44th Parl. 1st Sess.
March 6, 2023 11:00AM
Madam Speaker, I first want to address what our Conservative colleague just said. By his own admission, the bill is clearly flawed, but the Conservatives have decided to support it anyway simply to ensure that we do not take more time to get to the bottom of things. To me, that does not seem like the right or appropriate approach to take.
By way of introduction, I want to make three comments, which I hope will be rather brief, before I get into the substance of the matter and explain why we will be voting against this bill at report stage. Here is my first comment.
When he asked his question, my colleague from Berthier—Maskinongé did a great job explaining why we are voting against this bill at report stage. We voted in favour of this bill in principle because we support the idea of having tighter controls on imports coming in from forced labour, slavery and child labour. However, as my Conservative colleague noted, as we listened to some of the witnesses we realized that this bill has major flaws. As the member who introduced it admitted, this is a bill that simply encourages transparency, essentially relies on corporate goodwill, and does not provide for the necessary checks or for what we call due diligence. As my colleague from Berthier—Maskinongé noted, the government will not necessarily follow up to ensure that goods produced from forced labour or child labour are indeed not imported into Canada. I think that is a major flaw of this bill.
As my NDP colleague stated a little earlier, we tried to make some amendments to the bill in committee in light of the testimony we heard. However, the government had absolutely no intention of compromising. Considering the circumstances, we voted against the bill in committee. Consequently, and understandably, we will be voting against the bill given what has been reported today about what happened in committee.
My second introductory comment is simple: I believe that the sponsors of this bill, Senator Miville‑Dechêne and the member for Scarborough—Guildwood have very good intentions. I believe that their reasons for introducing this bill are honourable. They put their heart and soul into the bill and worked very hard on it. I believe they deserve our utmost respect for the work that has been done to date, but it is unfortunately not enough for us to vote in favour of this bill.
Third, I simply want to say that there is time before third reading to do something that would allow us to vote for this bill.
With that in mind, I would like to explain why we went from voting in favour of the bill in principle to voting against it in committee and today. As some of my colleagues have pointed out, the bill does not go far enough. It does nothing to ensure that the necessary checks will be performed to confirm that the spirit of the bill is being respected, in other words, to prevent the importation into Canada of goods made with forced labour, slavery or child labour. Beyond the principle, beyond the intentions, there is no follow-up. That is a fundamental flaw in this bill. Several witnesses who appeared before the committee told us that international experience has shown that once legislatures have passed legislation that simply calls for transparency, they stop there and do not go any further. If we want to go further than that, we should not pass a bill that does nothing beyond suggesting transparency.
Some might feel that this bill does nothing more than ease our conscience. It targets transparency and leans on corporate goodwill, but that is all.
My colleague from Edmonton Strathcona put forward amendments to make the bill more hard-hitting, to give it real teeth so we do not have to just cross our fingers and hope companies will get on board. The government and the Conservative Party rejected every single one of her proposed amendments.
Indeed, some people were in a big rush to shut down the committee's work, supposedly to avoid yet more delays, as my Conservative colleague said. Again, I do not think that rushing legislation is the right thing to do, especially when everyone knows the bill has some major flaws.
I asked that the Minister of Labour appear before the committee because there were rumours that the government had prepared a whole slew of amendments to improve the bill. To my surprise, when we studied the bill in committee, there was not a single amendment from the government, although we had been assured that the government had at least 20 amendments. Not a single one was introduced. What happened behind closed doors? I have absolutely no idea.
From what I understood, the Minister of Labour was persuaded by a number of people, including probably one of the sponsors of the bill, to withdraw the government's amendments and propose a more robust bill instead. I thought that was great, and I wanted the minister to come tell us about it publicly in committee. We invited him, but he declined.
I ran into the minister by chance at an event. He told me that he did not want to appear before the committee to say he had nothing to say because there were no amendments. That being said, he did tell me he intended to introduce a more robust bill along the same lines as Bill S-211.
I told him that that was great and asked him why he would not appear before the committee to tell us about it. He told me that he did not yet have the bill in his hands and he did not want to appear before the committee to say that the bill was not ready yet. I replied that, in that case, he needed to find a way to make public the government's intention in order to allay the concerns of some non-governmental organizations, or NGOs, that the bill would provide only for the transparency measure and would not go any further to ensure the necessary due diligence.
Since then, the minister has not made any public commitment to that effect, so the message he has been sending thus far is not very encouraging. There is still time, however, because we are approaching third reading stage.
In his speech, my colleague referred to a letter he sent to all members on February 28. That letter said this bill will transform Canada from laggard to leader on this issue.
I am sorry, but it takes more than just passing a bill on transparency to be a leader. If the government's position is that transparency would make Canada a leader, then I have concerns. That says to me that the Liberals do not have any real intentions of going further.
Accordingly, I have no choice today than to be consistent with the decision we made in committee and say that at report stage, the stage where we report on what happened in committee, we are voting against this bill. However, I want to assure my colleague, as I did in committee, that we are still open to the possibility of voting in favour of the bill at third reading provided we get a commitment from the government that it is ready and willing to go further than just passing a bill on transparency.
If my colleague can convince the minister to follow through on the informal commitment he made in my presence, he can be assured that we will vote in favour of the bill at third reading stage.
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Madam Speaker, we have seen an explosion in the impact of the digital world around the globe. Here in Canada, our systems are very complex, and we have some that are absolutely critical, which need to have the proposed protection.
We have a progressive government that is looking at this in a very serious manner. This is why we are bringing forward this legislation and recognizing the impact of cybersecurity threats. The opposition seems to support the principle of the legislation.
The member has recognized a number of areas in which he would like to see better definition and more details. I would suggest to the member that much of what he is looking for could best be had at the committee stage. If we get the bill to committee, could we look at what he is talking about in more detail? What are his thoughts on that?
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Madam Speaker, it is an honour, as it always is, to rise in the House of Commons of the Canadian people and speak to Bill C-26, an act respecting cybersecurity, which seeks to amend the Telecommunications Act and make subsequent amendments to others acts.
I want to say from the outset that cybersecurity is a critically important issue. For those of us who have been watching the news, we have even seen bookstores like Indigo impacted by ransomware, and we know that no Canadian, business or government agency is immune to cybersecurity threats. As Conservatives, we obviously support taking robust action on cybersecurity and we look forward to the bill going to committee, where we can hear from stakeholders who have expressed uncertainty about what the impact of the bill is going to be. Certainly, I hope we can work across lines to make a better piece of legislation and address the very real challenges we are facing in this cybersecurity age, in this cyber age that we are facing.
I am going to go into a bit of background on the bill, because my constituents might not have heard of this legislation. For their benefit, I am going to give a bit of summary of what I understand the changes to be.
The threat of malware in our telecommunications sector and critical infrastructure does pose a serious threat to Canada. It is important that we respond to these threats proactively, in light of the inevitable future attacks that will happen in our cyberspace. As I said, Conservatives will support legislation to defend our telecommunications sector and our other critical infrastructure from threats, the likes of which, as I stated earlier, have been levied against Canadian individuals, corporations and government agencies repeatedly.
In order to evaluate this legislation, I would like to take some time to consider how the proposed bill might impact our economy, our national security and our commitment to protecting the civil rights of Canadians. Although legislation relating to cybersecurity threats is now long overdue, we should remain vigilant to protect the rights of Canadians and our domestic corporate actors, who could be seriously impacted by the unintended consequences of this legislation. Notably, I am somewhat concerned by the sweeping discretionary powers that are granted to the minister and the Governor in Council in this legislation. I would also like to talk about some of the objectives of the bill and then describe how this current proposed legislation could fail in achieving its intended purpose.
The bill is presented in two parts. The first would amend the Telecommunications Act to promote the security of the Canadian telecommunications sector, and the second part of the act would enact the critical cyber systems protection act. The amendments to the Telecommunications Act are intended to protect against ongoing threats of malware, which poses a threat to the Canadian telecommunications system, and the critical cyber systems protection act aims to strengthen the cybersecurity systems that are so vital to our national security and public safety, and it would allow the government to respond to these cyber-threats.
The aim of this legislation would implicate operators in a broad variety of fields, including the finance, telecommunications, energy and transportation sectors, just to name a few, all critical parts of our infrastructure. With these aims in mind, it is important to consider how expansive the government powers being talked about here are, new powers to the government, how these new powers will affect all these sectors that affect our day-to-day lives, and whether these new measures are proportionate and necessary to be implemented.
To begin, the powers afforded to the minister present economic and financial risk for critical systems operators and telecommunication system providers. The first consideration is the minister's ability to direct telecommunication service providers to comply with an order to prohibit a provider from using or providing certain products or services to a specific individual or entity. Those are pretty broad powers. The bill would implicate the operations of private telecommunications organizations, and therefore the legislation requires safeguards to protect the economic viability of these companies. The bill would also allow the minister to compel telecommunications companies to obey government directives or face the consequences of significant monetary penalties.
In giving the minister such expansive powers, the government may have failed to consider the potential economic impact of these unchecked provisions on service provisions. Telecommunications revenues contribute over $50 billion to Canada's GDP, yet the government has not provided clear and adequate safeguards in this legislation to limit the extent to which or the frequency with which it might use these service provisions and how they might be restricted under the instance of even a minor cyber-threat.
Large, medium and small regional market players would be impacted by this legislation if appropriate safeguards are not adopted in the amendment stage. Large telecommunications service providers make up about 90% of the market share, and any directive to suspend a service by these large market players could impact a significant amount of the Canadian population. Although we hope that such orders will seldom be issued, the vagueness of the language in the bill does not guarantee this.
Meanwhile, we see small and medium-sized players who disproportionately service under-serviced areas in Canada; I am thinking of rural and remote communities. These small and medium-sized players often have trouble dealing with the regulatory complexity and the financial investments needed to meet regulatory thresholds, and we could see these small and medium-sized players just fold up or get bought out at a fraction of what their value would have been. We would really see this as a consequence for rural and remote communities, which are struggling, even today, to get access to basic services like high-speed Internet.
For these reasons, the overbroad provisions in the bill do not lend themselves to a standard of proportionality.
A stakeholder group, Citizen Lab, released a research report on Bill C-26 from the Munk School, authored by Dr. Christopher Parsons. The report outlines, in its recommendations, that the legislation should be amended to allow telecommunications service providers to obtain forbearance and/or compensation for orders that would have “a deleterious effect on a telecommunications provider’s economic viability”.
The Business Council of Canada is likewise concerned about the CCSPA requiring that all critical systems operators undertake the same precautionary actions to protect themselves from cyber-threats. The Business Council of Canada notes that the legislation would require a singular standard of all service providers “irrespective of their cyber security maturity”. We know that there are highly funded firms with a lot of resources that have highly superior cybersecurity systems, and then we have our more infant, junior tech companies that are trying to grow so that they can attract capital. These regulatory requirements of holding them to the same standard could have a negative effect on growing the tech ecosystem here in Canada.
Moreover, the Business Council of Canada notes that the legal threshold for issuing the directives is too low. The low threshold to issue these orders to an operator would allow the possibility of lost revenue for operators because of an absence of due diligence on the part of the government, a government that has had its own cybersecurity problems. I have serious reservations that a government that is unable to run its own IT systems will have a better capability of telling private companies how to run their IT systems.
The council further notes that the monetary penalties are unduly high and are not proportionate, given the benefits of compliance in the event of a perceived or actual cyber-threat. These companies in Canada want to live by the rules. They want to work with the Canadian government. Their reputations are at stake, yet the government is treating them like they are bad actors by putting these fines in place, when maybe we should be looking at working and engaging more with our telecom sector to have a more friendly relationship on this issue.
Another group, Norton Rose Fulbright, noted that there is still considerable uncertainty as to how detailed the cybersecurity plans must be and how it would alter industries' existing policies and agreements. Clearly, there is a lot of uncertainty about this, but it is too important to let it go aside, so I am looking forward to this coming to committee, where we can have some of these stakeholder witnesses come and talk about things so that we can clear up the uncertainty and we can have targeted cybersecurity measures that actually result in benefits to Canadians.
Other technical experts, academics and civil liberties groups have serious concerns about the size, scope and lack of oversight around the powers that the government would gain under this bill. Civil liberties groups are particularly concerned about the government's ability to direct telecommunications providers to do anything needed by secret order. While the legislation lists what might be included by the minister or Governor in Council, the ambiguity of the wording leaves open the possibility of compelling a telecommunications company to do more than is officially stated. This is particularly noteworthy because of the significant monetary penalties that can be levied against these companies, to the tune of up to $10 million a day.
Liberals, in many cases, have perhaps neglected to consider the privacy of Canadians through this legislation.
Bill C-26 would allow the government to bar any person or company from receiving specific services, which raises concerns about the discretion the government has in making these decisions. Again, it is very unclear. This is too important. We should bring the bill to committee and vote on it, but there are lot of things we need to get right in the legislation. We look forward to looking at that.
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