Official Hansard
Madam Speaker, I am rising at this hour to speak to the programming motion on Bill C‑22. I have heard the speeches of a number of colleagues in this place with whom I agree, particularly my colleagues from the Bloc Québécois and the New Democratic Party. As I explained earlier, in an answer to an earlier discussion with the hon. member for Vancouver East, the position we were in was not as members of the committee but as members of Parliament with the right to participate in the development of amendments. As we were not full members of the committee, our participation in the public safety committee, and when I speak of “we”, I mean the member for Vancouver East and me, was more limited than that of members who are full members of the committee. I have been very concerned, from the very beginning, which was June 2025’s tabling of Bill C‑2, the so-called strong borders act, there was an astonishing, broad, deep coalition of groups, over 300, that came together to oppose the bill on many grounds relating to human rights, as well as to privacy and overreach. Again, I just want to preface my discussion of Bill C‑22 by placing it, for citizens watching this, in the context of how we moved away from Bill C‑2, the strong borders act, which was strongly opposed, in June 2025. I do not think I have ever seen quite a diverse coalition. Certainly there are some bills that invite a lot of organizations to get involved and individual citizens to get involved. There was a breadth and a depth here that was certainly unusual. The government realized it was in trouble. There was so much opposition to Bill C‑2. When we came back in the fall, I thought to myself that the bill, over the course of the summer, had been dumped and replaced as we now had Bill C‑12. It is not a completely different bill. It is largely the same chunks of language that were in the strong borders act, Bill C‑2, taking out the parts that were an overreach into privacy, for instance, the sections originally in Bill C‑2 that said that postal workers could open the mail and such things. There were a number of examples that got dropped. The thing that is unusual about this, and I know it is complicated and I know the hour is late, but why would a government introduce a bill, which is widely panned, and then bring in a different bill, as opposed to amending the bill it already had on the Order Paper? I have not seen this before. It then brought in Bill C-12, which had most of what was in the strong borders act, and left Bill C-2 on the Order Paper while continuing to force through Bill C-12. Time will tell when Bill C-12 will be challenged in the courts globally because it violates our charter commitments to the protection of refugee rights. I speak of that in terms of the global convention on refugees. It may also offend the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but I am speaking globally. It pulled that protection out from under people who had expectations. They had expectations of being in Canada but did not know their access to claiming refugee rights would be taken away so abruptly. In any case, this has been bizarre. We had Bill C-2 staying on the Order Paper, and we had Bill C-12, which was largely language from Bill C-2, being pushed through. The whole time we were thinking that at least we had avoided the surveillance concerns, the privacy concerns and the overreach concerns that were evident in the original Bill C‑2, the strong borders act, but come March 12, 2026, we had the bill that is before us tonight, Bill C‑22. Again, it is the government’s, at this point, third run at crafting a bill that deals with lawful access. I will give them this: Bill C‑12 actually avoided the lawful access sections and just focused on the portions that affected refugee rights. That one still grieves me, the fact that we had Bill C‑12 pushed through to final stages on a unanimous consent motion in this place last June. I really still regret it very much that it was pushed through. This is a phrase we will hear from the opposition members tonight, and we have it heard it often: pushed through, rushed through. This is not hyperbole from opposition members. I am an experienced member of Parliament. I have been here 15 years, and I am honoured to have been so, but to my hon. colleagues in the government party on the other benches, it has been a shock to see how often we see these things. When mistakes are identified, previous governments have been more willing to say, “Ah, we have a mistake and we are going to have to rethink this. This is a mistake, and we are going to amend the bill. We are going to say where we made the mistake and how we are going to change it.” The government is quite unusual in not admitting mistakes, but it will bring in a different bill that does some of the same things. In this case, it is taking its third run at it. This lawful access regime has many improvements over the lawful access regime of Bill C-2. There is no question and no doubt. There have been significant changes, and I think every group that was in the original coalition opposing Bill C-2 has said that Bill C-22 is much better. We have fewer problems with it, but there are still very serious problems, which is why it is lamentable that we were not able to have the kind of conversation one would have with a government that was more comfortable in its skin to say that it made a mistake with Bill C-2. Such a government would say, “We pushed too hard, too far, too fast. Now we are going to listen to people. As we craft a lawful access regime, we are going to really listen and we are not going to assume we have it right because we are right, or because we have the majority, so we are right.” This has been very difficult to observe. Certainly, in committee, I have to say that I was surprised. I was taken aback when a reasonable request to have before the public safety committee the Privacy Commissioner, who had raised concerns, was rejected. We had a lot of witnesses there who represented government agencies and law enforcement to provide technical background. I try to be as non-partisan as possible, but I could not see any problem with getting the expertise of the Privacy Commissioner in the room as members were discussing and debating the impact of Bill C-22 and whether some amendments should work and how they should work, but the idea that the Privacy Commissioner should be in the room was rejected. I could not see, in any world, where that would not have been seen as helpful, but it was rejected. I had some amendments before the committee. We will get to them later this evening. I do not think it is anything but a foregone conclusion that the motion before us is going to pass, but I lament that we have seen the government, and it is a pattern, moving very fast and passing legislation despite significant concerns from significant quarters. A significant number of respected law professors and experts in privacy law and constitutional law wrote, as recently as last month, to most of the cabinet to express their deep concerns about Bill C-22. I think it is important to say that people are not just partisan here. Certainly law professors are not, and they acknowledge that they see the improvement over Bill C-2 in a number of areas. I will read from the letter, which was signed by 20 or 30 law professors from across Canada, and it is dated May 4, so anyone who is looking for it can find it. It reads: We write as lawyers and law professors who teach and practice in the areas of privacy law and constitutional rights.... I will skip ahead to their conclusion, which reads: ...provisions of the bill as currently drafted raise serious constitutional concerns and fail to strike a reasonable balance between the legitimate needs of law enforcement and the privacy rights of Canadians. Again, these are not the voices of people who have been misinformed through social media. These are people of depth, knowledge and experience, and they are very concerned. One of Canada’s premier policy wonk magazines is Policy Options, and I do not speak of it pejoratively here. Policy Options is not something one would pick up in the supermarket, such as “inquiring minds want to know”. Policy Options is serious. There was an article just yesterday by Professor Cynthia Khoo, who is a professor at University of Toronto and a senior fellow at The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. She is an expert in both technology and privacy areas. Her conclusion was that “Ottawa should reject any data-sharing arrangement that allows U.S. law enforcement to access Canadians’ personal information”. This is based on recent research within The Citizen Lab that the regime for surveillance being established by Bill C-22 could provide easy access for, for instance, U.S. homeland security to the private information of Canadians. I know the government benches have heard, and do not want to hear anything more, from Professor Michael Geist, who is, again, a prominent critic of Bill C-22, starting with his opposition to Bill C-2. He pointed out that what he sees being spread by the government benches could be described as misinformation, mischaracterization, overly broad definitions and a failure to be precise in areas where one really has to be precise. I am just going to quote from a blog he posted recently: “The political pressure against Bill C-22 has been steadily mounting, with the opposition parties,” as we can see, all the opposition parties in this place, “tech companies, and privacy experts, all increasingly” concerned about the need to amend this bill, increasingly concerned that all the government seems to have in response to the criticisms are, in his words, “misleading or inaccurate claims with little in the way of an actual defence” based on the facts. His conclusion is that “the government’s disregard for facts and privacy is fast becoming Bill C-22’s legacy.” Now, the criticisms come, again, from a broad sweep of legal, privacy and tech experts. They are not all the same. I practised law, and technology is not my area. I would not put myself out there as an expert in technology, though I read deeply. I am concerned about constitutional rights and privacy as a former practising lawyer, but it would seem to me that anyone with a background in the various areas that are touched by Bill C-22 would want to take the time to get it right. There have been things claimed, like that all our Five Eyes partners have legislation just like Bill C-22. That has been debunked by numerous experts. We have been told that it was wrong to take a long time in committee. Obviously, as my hon. colleague on the other side the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Finance knows well, we had a very lengthy filibuster on Bill C-30 in the finance committee. I sat through those evenings waiting for the chance to speak to my amendments. As I mentioned earlier, motions are passed by committees as if they are normal, and they are not normal at all, but the longer they are used, I guess, the more that future committees will just assume, as every committee did after this last election, that it is just normal to take away the rights of the smaller parties so that the larger parties do not have to fuss with them at report stage. That is the case. If it were not for the motions that were passed by committees, without thinking about them, taking away the rights of smaller parties, I would have the right to put forward amendments at report stage. I do not have that right at report stage only because I have been given this so-called opportunity to work really, really hard to bring forward amendments that give me the ability to sit in a room and not speak for days at a time, hoping for the chance to speak to the one or two amendments that I had brought forward. I want to thank my hon. colleague from Vancouver East, from the New Democratic Party, because she is in the same boat and she brought forward many more amendments to Bill C-22 than I brought forward on Bill C-22. I think I was too busy trying to write amendments on Bill C-30. In any case, what we have here is not just an imperfect bill but a potentially dangerous bill. We are now down to the final moments. The clock is ticking, and the words of experts from across Canada are being shut out because the government has determined it will move forward with Bill C-22. That is why we have a programming motion, to make sure that we do not have any further debate on the amendments that have been put forward by members of the Conservative Party, the Bloc Québécois, the Greens and the New Democrats. We are in a hurry. Again, I have to push back and ask why. What is the hurry? What is the rush? As a reminder, the first attempt the government made to bring forward lawful access was in the very outrageously overreaching Bill C‑2 a year ago. A year has passed. One would have hoped that year would have been used well by allowing a real discussion and continually striving to have the best possible surveillance architecture to protect privacy, to give law enforcement what it needs, without tests of access that are so low, the reasonable grounds to suspect, which we do not think the courts will find to have been an adequate ground to seize personal information. We are hearing concerns, again, from tech companies, constitutional and privacy law experts, those who work in the field and others, like OpenMedia. I am honoured to claim that the executive director of OpenMedia happens to be one of my constituents, so I also speak on behalf of my constituents when I stand here at this hour. We are hearing concerns, yet those voices seem to have just gotten annoying to the members of the government. They do not seem to be concerned, despite all the work and the full year that has gone by, that we could get this right. Again, we hear that we have run out of time. Well, we have not. I do not think any of us are going to expire in any particular moment. We could meet next week. We could get together again and have more time for witnesses to actually discuss without a clock ticking, for witnesses and experts to share with the members of the committee in a respectful way how we can improve this. I saw that the hon. member for Barrie South—Innisfil mentioned it earlier, but we are seeing news across the news wires that the Minister of Public Safety is about to make a step. Who knows, but certainly it was not the National Enquirer saying this. It was at least the CBC, saying that the Government of Canada is prepared to fundamentally change one aspect of this, which is not having to hold Canadians’ private data for a year but maybe bringing that down to six months. Is that going to be presented? I do not know. We will be going into committee after the programming motion is passed. There will be an opportunity for new amendments to be tabled, but not, of course, from me or the member for Vancouver East, because we had a deadline some time ago, and we either had to bring it in by that deadline or could not bring in something new. There may still be that opportunity to improve the bill. I certainly hope so, because what we have in front of us may violate our own Charter of Rights and Freedoms, open up personal data, surveillance data, and do serious damage. If, good heavens, the Citizen Lab research is right and Canadians’ private data would be available to the U.S. homeland security folks in large tranches, none of us are going to feel particularly happy about that. Our government should be making sure that our privacy is protected. It is an inherent right that we have. I would like to say it is a right in the same way first nations have the right to clean drinking water, although we have now been informed that they do not have the right to that but only the hope of a gradual or eventual “realization” of a right. That term is just so extraordinary. Well, we have a right to privacy, and I do not want to hear that it is dialed back to a gradual realization of a right. We have a right to privacy. We can reasonably expect it of our government to ensure that our private data is not left in an architecture of surveillance that allows it to be accessed by foreign governments, any foreign government. The Citizen Lab research that was just published in Policy Options yesterday talks about U.S. homeland security as an example, but I do not want my government asking tech companies to save, store and access private data about Canadians that is then available to foreign governments. We have certainly learned a lot about foreign interference, and we are waiting for the foreign interference registry to actually be established since we passed that law some time ago. At this late hour, and I know I’m out of time—
