- Member of Parliament
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- Calgary Rocky Ridge
- Alberta
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Madam Speaker, the intervention just before the last one was unusual, where the member for Winnipeg North said that any time a Conservative debates a bill, we are somehow obstructing it from getting to committee. However, right before the minister's speech, a Liberal member spoke. Therefore, when Liberals speak, they are debating, but when Conservatives speak, they are obstructing.
The debate on the bill may well collapse soon, but it is important to debate it. I would like the member, with the time he has left, to talk again about the serious concerns that people have with the bill and what we can look forward to at committee.
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Mr. Speaker, with respect to the first question, I will set it aside and await more testimony and discussion at the defence committee about that.
With respect to the second point, about the overclassification of information, that is a good one and I am glad the member raised it. It actually speaks to the overall culture of secrecy that exists in the Government of Canada. This is a real problem that has been ongoing for years. The current government ran on a platform in 2015 to let the sunshine in and we have absolutely unprecedented secrecy within the government. The member raises a good point around the overclassification of documents.
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Mr. Speaker, that may be a better question for the government to answer, but I do not believe this is the intent of this bill. This bill is about cybersecurity. The government has another bill before the House, Bill C-27, which is a bit closer to privacy changes. The government has not proposed changes to the Privacy Act or the Elections Act, so I do not think this bill is relevant to the question that the member raised. The member is getting away from cybersecurity and into the much broader rubric of the privacy of Canadians. She raises some points, but I do not actually connect them to this bill.
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Mr. Speaker, the primary function of government is to protect its citizens from external harm and to ensure that Canadians are able to live freely and safely in their communities.
I do have concerns about the gatekeeping aspect of this bill. I am concerned that if this bill does not get the balance of the regulation and the ability of commerce to continue, we will lose businesses and we will lose services and access to economic activity within Canada if we chase investment out through poorly thought-out regulations.
Yes, there is of course a delicate balance to be had. If we come down too hard on the side of regulation and gatekeeping, it will result in job loss and lack of investment, and the absence of investment would then compound businesses' abilities to actually deliver on cybersecurity.
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Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise and join the debate this morning in the House of Commons. I will be sharing my time with the member for Fort McMurray—Cold Lake.
Bill C-26 is a bill that addresses an important and growing topic. Cybersecurity is very important, very timely. I am glad that, in calling this bill today, the government sees this as a priority. I struggle with trying to figure out the priorities of the government from time to time. There were other bills it had declared as absolute must-pass bills before Christmas that it is not calling. However, it is good to be talking about this instead of Bill C-21, Bill C-11 or some of the other bills that the Liberals have lots of problems with on their own benches.
Cybersecurity is something that affects all Canadians. It is, no doubt, an exceptionally important issue that the government needs to address. Cybersecurity, as the previous speaker said, is national security. It is critical to the safety and security of all of our infrastructure. It underpins every aspect of our lives. We have seen how infrastructure can be vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Throughout the world, we have seen how energy infrastructure is vulnerable, like cyber-attacks that affect the ability to operate pipelines. We have seen how cyber-attacks can jeopardize the functioning of an electrical grid.
At the local level, we have experienced how weather events that bring down power infrastructure can devastate a community and can actually endanger people's health and safety. One can only imagine what a nationwide or pervasive cyber-attack that managed to cripple a national electrical grid would do to people's ability to live their lives in safety and comfort.
Cyberwarfare is emerging as a critical component of every country's national defence system, both offensively and defensively. The battlefield success of any military force has always depended on communication. We know now just how dependent military forces are on the security of their cyber-communication. We see this unfolding in Ukraine, resulting from the horrific, criminal invasion of that country by Putin. We see the vital role that communication plays with respect to the ability of a country to defend itself from a foreign adversary, in terms of cybersecurity.
I might point out that there is a study on this going on at the national defence committee. We have heard expert testimony about how important cybersecurity is to the Canadian Armed Forces. We look forward to getting that report eventually put together and tabled, with recommendations to the government here in the House of Commons in Canada.
We know that critical sectors of the Canadian economy and our public services are highly vulnerable to cyber-attack. Organized crime and foreign governments do target information contained within health care systems and within our financial system. The potential for a ransom attack, large and small, is a threat to Canadians. Imagine a hostile regime or a criminal enterprise hacking a public health care system and holding an entire province or an entire country hostage with the threat to destroy or leak or hopelessly corrupt the health data of millions of citizens. Sadly, criminal organizations and hostile governments seek to do this and are busy creating the technology to enable them to do exactly this.
The Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics conducted three different studies while I was chair of that committee that were tied to cybersecurity in various ways. We talked about and learned about the important ways in which cybersecurity and privacy protection intersect and sometimes conflict. We saw how this government contracted with the company Clearview AI, a company whose business is to scrape billions of images from the Internet, identify these images and sell the identified images back to governments and, in the case of Canada, to the RCMP.
We heard chilling testimony at that committee about the capabilities of sophisticated investigative tools, spyware, used by hostile regimes and by organized crime but also by our own government, which used sophisticated investigative tools to access Canadians' cellphones without their knowledge or consent. In Canada, this was limited. It was surprising to learn that this happened, but it happened under judicial warrant and in limited situations by the RCMP. However, the RCMP did not notify or consult the Privacy Commissioner, which is required under Treasury Board rules. This conflict between protecting Canadians by enforcing our laws and protecting Canadians' privacy is difficult for governments, and when government institutions like the RCMP disregard Treasury Board edicts or ignore the Privacy Commissioner or the Privacy Act, especially when they set aside or ignore a ruling from the Privacy Commissioner, it is quite concerning.
This bill is important. It is worthy of support, unlike the government's somewhat related bill, Bill C-27, the so-called digital charter. However, this bill, make no mistake, has significant new powers for the government. It amends the Telecommunications Act to give extraordinary powers to the minister over industry. It is part of a pattern we are seeing with this government, where it introduces bills that grant significant powers to the minister and to the bureaucrats who will ultimately create regulations.
Parliament is really not going to see this fleshed out unless there is significant work done at committee to improve transparency around this bill and to add more clarity around what this bill would actually do and how these powers will be granted. There have been many concerns raised in the business community about how this bill may chase investment, jobs and capital from Canada. The prospect of extraordinary fines, without this bill being fleshed out very well, creates enormous liability for companies, which may choose not to invest in Canada, not fully understanding the ramifications of this bill.
There is always the capture. We have seen this time and time again with the government. It seems to write up a bill for maybe three or four big companies or industries, only a small number of players in Canada, and yet the bill will capture other enterprises, small businesses that do not have armies of lobbyists to engage the government and get regulations that will give them loopholes, or lawyers to litigate a conflict that may arise as a result of it. I am always concerned about the small businesses and the way they may be captured, either deliberately or not, by a bill like this.
I will conclude by saying that I support the objective. I agree with the concern that the bill tries to address. I am very concerned about a number of areas that are ambiguous within the bill. I hope that it is studied vigorously at committee and that strong recommendations are brought back from committee and incorporated into whatever the bill might finally look like when it comes back for third reading.
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