support a bill at second reading to get it to committee, provided that one is voting for the principle of the bill at second reading. It has to be, in my view, a pretty bad bill not to get support at second reading.
When the bill gets to committee, that is the time to look at the clauses of the bill on a clause by clause basis, try to make amendments and changes that we want, and then at that point, when it comes back to the House, decide whether or not we can support the amended bill.
With regard to the general concept and the general principles involved in this bill, there is no question that this bill is one that merits support and that should be passed to committee.
Bill C-46 is an act to amend the Criminal Code, the Competition Act and the Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Act. The bill sets out to provide police with updated powers to investigate, execute warrants, and charge individuals who are using digital technology to commit crimes. Specifically, the bill addresses gaps in the Criminal Code dealing with search warrants and production orders to permit police to obtain transmission data, which include text messages, files and photographs from telephones.
As well, Bill C-46 proposes to broaden the scope of warrants to allow tracking warrants, which would permit police to remotely activate existing tracking devices found in certain types of technology such as cellphones and tracking devices in some cars, and would also continue to permit the police to install a separate device that would allow for tracking. One of the members from the Bloc, earlier this morning, talked about criminal gangs stealing expensive cars, that those cars could be tracked overseas and recovered through this legislation.
In addition, the bill would create a new preservation order that would require a telecommunications service provider to safeguard and not delete its data related to a specific communication or a subscriber when police believe that data will assist in an investigation.
The bill proposes modifications to the Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Act, and it widens the scope of assistance that Canada could provide to other countries in fighting cybercrime. Amendments to the Competition Act would provide the Competition Bureau and police with adequate tools to investigate computer-related crime.
Finally, Bill C-46 proposes the creation of two new Criminal Code offences. A new offence would be created to prohibit anyone from using a computer system such as the Internet to agree or make arrangements with another person for the purpose of sexually exploiting a child. Currently, the Criminal Code prohibits anyone from using the Internet to communicate directly with a child for the purpose of facilitating child sexual exploitation, but it does not prohibit people from agreeing or making arrangements with another person to sexually exploit a child.
As well, a new offence would be created making it a Criminal Code violation for possessing a computer virus for the purpose of committing mischief.
New Democrats agree that we must be tougher on crime and we should be certainly tougher on Internet-based crime and that in fact we should have a zero tolerance for child pornography.
Canadians also need to know that when they use the Internet or they use email what their privacy rights are.
The bill appears to reintroduce warrantless searches which would allow police to conduct searches without proper oversight. We are already hearing serious warnings from people like the Privacy Commissioner. I asked one or two questions about that this morning and she has some very important observations about this area. That is something, once again, that we are going to have to deal with at the committee stage.
We also have some concerns that the stakeholders have to be properly consulted. I know that at committee we dealt with another bill a few months ago, the charities bill, which is a bill that had been through several incarnations, and through several parliaments. We are still finding that only a small number of charities actually even know that the bill exists.
It seems hard to believe that if the government is doing its job that it would not be sending out letters to thousands of charities across the country telling them that such a bill is before the House and it is in their particular interest to make representations and get involved in the process. I think that is the sort of problem that we all face that we can only dig down so far with legislation. We only have so much time to do the consultations and sometimes it is hard to shake out and stir up the stakeholders to get them involved. However, that is something that we definitely want to do on this bill.
We think it is very important to modernize these laws. It is not only this law that needs modernization. There are many laws that we have on the books which go back to the horse and buggy days. We have to upgrade and update these laws to get them into the computer age. That fact is that even in five or ten years the technology can change so much that we are basically playing catch up. That is what I find as a legislator that we seem to be always playing catch up from a legislative point of view.
We need to get tough on criminals like Internet predators while still allowing ordinary Canadians privacy when sending e-mails to friends and family.
The previous Bloc member asked a question just minutes ago about that very point. It is a very difficult balance between the privacy issues, protecting people's privacy and certainly having the public protected. That is the exercise that we have to deal with at this particular time.
New Democrats agree that we must be tougher on crime, tough on Internet-based crime and have zero tolerance for child pornography. We support modernizing our laws to ensure that cellphones and the Internet are not a haven for criminal activity. We want to work with the government to ensure that these changes are done right.
Now that the Internet is in place, particularly since 1995, criminals adapt very quickly. If they can get away with frauds and scams by using the Internet and do it in an offshore place where there are really no laws against what they are doing, or they can hide and not suffer the consequences, then they will do that. We need to adapt to these changes by giving our police forces the tools they need to catch up to the criminals and stop them before they get away with their crimes. We in the NDP are very interested in combatting cybercrime.
We are pleased with a number of provisions in the bill and one is the creation of a new Criminal Code offence to prohibit people from agreeing or making arrangements with another person to sexually exploit a child. Another one is the creation of a new Criminal Code offence for possessing a computer virus for the purpose of committing mischief.
As I indicated before, much of the bill is taken up with amendments to definitions of various terms to reflect modern technologies. We have not seen any compelling evidence yet that the current definitions impede police in their investigations but we are certainly not opposed to getting the updated language in there to reflect the realities of today.
I mentioned before that the Privacy Commissioner had some opinions about the legislation. She has called for assurances that any legislative proposals on surveillance be minimally intrusive. She has called for a limit on the use of new powers and ensure that appropriate legal thresholds remain in place for court authorizations. She also has asked that the draft regulations be reviewed publicly before coming into force and that we include effective oversight. I am not exactly certain what she has in mind there but oversight, in any type of government legislation, is good.
We only need to look at the lack of oversight in the eHealth file, which started out as, and still is, a very positive and solid idea, but 10 years after the start of the eHealth programs, not only in the federal government but in the provincial Governments of Ontario, there is absolutely nothing to show for it. I could even go back further to the Manitoba government before 1999 where it spent $50 million on an eHealth program and yet, at the end of the day, there was absolutely nothing to show for it.
The federal government feels that 16% of Canadians will have electronic health files by perhaps 2010. The cost is about $1.6 billion and that $1.6 billion was supposed to cover the whole country. I must ask a rhetorical question. How do these programs get out of control? I have always been a very big supporter of e-government files, d eHealth files and e-commerce files. In fact, when the legislation was introduced in Manitoba in 2000, the most comprehensive e-commerce legislation in the country, I was the MLA in charge of putting it all together.
At that time, we were trying to promote e-commerce but people were reluctant to buy things online. It was just the very beginning of the process. I remember getting a piece of consumer legislation in that legislation, which I think, to this day, only exists in Manitoba, and that was the requirement that if someone bought a product or service online and, as the consumer, did not get that product or service, then the credit card company was responsible for reimbursing the consumer. That was peculiar to Canada at the time but I took it from one of two or three American states that had that legislation at the time. Ten years ago, we put that piece of consumer legislation and several others dealing with electronic commerce into an omnibus bill dealing with electronic commerce to promote the idea.
However, at the time we could never have even comprehended what in fact would happen over those ensuring years. As a matter of fact, we had the best government-secured system in the country in terms of security. Our people were so good that when they left the Manitoba government we were paying them maybe $100,000 a year, which we thought was excessive. However, one of them went to work for the Bank of Montreal and I think his salary was $300,000 a year. He lived in Toronto anyway, so he made $300,000 a year and simply walked to work, as opposed to flying back and forth to Manitoba every week for $100,000. That is just to show members how important Internet security actually became at about that time.
Members will recall that there were viruses afloat in those days that crippled the British government. The B.C. government was down for a day or two. I think Manitoba was the only government that we were aware of that withstood all of these cyber attacks. I used to get printouts and reports, certainly not a daily basis but any time I wanted them, which would show how many attacks the government would have.
I think any of the members of the government can talk to their online people and can get that information themselves. They can go back and ask how secure our government's system is. They can ask about the number of attacks, the type of attacks and where they are coming from. I think they might be surprised to see those results. They might be positively surprised now because those attacks may be dropping. I have not followed the file as much as I did in the past years.
When Reg Alcock was here he was a big champion of e-government and pushed the file. He obviously lost track of that eHealth file somewhere because it is not producing the results that he would have hoped for. However, his heart and his head were in the right place. He certainly pushed Prime Minister Martin on that whole e-government file. I would guess that the file has been essentially forgotten under the Conservative government. It is just a guess at this point, but my guess is that the Conservatives have gone for simply retrenchment and have taken out no real new initiative since Reg left that particular file. I checked into the secured channel just about a year and a half ago and they were basically retooling the whole concept.
The government has a duty to get its systems and services online as quickly as possible and make them transactional so that people can get proper service. In Manitoba, we have student aid applications online. We did not want students driving 100 miles to Winnipeg to stand in line at the student aid branch for an hour to fill out an application and then drive all the way home again, so we put the application online.
All government services should be put on line. Not only should the government have the applications on line, but it should make them transactional so people can pay for the service with their credit card and have a much happier experience dealing with the government than having to wait in line at government offices. This is something that I do not hear much from the government on and I think we should be looking at that. I intend to ask more questions about that in the future.
What sort of oversight will we have on the bill? I sure hope it is a better oversight than what we had on the eHealth file and other files where there were boondoggles in the government.
I think the five year parliamentary review that was suggested by the Privacy Commissioner is a good idea. However, I need to know whether there will be a review after five years, which is a great idea, or even a sunset clause after five years given the great changes in technology that could happen over a period like that.
