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Results: 1 - 5 of 5
View Randall Garrison Profile
NDP (BC)
Then, Mr. Minister, why did this government take away the power of the Canadian Human Rights Commission to remove hate crime material from the Internet? Your government sponsored and passed a bill through this House and through the Senate that took away the power of the Human Rights Commission to order the withdrawal of hate crimes material from the Internet. Why did you do that then and why are you advocating the opposite now?
View Françoise Boivin Profile
NDP (QC)
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
My thanks to the witnesses who have appeared before us. Your presentations on your respective areas were extremely interesting.
It ties in significantly with what we have been hearing since we began this study. Of course, I would have liked more time to explore the matter more.
Professor Shariff, you began your presentation by talking about clause 12 of the bill, which deals with hate propaganda. You did not really have the time to talk about it fully.
Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act has been repealed. So clause 12 of the bill is the only protection against hate propaganda we in Canada have left. Some categories that were not there before have been added, which is not a bad thing. So I would like to know your opinion in that regard.
Before you begin your answer, I want to thank Mr. Bernstein. UNICEF Canada did an extraordinary job on the brief you presented and the recommendations you have provided us with.
I particularly appreciate and I think your colleagues on the panel probably agree with your recommendations for section 162 to maybe put more on the mens rea, on the intent, and to clarify this. So it didn't fall on deaf ears, and we'll probably discuss in the committee certain amendments on that aspect.
The other question I have is for Mr. Anderson of OpenMedia on hate crime. I hope I can join you in saying that I trust the government, but if we were able—and here I use a big “if”—to amend the bill to add some safeguards, remove the immunity that seems to bother a lot of people and maybe have some type of
…accountability. In other words, we have to force the authorities that have obtained the information to report on it, somewhat like the way it is done with electronic surveillance under the appropriate section of the Criminal Code.
If we could establish those safeguards—
do you think the bill would be more palatable? And how do you rate Bill C-13 versus Bill C-30? The floor is yours.
Shaheen Shariff
View Shaheen Shariff Profile
Shaheen Shariff
2014-06-03 12:01
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I wasn't going to say a lot on it other than to say that the provision in Bill C-13 should be accepted because without it, the discriminatory reroutes of cyberbullying that often perpetrate hatred and division due to people's ethic origin, age, sex, mental or physical disability, or religion will continue to be unjustifiably excluded from the protection of federal law.
I have to say at this point that I also support a submission by my colleagues, professors Jane Bailey, Wayne MacKay, and Faye Mishna. It was a written submission, and I don't know if they presented it at this committee. I was supposed to join them. They have noted that it is particularly important in light of the unfortunate repeal of section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act last year. This provision is also essential given the gap in the Canadian public's knowledge of substantive human rights. As I mentioned, there is a need for legal literacy, and so I commend the committee—or at least on this aspect.
James L. Turk
View James L. Turk Profile
James L. Turk
2014-05-29 11:32
Thank you very much.
My name is James Turk. I'm the executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers. We represent 68,000 academic staff at 124 universities and colleges across Canada.
We've had a long concern with lawful access legislation as it has come through its various iterations. I would like to bring to your attention three concerns that we have with Bill C-13.
The first is, as Mr. Geist was mentioning, the reduction in the legal threshold to obtain personal records. The second is that Bill C-13 sets out that ISPs that preserve data or hand it over voluntarily will not incur civil or criminal liability. The third concern is that it adds “national...origin” to the definition of “identifiable group” in the Criminal Code. This is the part of the Criminal Code that relates to hate speech. It provides the possibility of criminalizing political discourse.
Let me deal with the first issue, and that is the lower threshold. Current Bill C-13 provisions for a production order for transmission data and tracking data reduce the threshold—as you know, I hope—from “reasonable grounds to believe” to “reasonable grounds to suspect”. This is a possible next step after a preservation demand or a preservation order for transmission data. The higher threshold—the current threshold—of “reasonable grounds to believe” still applies for production orders that exclude transmission data, so that if you want the content, the request has to meet the standard of “reasonable grounds to believe”. But if you want the metadata, it's only “reasonable grounds to suspect”.
Given the number of requests we know of in Canada in recent time, and given what we know of what is going in the United States.... You'll recall that in June 2013, the FISA court in the U.S. required Verizon to provide the NSA with all its customer metadata within the United States, including local phone calls. As a result, the NSA collected and retained all metadata for every call, every cellphone call, and every smartphone call attempted or made in the United States.
I agree with Mr. Geist that metadata can make the content irrelevant. The data crumbs that we use in communication technology, including the time and duration of the communication, the specific device that is used, and the geolocation, can allow enormous invasion of individuals' privacy rights.
Let's imagine that a member of this committee makes a telephone call to someone and then a week later visits an office building; sometime later makes a second phone call to a different number and a week after that, visits a different office building. What would the analysis of the metadata of this example look like or tell us? Well, if it is fed into a profile, the metadata on the telephone and the devices of the politician could tell a government agency that the first call was to a doctor; the first office building visited was a doctor's office. The second phone call was to a medical specialist; the second office building visit was to that specialist's office.
So what? We know that a politician has visited two doctors. All the government agency would then need to have access to is the Internet activity of that politician to have a very good idea what disease the politician was suffering from or was concerned about, if the member went on the Internet to WebMD.com/colorectal-cancer—or Parkinson's, or HIV.
Arguably, the metadata in the above example—two calls to two doctors, two visits to two separate doctors, and Internet activity in that time period—is as invasive as the content of communications. Bill C-13 lowers the threshold for state surveillance for that politician's visits to the doctors but maintains a higher level for any email message that politician might send to his or her spouse about his or her medical condition.
I can give you loads of other examples in which analysis of metadata can be highly invasive. Communication between a husband and wife can reveal many dynamics of their relationship: where they live, where they work, the time they go to sleep, when they wake up, when they leave home, and whether they're home together or not.
Access to metadata can also determine with reasonable probability that two people share a close relationship, by seeing that their devices are in the same location on repeated nights; or whether a person has a drinking problem from how often there are calls to Alcoholics Anonymous; or whether they are considering an abortion by knowing whether they have made calls to an abortion clinic; or whether they have a gambling problem, from their having made repeated calls to a bookie or to a helpline.
In other words, metadata are retained by an Internet service provider for a long period of time. The collection and analysis of these data in a large pool of metadata allow it to be matched up with real-world events. This makes it easier to get profiles and violate the privacy of individuals without the higher level of authority that would currently be needed in order to tap their telephone. A lower threshold of metadata opens the door to mass surveillance.
The second concern is the ISP immunity for turning over personal data. The Supreme Court, as you know, has reserved judgment on the constitutionality of the state obtaining subscriber information without a warrant under PIPEDA. We're expecting the decision in R. v. Spencer reasonably soon.
Advances in technology and the value of metadata for state surveillance make ISPs in many ways the gatekeepers of Canadians' privacy information. Offering civil or criminal liability exemption for ISPs invites ISPs to aid invasive state surveillance rather than incentivizing ISPs to protect Canadians' personal information with political and legal means. I would expect Telus, or Bell, or Rogers to have as their first interest protecting the confidentiality and the privacy of their subscribers' information. This bill would encourage them to see themselves as partners in state surveillance of their own customers.
The last comment is with regard to the expansion of hate speech to capture political speech. Bill C-13, as I mentioned at the beginning, adds “national...origin” to the definition of “identifiable group” in the Criminal Code. This part of the Criminal Code relates to hate speech. By including national origin as part of the definition of identifiable groups, certain speech—for example, speech critical of a national government, whether it be Israel, or Cuba, or the Ukraine—could be characterized as hate speech. We don't have to remember too far back, just to the 1980s, when a similar provision was used to prosecute persons critical of the apartheid regime in South Africa.
Like others who have appeared before this committee, we would encourage you to split the bill. Combatting cyberbullying is a worthy goal, but expanded surveillance powers over the citizenry by a government has the potential to represent an entire rebalancing between individual freedom and autonomy versus the power of the state. This fundamental tension in democratic society must be approached with care and an almost overabundance of consultation and concern for privacy.
Not doing so—refusing to split the bill and refusing to consider these concerns that Mr. Geist and I have raised—at best will represent for the Government of Canada an exercise in futility. Overreaching legislation will spend the next five to 10 years in the courts, and in our view, will be ultimately struck down as a violation of Canadians' constitutional rights. At worst, refusal to split the bill and revise these sections will increase government surveillance powers at the expense of individual liberty and autonomy, and Canadian citizens will be the worse for that.
Thank you very much.
View Randall Garrison Profile
NDP (BC)
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
There are a lot of things in Bill C-13. One is that it reopens the hate crime section of the Criminal Code to add additional identified groups. As I know, Chief Chu will be familiar, my private member's Bill C-279, which passed the House over a year ago, is either sleeping or stuck in the Senate, whichever analogy you like.
We have said that we have the intention of bringing the amendment to the committee, since that section is being opened, to add gender identity to the hate crime section of the Criminal Code, which is half my private member's bill.
I'm asking an easy question of Chief Chu. Police deal a lot with violence on the streets. Transgender people are more often subject to violence than others. I wonder whether you would see that as something we could do in this bill.
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