Bill C2, the Strong Borders Act, includes provisions that would allow police to force a broad range of service providers to share client information without a warrant.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
If the Liberal government of Mark Carney has displayed one particularly dismaying tendency during its early weeks in power, it is its indifference to Canadians’ privacy rights.
Twice so far, the government has tried to sneak amendments that would weaken those rights into bills about unrelated matters.
In one instance, the Liberals pasted legislation that would exempt federal political parties from any regulatory oversight related to the privacy of voter data into a bill ostensibly about reducing the cost of living.
That was Bill C-4. In Bill C-2, a.k.a. the Strong Borders Act, Team Carney has included provisions that would allow police to force a broad range of service providers – telephone companies, internet providers, medical services, car rental services – to turn over information about clients without a warrant.
Like another government before them, the Liberals are trying to satiate law enforcement’s perennial desire for warrantless access to personal information in the digital age by linking it to a perceived emergency.
The Conservatives under Stephen Harper did it in 2013, when Vic Toews, the public safety minister, famously said of a Liberal opposition critic that, “He can either stand with us or with the child pornographers.”
Mr. Toews was talking about the 2012 Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act, which would have given police unprecedented powers to monitor Canadians’ internet activities without a warrant.
The bill did not in fact mention children or internet predators anywhere except in its title, and the Conservatives abandoned it in 2013 under a withering public outcry.
The Carney Liberals are now throwing around the words “fentanyl,” “sex offenders” and “money laundering” in Bill C-2, and suggesting Canada’s borders are porous, for the same purpose.
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No one should buy it. We have already criticized Bill C-2 for being an overly broad omnibus bill that lumps immigration reform in with criminal law reform, and have said the parts about immigration should be put into discrete legislation.
The same goes for the provisions in C-2 related to what the government calls “timely access to data and information.”
Under those provisions, federal law enforcement officials who have “reasonable grounds to suspect that an offence has been or will be committed” could force any sort of service provider to say whether someone is their client, when that person became their client, the municipality where they did so, and whether they have any information about that client’s use of the service.
Officials would need to get a production order from a judge to see the actual information. But they would not be limited to offences in the Strong Borders Act; they could investigate any suspected breach of any federal law, and not just suspected money launderers or fentanyl smugglers.
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Critics justifiably fear that law enforcement could target any sort of service, from an internet provider to a medical services provider to a hotel.
They point out that, even without resorting to a warrant, the police could gather information that could undermine any expectation of privacy.
This is key, because the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in 2014 that internet subscriber information is protected by the Charter right against unreasonable search or seizure and requires a warrant to be accessed. Last year, the Court ruled the same about IP addresses, the unique identifying numbers assigned to every device connected to the internet.
And yet the Carney Liberals are trying to push through legislation that would allow police to go on fishing expeditions. This happened before: Michael Geist, one of Canada’s leading experts on technology and privacy law, found that Canadian law enforcement agencies asked telecom providers for subscriber information every 27 seconds in 2011.
The Supreme Court put an end to that in 2014. Now the Liberals seem to think they can get around the Court – although we note they haven’t tested Bill C-2 for Charter compliance yet, unlike other bills they tabled this month.
If the Liberals want to bring back warrantless searches, they should do it in separate legislation that can be examined and debated properly, and not as something buried in a stew of laws they insist must be enacted quickly.