SECU meeting 23 · 2026-02-10 — Committee Evidence — LegisWatch

Summary

The House of Commons Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security met to continue clause-by-clause consideration of Bill C-8, studying amendments related to telecommunications security and privacy protections. Andre Arbour, Director General of the Telecommunications and Internet Policy Branch at the Department of Industry, appeared as the sole witness to provide technical advice on the proposed changes.

Andre Arbour testified that several amendments risked undermining the bill's effectiveness, particularly those replacing "relevant" with "necessary" for information collection, which he argued would exclude highly relevant data like private sector cost information needed for cost-benefit analysis. He noted that the information collection provisions in Bill C-8 are based on longstanding provisions in the Telecommunications Act and Radiocommunication Act, and that requiring judicial authorization for information collection from telecommunications companies would be unprecedented federally and could render part of the bill unworkable by adding months or years to order-making processes. Arbour also warned that amendments limiting information sharing to illegal activities would miss significant risks like negligent network configuration, citing the 2022 Rogers outage as an example of a non-criminal but dangerous issue.

The committee debated numerous amendments addressing privacy protections, information sharing limits, and oversight of the Communications Security Establishment. Members adopted Bloc Québécois amendments BQ-5 and BQ-6, which were based on Privacy Commissioner recommendations and deemed all personal information automatically confidential, while rejecting or withdrawing several overlapping Conservative and NDP amendments due to conflicts with already-adopted provisions. The Green Party's PV-9 amendment, which proposed strict guardrails on CSE activities under the bill, was opposed by the Liberals who argued that oversight of CSE should be addressed through the CSE Act rather than the Telecommunications Act. The meeting adjourned after members thanked the interpreters for their work.

AI-generated summary — may contain errors; verify against the official evidence.

Witnesses · 1

Andre Arbour

Director General, Telecommunications and Internet Policy Branch, Department of Industry

Opening remarks

Mr. Chair, the concerns with respect to this amendment concern this switch from collecting information that is relevant to an order-making activity to necessary. Then there's also a lack of clarity, potentially, and some risk of confusion. The core issue appears to be the difference between “necessary” and “relevant”. The issue here is that there is information that is highly relevant to an order-making activity, but it's highly debatable whether it would be necessary, for example, information from the private sector on the costs of implementing an order to undertake a reasonable cost-benefit analysis of how to calibrate the order. Arguably, that is not, strictly speaking, necessary to proceed, but it is certainly relevant to whether and how an order should be calibrated. The issue of the risk of lack of precision is due to the language around gravity of the threat. Another reason for collecting information in this context would be to verify compliance. By taking the gravity-of-the-threat language out of the order-making and putting it into information collection, it's unclear what threat we're talking about here. Is it the threat of non-compliance? Is it the threat for the…

Full testimony ↗

Public Safety and National Security

Summary

Witnesses · 1

Bills mentioned