The Harper government is temporarily parking controversial legislation that would grant new powers to authorities to police the Internet while it consults on how to rewrite it to assuage privacy concerns among Canadians and within caucus.
The Commons resumes sitting on Monday after a week-long break.
The process of sending the bill to MPs for study is not scheduled to start in the week of Feb. 27, and sources familiar with the government’s plans say the Conservatives are in “no rush” to pass the legislation. They said the bill is unlikely to be moved forward in the next couple of weeks.
Rattled by a public backlash over Bill C-30, Public Safety Minister Vic Toews announced in mid-February the Conservatives would take the unusual step of referring it to a committee for amendments before second reading. This means that MPs will be asked to recast the bill before the Commons has agreed in principle to approve it.
Conservatives make no secret of the fact this isn’t Stephen Harper’s favourite bill, meaning that, during a slow economic recovery, he’d rather be associated with other legislative priorities.
Unlike most tough-on-crime bills, its measures did not spring from grassroots concerns or fears. The legislation is based on requests from the public security bureaucracy in Canada to bolster police powers for the Internet age that the Tories have felt compelled to address.
“There’s a tough-on-crime constituency for locking up offenders for a longer time, but not for greater Internet surveillance,” said one government official.
People familiar with the government’s plans say Ottawa is still determined to move forward with C-30 but does not want to be tied down to a time frame. The next step would be a Commons debate of up to five hours before sending it to committee for review.
Tory supporters have not always agreed on one of the most controversial provisions of the legislation. Former public safety minister Stockwell Day, for instance, has said he wasn’t keen during his tenure on granting police power to gain access to information without a warrant. Mr. Toews’ bill, however, as currently written, would allow that for the identities of Web users.
The Conservatives knew they would have a challenge on their hands with this bill. They took care not to roll it into their omnibus crime bill, which would have made passing that legislation very difficult, Tories acknowledge.
In some respects, the Conservatives still treated C-30 like previous crime bills. They tried to split support in their favour on the bill, for instance, by calling it the Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act. This failed, the government official said, when Mr. Toews overplayed his hand, declaring that those opposed to the legislation stood “with the child pornographers.”
“This went from being another tough-on-crime bill to being something where the minister had done something that was so far out whack with the standards of polite discourse that it kind of scared [supporters] off.”
Police forces and provincial governments still support the bill, and the Harper Conservatives are counting on these backers to speak out loudly in the weeks and months ahead when it tries to rewrite the bill at committee.
Privacy advocates say the legislation’s problems go far beyond the concern that has dominated debate – the provision that would give police access to identifying information about Internet users without having to apply for a warrant.
The bill would also compel Internet service providers to install equipment to allow police, with warrants, to track the activities of users more easily. Ottawa has estimated this would cost as much as $80-million over the next four years and has not disclosed the cost to Internet service providers.
These companies say they’re worried that the full cost will be much higher.
