Bill C-8

An Act respecting cyber security, amending the Telecommunications Act and making consequential amendments to other Acts

Part 1 amends the Telecommunications Act to add the promotion of the security of the Canadian telecommunications system as an objective of the Canadian telecommunications policy and to authorize the Governor in Council and the Minister of Industry to direct telecommunications service providers to do anything, or refrain from doing anything, that is necessary to secure the Canadian telecommunications system. It also establishes an administrative monetary penalty scheme to promote compliance with orders and regulations made by the Governor in Council and the Minister of Industry to secure the Canadian telecommunications system as well as rules for judicial review of those orders and regulations.
Part 2 enacts the Critical Cyber Systems Protection Act to provide a framework for the protection of the critical cyber systems of services and systems that are vital to national security or public safety and that are delivered or operated as part of a work, undertaking or business that is within the legislative authority of Parliament. It also, among other things,
(a) authorizes the Governor in Council to designate any service or system as a vital service or vital system;
(b) authorizes the Governor in Council to establish classes of operators in respect of a vital service or vital system;
(c) requires designated operators to, among other things, establish and implement cyber security programs, mitigate supply-chain and third-party risks, report cyber security incidents and comply with cyber security directions;
(d) provides for the exchange of information between relevant parties; and
(e) authorizes the enforcement of the obligations under the Act and imposes consequences for non-compliance.
This Part also makes consequential amendments to certain Acts.

Strengthening Canada's Immigration System and Borders Act

[Matt Strauss, Conservative, Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am so surprised to receive that question. I think I explained it to the member during my last two speeches on government legislation.

The Liberals violated the Charter of Rights and Freedoms when they imposed the Emergencies Act, sections 2 and 8. That is not me, but Justice Mosley of the Federal Court who found that. I would love to hear the member apologize for that violation.

Bill C-8, Bill C-9 and Bill C-2 also violate our charter. I am not going to let it get through the net.

[Matt Strauss, Conservative, Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON]

Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to have this opportunity to speak to Bill C-12. This is the fourth time I am speaking to a piece of government legislation in this Parliament.

For the first time, I think it is the story of the bill rather than its content that I find most interesting. I apologize to those following at home if it seems a little bit like inside baseball, but in every Parliament, the government introduces bills and numbers them sequentially. After the pro forma throne speech, Bill C-1, came Bill C-2. The present bill, Bill C-12, is the parts of Bill C-2 that had to be salvaged from the flaming dumpster fire of that original piece of legislation. It is as though the Liberals set their own legislative agenda on fire and the Conservatives had to comb through the charred remains to find something salvageable. What an embarrassment it is for the government.

The new Prime Minister ran on his expertise in government, having spent most of his career as a bureaucrat. He had been waiting in the wings for 10 years to plant his legislative agenda. Do members opposite remember when he was asked if he would ever become prime minister? He said, “Why don’t I become a circus clown?” Well, now he has. He has beclowned himself.

Bill C-2 is the very first piece of legislation that the Prime Minister's government introduced, and it had to be split up in this manner. What an embarrassment that is.

Why did it need to be split up? It is because the forefather of Bill C-12 contained clauses that were so howlingly bad that no one on either side of the House, nor from any coast in this country, could bring themselves to defend it.

Bill C-2 includes a provision that would allow the police to ask a doctor, without a warrant, if their services had ever been used by an individual. This is reprehensible. I am a physician; frankly, this does not just offend me as a Canadian and as a person, but it offends my whole profession. It would violate not just our Charter of Rights and Freedoms but the Hippocratic oath. If a member opposite or their child went to see a doctor who specializes in addictions, mental health, sexually transmitted diseases or reproductive medicine, on what possible planet would they think it was appropriate for the police to ask that physician to disclose them as a client?

Again, I suspect members opposite are getting ready to say that I am somehow being outlandish in my interpretation of their proposed law. Here, once again, I will read them their own darned bill.

In part 14, clause 158, it reads:

A peace officer or public officer may make a demand...to a person who provides services to the public requiring the person to provide, in the form, manner and time specified in the demand, the following information:

(a) whether the person provides or has provided services to any subscriber or client

This is bananas. This is, once again, a Chinese Communist Party level of state overreach.

Once again, if the Liberals do not trust my interpretation of their legislation, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association's interpretation or the Canadian Constitution Foundation's interpretation, will they believe their own public safety minister, the one who introduced the legislation? He was quoted in The Globe and Mail in an October 9 article by Marie Woolf, entitled “Public Safety Minister says he wants to push through refined warrantless...powers to help police”. She wrote that the Minister of Public Safety acknowledged that the “provisions in Bill C-2, the original strong borders bill, [allowing police to ask a] doctor without a warrant” if their services had been used by someone, constituted “overreach”.

This is not the first time the Minister of Public Safety has had to throw the Minister of Public Safety under the bus. Who could forget that, just last month, he told his tenant that his own gun confiscation program was a bad idea that he did not support? I would love to believe that it is merely incompetence over there. It is incompetence; it is just not “merely” incompetence.

I am a physician. I do not sign prescriptions that I have not read. I do not give out prescriptions that I do not believe in, because prescriptions are important documents and I have a professional duty to read them. On the other side of the House, we have a Liberal minister who seems not to read the legislation that he tries to pass in the House. On other occasions, he executes a gun grab he does not believe in. This sort of conduct would not be tolerated from any physician in this country. I dare say it would not be tolerated from any professional under any professional body in this country. Why does the Prime Minister tolerate it from one of the highest office-holders in this land?

As I said, it is not merely incompetence over there. I take it that the public safety minister did not write the legislation, but someone did. I want to know who, because this is not a one-off oopsy doopsy in which a junior staffer wrote a law that would violate the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This is a clear pattern with the government.

The last three pieces of government legislation that I have debated in the House, Bill C-8, Bill C-9 and now Bill C-12 have involved significant power grabs by the Prime Minister. I want to know why.

Bill C-8 would allow the Liberals to kick people off the Internet without a warrant. Bill C-9 would allow the Liberals to police speech on the Internet. Bill C-12, in its previous iteration as Bill C-2, would not only violate patient-physician confidentiality but also allow the government to read letter mail without a warrant.

What is going on over there? Why is the Liberals' response to every conceivable social problem to violate our charter rights? Who is writing the legislation?

I know that as soon as I am done, the member for Winnipeg North will ask why we do not fix this at committee, to which I would say, yes, we are going to have to, but every member in this House should be protecting charter rights. The committee should not be the goalie. The Conservatives should not be the goalie. The Liberals should not be trying to get charter violations past the Conservative goalies. They are the Liberals. They are supposed to believe in liberty. I am honestly starting to wonder if they even know what their party's name means anymore.

Here is the Encyclopædia Britannica entry on “liberalism”:

political doctrine that takes protecting and enhancing the freedom of the individual to be the central problem of politics. Liberals typically believe that government is necessary to protect individuals from being harmed by others, but they also recognize that government itself can pose a threat to liberty.

Do the members opposite see themselves at all in this definition today? It has been six months since I was elected to this House, and not once, in between their power grabs, have I heard them make even passing reference to individual liberty or to the fact that the government itself can threaten that liberty.

Conservatives seek to conserve our liberty. Liberals are supposed to seek to expand our liberty. However, this is three times in six months they have tried to get one past us. I am asking them honestly to reflect on this. Are they even Liberals anymore, or have they become something darker? How is it that they have betrayed the Liberal tradition again and again in this House?

I would ask the Liberal backbenchers, in particular, if this is what they signed up to do when they took out a Liberal Party membership and if the Prime Minister's Office ran any of it by them before it tried to ram it through the House. Why do they not do the right thing and withdraw Bill C-2 entirely instead of trying to get it passed piecemeal?

One piece of Bill C-2, Bill C-12, is going to go to committee, but we must not forget the omnibus monstrosity from which it came. We must not forget the questions of competence that the story of Bill C-12 raises, and we must also not look away from the authoritarian tendencies of the so-called Liberals that this story reveals.

Commissioner for Modern Treaty Implementation Act

[Arnold Viersen, Conservative, Peace River—Westlock, AB]

Mr. Speaker, it is great to be up here today to talk about accountable government and speak to Bill C-10. The government has put forward this piece of legislation, and I think it is a total admission of the Liberals' failure to keep first nations included in the Canadian economy and ensure first nations are part of the Canadian conversation. Therefore, one of the trinkets they are putting forward is the commissioner position, to acknowledge that they have been a failure over the last 10 years.

I want to talk about accountable government more broadly. People back home always say, “Arnold, you are part of the government,” but I say no, I am part of the opposition. The government is generally considered to be the front bench on the government side of the House. That is the government that lives inside of our legislative chamber. Unlike in the United States, where the administration lives outside of the legislative process, in Canada, in a parliamentary system, the government lives in the front bench, and that is the Prime Minister and his cabinet.

They direct the administration of our country, and they answer directly to the legislature. They are right here, and one of the key functions of this place is to hold the government to account, principally through question period. That is probably what people see the most. That is the Government of Canada. It then branches out from there to all the ministries, the ministry offices across the country, and the folks who work for those ministries would also be part of the government. Very soon, I hope to be part of the governing party of Canada, if not part of the government, Lord willing.

I also want to inform the House that I will be splitting my time.

When we talk about accountable government, this is an important part of Canadian history. This is something that this particular place fought vehemently for at the founding of Canada in response to being a colony of Great Britain, asking and pushing for our own responsible government. I would also point out that the responsible, accountable government that was fought for at that time was immediately put to the test in the riot reparations act that the brand new Canadian Parliament passed. It then ran out to ask the Governor General to not sign it into law, because the government had suddenly realized the ramifications of the riot reparations act. The Governor General at the time asked if we wanted a responsible, accountable government or not. He signed that into law, and the negative implications of it came to fruition. Parliament then reversed itself on that particular bill.

I tell that story just to point out that the things that happen in this place have an impact on Canadian society. I hope that is the case, and I know that to be the case. The point is that the Liberal government is the government of this country, and it has duties it has to implement. The Liberal government is classic in terms of causing a problem or failing to address a problem and then, rather than fixing the problem, coming back here for another piece of legislation and saying that this is the one that will fix the particular problem. In reality, it generally has the tools and ability to fix the particular problem or manage the particular issue or maintain the relationship around the world that it currently has.

We hear from the Liberals often that a particular UN document is demanding that they do something. Maintaining the relationship with first nations across this country, ensuring they are full participants in our economy and living up to the treaty obligations this country has signed onto are just basic functions of the government. We do not need a UN document or a UN declaration to tell us to do these things. The Government of Canada should be doing these things because we are upholding the honour of the Crown and we are upholding the things that make us this country.

In the case of the current government, it is the Government of Canada, and it should live up to its obligations. This means treaty obligations, keeping the peace in this country, working on maintaining our borders and reducing the crime. On all of these things, many times, we see total mismanagement, and then the Liberals come in here and say, “If we only had this piece of legislation.” We see this in front of us over and over again, with bills such as Bill C-2, Bill C-8 and Bill C-11, where the government is trying to solve problems it could already solve and is the cause of.

With Bill C-10, we see a classic case of Liberal mismanagement. We failed to sign new treaties across the country and failed to manage the relationship. We have seen the resource industry stalling out because of our inability to build major projects across this country, and now the Liberals are bringing this forward.

The other thing I find very interesting is that, although I say it is the tired old Liberal government, this is a “new” government, but we have yet to see any major new pieces of legislation. This is not a new piece of legislation from a new government. It is something that is long sought-after. The Liberal government has introduced this idea over and over again. This is not something new.

We are looking forward to the removal of Liberal bail. That would be a new piece of legislation. The reversal of Liberal bail in this country would be an impressive thing in order to get crime under control. That would be new, but this is not a new idea. This is something the Liberals have talked about for a long time, and now, because their legislative agenda is kind of empty, suddenly they are going to put it forward.

I am going to turn my attention to the Bloc. I always find it interesting when I agree somewhat with the Bloc. Bloc members are saying that this commissioner would not achieve anything, that it would not do anything, which is also kind of our position on this. It would not do anything and is just spending money for the sake of spending money, which, I acknowledge, is generally the Liberal test of success: Success is how much money it spends on a particular thing.

I point to the border. When we say the Liberals are failing to maintain our border and are allowing people to run across our border and things like that, their response is not that they are doing a good job managing the border; it is that they are spending more money managing the border than the Conservatives did and are therefore being successful. They are not. The problem is that the border is porous and unmanaged by the Liberals. If we could spend zero dollars to manage the border, I would be in favour of that as well. The amount of money the Liberals spend to manage the border is irrelevant if we are not getting the results we are looking for. Fundamental to an accountable government is who is responsible.

This commissioner is a distraction from the responsibilities of the government. The government is responsible for maintaining these relationships and cannot outsource it to a commissioner. It cannot outsource it. I guess the same goes for the Parliamentary Budget Officer, for example. Does his advice get followed by the Liberal government? No, not at all. Will this commissioner's advice be followed by the Liberal government? Maybe, or maybe not. The fundamental issue is the results the government has caused.

We see it over and again, whether it is with the Liberals' bail system, which they totally made a hatchet job of, border security or cybersecurity. Over and over again, the Liberals fail to be responsible for the issues the government is supposed to be responsible for in this country. We see a failure, and then suddenly the Liberals will say we need a particular piece of legislation in order to fix it. When we then look at that piece of legislation, it generally does something other than what they say it will do, or it fails to change anything.

I just want to put on the record that, in some weird way, we agree with the Bloc on this, that the commissioner would not do anything. I also want to close by stating that the bill is an admission by the Liberal government that its inabilities over the last number of years have led to failure.

Public Safety

[Jacques Ramsay, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Public Safety]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his question. Bill C‑8, an act respecting cyber security, is being debated today in the House. This legislation aims to secure Canada's critical infrastructure by bringing the Canadian telecommunications sector in line with other critical sectors of the Canadian economy.

This bill will allow us to notify operators of threats and vulnerabilities so they can protect their systems and more importantly so they can avoid falling prey to nefarious actions. In recognition of Cybersecurity Awareness Month, I hope that our colleagues across the aisle will support Bill C‑8.

Business of the House

[Steven MacKinnon, Liberal, Minister of Transport and Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, it is funny that those questions did not make the top 40 of the ones they wanted to ask today. Of course, the Prime Minister and ministers are in regular contact with our friends and neighbours in the United States. We will be advocating for Canadian workers and Canadian jobs.

In terms of criminal justice legislation, the member well knows that, right now, he could stand up and ask for unanimous consent on a very tough border bill that would help the government get tough on crime. This week, we had the chance to vote on Bill C-9 and move it through the legislative process.

The member need not fret. Legislation is going to be coming fast and furious, and the Conservatives will have a decision to make whether they want to support constitutional bail reform concocted with provinces and territories, victims associations and all manner of other stakeholders, or will they keep grandstanding in the way that they do? In the meantime, we have a very interesting week coming up.

Today, we are concluding debate on the Conservative Party's opposition day motion. Tomorrow, we will resume second reading debate of Bill C-8, An Act respecting cyber security, amending the Telecommunications Act and making consequential amendments to other Acts.

Next Monday, we will consider second reading of Bill C-11, the military justice system modernization act. We will continue with this debate on Wednesday. On Tuesday, we will commence second reading debate of Bill C-10, the commissioner for modern treaty implementation act. Thursday, October 9, shall be an allotted day.

Combatting Hate Act

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, with my limited time, I will do a bit of an overview. When we look at the issue of combatting hate, we see that the legislation is substantive and would in fact make a significant difference in our communities.

I would also suggest that one needs to look at the last election, where there was a commitment to bring forward legislation of this nature. I say that because the election was not that long ago. A new Prime Minister and new government were elected based on a series of commitments. Those commitments, at least in part, to date, have come in the form of legislation.

I could talk about Bill C-2, the stronger borders legislation; Bill C-4, the middle class tax break for Canadians; Bill C-5, the one Canada economy legislation; Bill C-8, the critical cyber-system legislation; or Bill C-9, which we are debating today, about hate crime. It is very real and very tangible.

With that mandate, not only the government was given a responsibility, but so were all opposition members. It was a very clear mandate given to all of us. Canadians want and expect that their parliamentarians here in Ottawa will work co-operatively in order to have legislation and budgetary measures pass through the system.

My appeal to all members of the House is to recognize the mandate that was given to us by Canadians: Legislation like we are debating today, other pieces of legislation that we have already introduced, or legislation such as our bail reform, which is going to be coming out shortly, should all be allowed to get to the committee stage. That is what is in the best interest of Canadians. This is not to limit debate, because we still have third reading and all sorts of debate and consultations that take place in our standing committees.

With respect to the legislation before us today, it is important that we recognize how much racism and hatred have increased over the last number of years. Race or ethnicity is number one in terms of hate, followed by religion and by sexual orientation. Those are the big three.

Hate happens every day in communities throughout Canada. It is one of the reasons it is so critically important that we not only recognize the legislation as a commitment that was part of our electoral platform but also recognize that communities are hurting and that the bill is legislation that would advance more peaceful communities. I would encourage all members to support it.

Business of the House

[Steven MacKinnon, Liberal, Minister of Transport and Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, I want to assure my hon. colleague of my great affection for the Thursday question and our weekly rendezvous. I appreciate that.

As the member well knows, we have made a strong and firm commitment to bring in legislation this session to reform bail. The member opposite might be careful of what he asks for, because he will have the opportunity to vote for strong, crime-fighting Liberal legislation in the House. We will be absolutely and earnestly seeking his support and that of his colleagues.

This afternoon, we will continue the debate on the Conservative Party's opposition motion.

Tomorrow, we will begin the debate at second reading on Bill C-8, the critical cyber systems protection act.

As all hon. members are aware, the House will stand adjourned on Monday and Tuesday of next week to mark the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. Upon our return on Wednesday, we will resume debate at second reading of Bill C-9, the combatting hate act. Finally, I would like to inform the House that Thursday of next week shall be an allotted day.

[Steven MacKinnon, Liberal, Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, I, too, would like to welcome the House leader of the official opposition and all of his and our colleagues in the House. I am confident that we will have a productive session. We will see.

This afternoon, we will continue to debate the Conservative Party's supply day motion. Tomorrow, we will resume debate at second reading of Bill C‑3, an act to amend the Citizenship Act. I would also like to say that, next Wednesday, we will begin debate at second reading stage of Bill C‑8, an act respecting cyber security.

I would like to inform the House that Monday, Tuesday and Thursday of next week shall be allotted days.

Furthermore, pursuant to Standing Order 83(2), I request the designation of an order of the day to allow the presentation of a budget speech at 4 p.m. on Tuesday, November 4.

As to the question of a take-note debate, I would note that the Conservatives have, as I just indicated, two opposition days scheduled for next week, and they can certainly choose this very important topic, on which the government will have a lot to say, for debate if they believe it is that important.

With respect to the crime legislation, I would simply point out that there is before the House crime legislation presented by the government that meets the test of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and I would very much urge my Conservative colleagues to get on board with it right now so we can fight crime in this country.