The federal government on Tuesday said it is willing to shorten the time electronic service providers would be required to keep users’ metadata under a proposed lawful access bill, but is dismissing Conservative calls to split the controversial bill in two.
The provision that could require service providers to retain certain metadata — including transmission and location data — for up to one year is included in Part 2 of Bill C-22, which has also prompted pushback from tech companies for measures they say could weaken encryption and security.
That section has raised alarm from privacy experts and opposition parties, while businesses have threatened to leave Canada over its sweeping powers it would grant to cabinet.
In a letter Tuesday to Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree, Conservative public safety critic Frank Caputo said the party was prepared to support quickly passing the more broadly supported Part 1 of the bill on its own, which would give police and spies expanded powers to access subscriber information through judicial warrants.
“This would give law enforcement a large chunk of what they have requested from Parliament,” Caputo wrote. “Part 2 requires further study on encryption, metadata, significant government powers and secret ministerial orders.”
Speaking to Global News, Anandasangaree’s spokesperson Simon Lafortune dismissed the Conservatives’ request.
“Our position is that splitting the bill is not an option,” he said.
Lafortune, however, said the government was prepared to shorten the metadata retention period after further consultations on the bill, which Anandasangaree first told the Canadian Press in an interview.
Lafortune told Global News the government was aiming to change the retention period to at least six months, and shorter than one year.
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The minister recently said the one-year maximum was reasonable and wouldn’t be changed, but that the Liberals would be putting forward other amendments to make clear that encryption would not be compromised by the measures in C-22.
The government is expected to propose changes to the bill at the House of Commons public safety committee, which is going through the legislation clause by clause.
Part 1 of the legislation would allow authorities to demand that a telecommunications provider such as Bell or Rogers reveal whether it provides service to an individual or a number of interest — a measure intended to speed up investigations.
The second part would require electronic service providers to develop and maintain the technical capabilities to enable police and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service to obtain communications and information for their probes. Tech companies have warned this would create “backdoors” into their systems, which the government has denied.
University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist told the public safety committee last month that the stored metadata — despite only containing digital traces of a communication, rather than the email or text itself — would amount to “a comprehensive surveillance map of virtually every Canadian.”
“The government’s building this massive haystack of data with the thought that they might need to find the needle every once in a while,” Geist told Global News in an earlier interview.
Police and the government have said Canada’s lawful access regime needs to be urgently updated in line with Five Eyes and G7 partners and to give investigators what they need as criminals move increasingly online.
Caputo argued Tuesday that splitting the bill and leaving Part 2 for further study and revisions would achieve just that, particularly with Parliament just 10 days away from rising for a summer break.
“We can get Part 1 dealt with before we rise,” he said at committee. “If the whole point of this exercise is to get the bill right … and law enforcement wants what’s in this bill, I would hope that they would want part of what is in this bill.”
Conservatives repeatedly pressed government, RCMP and CSIS officials at the committee on whether they would support the quick passage of Part 1 and if its provisions would be sufficient.
Officials declined to explicitly make that distinction, however.
“There is no doubt that Part 1 is important, but so is Part 2,” said Richard Bilodeau, the acting senior assistant deputy public safety minister.
“They’re distinct parts of the legislation, but they are both equally important to solving some of the gaps that have been identified in various lawful access regimes and how they can help law enforcement and intelligence services fill those gaps.”
Chief Supt. Richard Burchill, the RCMP’s director general of technical investigations, said both parts of the bill as written “gives us timely access to data in a structured, uniform way.”
Both the Conservatives and the Bloc Quebecois said Tuesday they wanted to hear more from federal privacy commissioner Philippe Dufresne on his proposed amendments to the legislation, which are centred on further protections against potential data breaches and cyber attacks.
—With files from the Canadian Press
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