The Hon. the Speaker: Is it your pleasure, honourable senators, to adopt the motion?

Hon. Claude Carignan moved second reading of Bill S-231, An Act to amend the Criminal Code, the Criminal Records Act, the National Defence Act and the DNA Identification Act.

He said: Honourable senators, I rise today at second reading of Bill S-231, whose short title is Increasing the Identification of Criminals Through the Use of DNA Act.

This is the new version of Bill S-236, which died on the Order Paper when the election was called. I would like to mention that the speech I delivered on June 23, 2021, at second reading of Bill S-236, is helpful to understanding Bill S-231. These two bills are similar and have the same underlying goal.

[English]

Bill S-231 will enhance public safety and facilitate the goal of criminal trials to seek the truth. It will allow for faster and more reliable resolution of police investigations and criminal court proceedings through DNA identification.

[Translation]

Scientific developments with respect to DNA make it possible to distinguish one person from another with great accuracy. The use of this technology, which is well established in Canada, has increased the accuracy of evidence proving the identity of individuals who have committed crimes. It also has the advantage of preventing judicial errors by exonerating innocent suspects.

To give you an idea of the accuracy of DNA evidence, I will give you an example from the 2015 Quebec Court of Appeal ruling in R. v. Cartier. This was a double murder case. The evidence showed that the genetic profile of the accused had been found on the inside of a mask left in a vehicle used by the killers. This evidence established that the likelihood of this profile matching someone other than the accused was about 1 in 300 billion.

Before I outline the provisions of Bill S-231, I will explain the process used by police to establish the identity of an individual from their DNA, in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the bill and the solid privacy protections it incorporates.

The DNA identification process is clearly explained in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s 2020-21 National DNA Data Bank annual report.

This state-run bank has collected and managed hundreds of thousands of DNA profiles since 2000, most of them from crime scenes and convicted offenders. As of December 31, 2021, the bank had 422,067 profiles in its convicted offenders index and 193,053 in its crime scene index.

The DNA Identification Act regulates the operation and maintenance of the data bank, while the Criminal Code sets out under which circumstances an individual can be ordered to provide a DNA sample. These are two of the acts that Bill S-231 seeks to amend.

This bank is extremely important, as the Ontario Court of Appeal said in paragraph 82 of its ruling in R. v. K.M., and I quote:

(1520)

[English]

The importance of the state objective in enacting the DNA data bank legislative scheme, both as it relates to adults and young offenders, can scarcely be doubted. Indeed, I would describe its worth as inestimable in cases such as where the [National DNA Data Bank] facilitates the apprehension of a serial sexual predator, or the exoneration of a person who has been wrongfully convicted.

[Translation]

The data bank contains profiles of both adult and young offenders. This is how it works. Each new DNA profile entered into the data bank is compared against existing profiles. This makes it possible to identify matches between profiles and to identify the perpetrator of a crime. A match is made when DNA profiles from two different crime scenes match or when a DNA profile from a crime scene matches the profile of a convicted offender in the data bank.

When a comparison of profiles in the data bank shows a match, police gain an invaluable lead to help them continue their investigation. In many serious criminal cases, a DNA match can lead to the reopening of an investigation that had been stalled for years.

You should know that there are hundreds of unsolved murders in Canada. The Sûreté du Québec alone has 750 such cases, according to an article by journalist Daniel Renaud published on November 13, 2021. In a 2015 report, the RCMP mentions 204 known and unsolved cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, with 106 homicide cases and 98 missing cases.

However, the actual number could be much higher, according to the final report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.

Imagine how many families could achieve a sense of justice and work through the grieving process if the murderer were finally identified and tried. That is exactly what this bill will make possible by giving police forces more ways to find matches in the bank.

The bank has actually helped solve thousands of investigations. According to its annual report, the bank found 66,539 matches between a convicted offender and a crime scene, as well as 7,211 matches between two crime scenes. Thousands of associations were made for homicides — over 4,000 in fact — and sexual offences — almost 7,000. These are serious crimes that threaten public and personal safety.

[English]

The bank will be even more effective if the Criminal Code were amended to make sure more offences trigger the requirement for convicted persons to provide DNA profiles to the bank, which is what Bill S-231 proposes.

The logic is that when someone is required to provide a DNA sample for a criminal offence, even a lesser offence, that sample may help resolve investigations for more serious offences, whether past or future, that this person has committed.

[Translation]

I want to share two statistics from the data bank’s annual report to support this. First, simple assault offences resulted in nearly 600 associations to murder cases and nearly 1,400 to sexual assault cases. Second, the offences of failure to appear in court or failure to comply with interim release conditions and other offences set out in section 145 of the Criminal Code resulted in 247 associations to murder or sexual assault cases.

That said, since DNA contains a lot of personal information, the National DNA Data Bank has strict rules about identifying an individual based on their DNA. For example, an individual’s profile in the bank is created based on just a fraction of their DNA, which means that the profile does not reveal any medical or physical information about the individual, aside from their biological sex.

To give you some idea of what that means, a DNA fraction in the data bank would be like copying down the first letter from every paragraph in a book. This very long series of letters would be anonymous data that would not reveal the author of the book or its plot. However, this series of letters would represent that book’s unique identifier, since a different book would have a completely different series of letters.

Moreover, the way the bank works, its employees do not know the name of the offender whose DNA sample is in the bank, nor do police officers have access to the DNA samples in the bank. In other words, the person’s name and their DNA sample are separate from the creation of their genetic profile in the bank.

As the Ontario Court of Appeal indicated in paragraph 46 of R. v. K.M.:

The DNA collection kit contains two parts, one with the DNA sample and the other with the offender’s identification information. Both parts of the kit have the same unique barcode number . . . . When the kit arrives at the data bank, the two forms are separated with the sample being retained by the databank and the identification form being sent to the RCMP records unit. From this point on, the processing of the sample at the data bank is anonymous. The donor’s identity remains unknown and no personal information is retained or entered into any DNA data base.

In its rulings, the Supreme Court of Canada has provided other examples of privacy protections for individuals who have a DNA sample in the data bank. The court has explained that when there is a match in the data bank between a convicted person and a crime scene, the police cannot access the DNA sample from the data bank and put it into evidence at trial. Instead, they must obtain a new sample from the person, for example by recovering a discarded item containing his or her DNA or by applying to a judge for a warrant to take a bodily sample from that person. The conditions for obtaining such a warrant are quite strict and are set out in section 487.05 of the Criminal Code.

In this context, the court ruled in R. v. S.A.B. that taking bodily samples under such a warrant represents a relatively modest violation of bodily integrity.

Similarly, the court ruled in R. v. Rodgers that the legal protections associated with the data bank make the loss of privacy for a convicted offender required to provide a DNA sample comparable to the loss of privacy for someone required to provide fingerprints to police upon arrest.

As the data bank’s annual report explains, the methods for collecting bodily samples for DNA are not very invasive. There are three types of collection kits designed specifically for the data bank. The first kit, which is used in 98% of cases, collects small droplets of blood using a finger prick. The other two kits collect samples by rubbing the inside of the mouth or taking six to eight hairs.

We can also find another protection for the information stored in the bank in section 487.08 of the Criminal Code and section 11 of the DNA Identification Act. These sections make it a punishable offence for police officers or officials to engage in unauthorized use of information and DNA samples from the bank.

As you can see, the data bank’s DNA samples and personal information are well protected. Bill S-231 does not change these important privacy protections. Instead, and most importantly, it seeks to increase the chances of making a match.

To that end, the bill proposes increasing the number of offences that require the court to order the convicted person to provide a DNA sample to the data bank. This provision of the bill received a lot of support from the National DNA Data Bank Advisory Committee.

Accordingly, Bill S-231 seeks to increase the number of criminal offences for which a DNA sample many be taken and to limit it in order to avoid purely summary cases. I therefore ask that you support Bill S-231.

Senator Housakos: Any entity that is connected to this tyrannical regime in Beijing would be covered, yes. The answer is yes. I’m not hiding from that reality. If you have a Chinese, state-owned and operated institution in Canada, yes, it would fall under this bill, as it should.

Hon. Frances Lankin: Honourable senators, I think there may be some controversy here. I truly appreciate your speech, senator. In addition to Senator Simons’s speech, this is an important moment in the Senate, with a laser focus on this. I want to ask you three questions.

First, you said that you didn’t think the registry was a silver bullet. Will you explain how the registry would work and how it will help? Embedded in that is an understanding of how some of this foreign influence takes place, that the people doing the targeting are not always obvious and that names could not always be added to a registry.

Second, if there were a criticism of your bill, what do you think it would be? Where could the bill be improved?

Third, is there something the Senate could do beyond passing or amending your bill to bring greater focus on this issue? Is there a joint project in which we should be engaging? Thank you very much.

Senator Saint-Germain: Thank you for the question. I understand that it is about the importance of organizing our work at committees and possibly in the chamber in a way that would keep us from having to push through our work quickly — sometimes even too quickly — at the end of break weeks, during the summer or during the holiday season. I think it is a good example of rules and work organization strategies that could be studied by the Rules Committee or the Selection Committee. The goal would be to organize our business more efficiently while taking into account the constraints of our work, including interpretation and the presence of a fourth group of senators. I agree with you. It depends on us, and it is up to us to see to it. Thank you.

[English]

Hon. David Richards: Senator Saint-Germain, thank you for your speech. The problem with Supplementary Estimates (C) is we had two days. We had to have translation. We had to do clause-by-clause consideration. Within another three or four days, we’re going to get the Main Estimates; they’re going to come through.

We are really rushed with this Supplementary Estimates (C). I don’t think we studied it as well as we could. It is a fundamental financial bill; it has to go through. But there are a lot of clauses in it and a lot of monies that were spent, and we didn’t get as much clarity on it from the witnesses as we may have wanted because it was rushed. I think that was part of the problem that Senator Tannas was trying to deal with and trying to explain and to come to some solution. I wonder if you could address that.

Senator Saint-Germain: Senator Housakos, I won’t admit anything, but I will concur with you that the onus is on us to organize our work first during these three sitting days. There is more efficiency to gain there; I am sure of it. If and when so needed, it is what we do and what we have done during the intensive sessions, when we need to be there for more than three days, be it four days or five days, or when there are emergencies as well. So, yes, the onus is on us to better organize ourselves.

The Hon. the Speaker pro tempore: Honourable senators, we have 25 seconds left and there are a few senators who wanted to ask questions, but we are nearly out of time.

Is it agreed to have additional time? It is agreed.

Senator Lankin: From my dear colleague in the GRO, yes.

Senator Boisvenu: You know that the pandemic has exacerbated mental health issues. Nine million Canadians will suffer from mental health issues over the course of their lives. In 2017, close to 5.5 million Canadians received mental health services, and, in 2020, this number reached 6 million.

Does the Government of Canada plan to bring back programs such as At Home/Chez Soi, which helped reduce re-incarceration rates among people suffering from mental health issues by 90% and which funded itself through savings resulting from this reduction? Will the government commit to bringing back this program, which delivered very good results?

Hon. Denise Batters: Thank you, Senator Gagné. I would have asked you this question on the last bill too, but it zipped by a bit too quickly. How much money is involved with these supply bills, Bill C-15 and Bill C-16?

Senator Gagné: Let me go back to my notes. I wasn’t expecting any questions at this point in time.

I don’t have all those numbers at the top of my head. Supplementary Estimates (C) includes $13.2 billion for 70 organizations in voted dollars, and $3.9 billion for statutory spending. That was supplementary estimates.

For interim supply, the Main Estimates provided information for $397.6 billion in proposed spending for 126 organizations, including $190.3 billion in voted expenditures and $207.3 billion in statutory expenses.

Through this interim supply bill, we’re seeking Parliament’s approval for $75.5 billion in budgetary expenditures.

Hon. Marc Gold (Government Representative in the Senate), pursuant to notice of March 24, 2022, moved:

That the provisions of the order of November 25, 2021, concerning hybrid sittings of the Senate and committees, and other matters, be extended to the end of the day on April 30, 2022;

That the Senate commit to the consideration of a transition back to in-person sittings as soon as practicable in light of relevant factors, including public health guidelines, and the safety and well-being of all parliamentary personnel; and

That any further extension of this order be taken only after consultation with the leaders and facilitators of all recognized parties and parliamentary groups.

(On motion of Senator Wells, debate adjourned.)

On the Order:

Resuming debate on the motion of the Honourable Senator Bovey, seconded by the Honourable Senator Cordy, for the second reading of Bill S-208, An Act respecting the Declaration on the Essential Role of Artists and Creative Expression in Canada.

Hon. Yuen Pau Woo: Thank you, Senator Housakos, for drawing attention to my op-ed. I encourage all of you to read it for yourselves rather than rely on the caricature that he has offered.

Senator Housakos, you have been quite clear in saying that China is an authoritarian state, which I entirely agree with. You also described it as “tyrannical.” I’m not sure I would go that far, but it’s certainly a Leninist state.

I think you said that all entities in China are subject to the direct or indirect control of the Chinese state.

Let me put my question in the reverse. Can you name some legally constituted entities in the People’s Republic of China that would not fall under the definition of directly or indirectly controlled or influenced by the Chinese state and therefore would not be subject to registration under this bill?

Senator Housakos: You’re using an extreme case, Senator Woo. We’re not talking about holding accountable people who are promoting cultural exchanges. I can tell you that the Chinese community in Canada does not need any help from the Chinese republic in order to promote Chinese culture and Canadian-Chinese culture. They can do it on their own very well.

That is not at all the essence of this bill. The essence of this bill is very simple. When you have organizations that are funded directly by Beijing, which are here promoting the agenda of that tyrannical organization to government agencies, to our institutions — particularly in commerce, trade, science, technology, energy sectors — those are the ones that are of serious concern when it comes to dealing with this issue, Senator Woo.

Trying to muddy the waters and justify the unjustifiable isn’t right and isn’t appropriate.

Senator Woo: If I could follow up again, your non-answer would seem to suggest that the cultural organization would, in fact, be covered under the registry, even though you said it would not be in your speech. Presumably, other organizations, such as alumni associations, sporting groups, municipalities, again under the direct or indirect control of the state, would have to be registered if an individual representing that entity were to speak to a parliamentarian or indeed with a senior official.

In that situation, where essentially every legally constituted entity in the People’s Republic of China would have to be registered under this act, would you not agree that the assertion of the two authors in the op-ed about the circulated “disinformation” in text messages and WeChat posts saying that many entities and individuals associated with China would be targeted under Mr. Kenny Chiu’s failed bill was in fact accurate?

Senator Housakos: Senator Woo, my answer is very clear. If you have any organizations funded by Beijing that are active on Canadian soil, they are going to be obligated to register. Absolutely. That’s what this bill is saying. I’m not disagreeing with it. That’s really the objective of the bill at the end of the day. However, it doesn’t target Canadian-Chinese cultural organizations that are active on Canadian soil.

My point is exactly that. We do not need Beijing and their money in order to be infiltrating Canadian-Chinese cultural organizations. That is precisely part of the point and part of this exercise we’re going through. Beijing should be worrying about promoting their own cultural activities at home as we are preoccupied with promoting our own cultural and multicultural activities in Canada with our Canadian citizens. That’s really the objective of this bill. I don’t see where you’re lacking an answer to your question.

The Hon. the Speaker pro tempore: Senator Housakos, as I see more senators rising, you have, as acting leader, unlimited time. Do you wish to continue to answer questions?

Hon. Victor Oh: Thank you, Senator Housakos. Would you take a question?