Mr. Chair, thank you very much for the invitation to appear today to speak to Bill C-70.

I'm with the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group, a Canadian coalition of 46 civil society organizations that works to defend civil liberties and human rights in the context of national security and anti-terrorism activities.

Bill C-70 has been presented as legislation to address the threat of foreign interference. We recognize the importance of addressing this issue, particularly as we've heard in instances where governments are threatening individuals or their close ones in order to repress their ability to exercise their fundamental rights or engage in democratic processes. However, the changes proposed by this legislation go much further.

If adopted, this bill would have wide-ranging impacts on Canada's national security, intelligence and criminal justice systems. As such, it would also have significant impacts on the lives and fundamental rights of people in Canada. For example, providing CSIS with new forms of warrants, granting it extraterritorial reach for foreign intelligence activities and allowing the service to disclose information to any person or entity in order to build resiliency could lead to increased surveillance, diminished privacy and racial, religious and political profiling.

Powerful new offences for actions taken secretly at the behest of foreign entities, including foreign governments and terrorist organizations, while necessary, are punishable up to life in prison. Those could infringe on freedom of expression and association and raise questions of proportionality in sentencing.

The bill would also transform how federal courts handle sensitive information that can be withheld from appellants or those seeking judicial review undermining due process in courts through the use of secret evidence.

A bill of such breadth requires in-depth study. We're very grateful for the work that committee members are doing and recognize the amount of time and effort being put into these hearings which, as was pointed out, are extending long today and throughout the week.

However, we're still deeply concerned with the hastiness with which this legislation is being considered. Introduced barely a month ago, with a foreign interference inquiry ongoing, it will have gone through committee study within a week. This is even faster than the rushed 2001 study of the first Anti-terrorism Act, which was in committee for a month.

We're grateful for today's invitation; however, we only found out about our appearance on Friday afternoon. Colleagues from other organizations who would have asked to appear or submitted written briefs have said they will be unable to do so on such short timelines, let alone develop specific amendments to suggest for Friday's deadline.

Rushing the parliamentary process, supported by a state of suspicion and ardent calls to protect national security, can lead to serious negative and long-lasting consequences. An expedited study also risks missing ways the bill could be improved to better address issues of foreign interference. We are therefore urging the committee to work with your colleagues in the House of Commons to extend your study of this very consequential bill.

Apart from the process of this study, we have some specific areas of concern.

First, modifications to CSIS's dataset regime are only tangentially related to foreign interference. Many of these changes relate to significant problems that the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency identified in a scathing report on the regime. The necessity and potential consequences of these changes remain unclear and should have been addressed during a statutory review of 2019's National Security Act. We would recommend removing these changes until such a review happens. I'd be happy to speak to this further during the discussion.

We're also concerned around the powers of disclosure in section 19 of the CSIS Act. While we understand the goal of ensuring appropriate information can be shared, journalists and NSIRA have raised serious questions about how CSIS has handled the disclosure of sensitive information in the past. Bill C-70 also grants CSIS significant new production order and warrant powers. The changes come after years of the courts admonishing CSIS for misleading them in their warrant applications. Warrant requirements exist to protect our rights. They shouldn't be lessened and especially not while CSIS's problems of breaches of duty of candour to the courts have not been resolved.

Bill C-70 also changes the Security of Information Act, including new indictable offences for the carrying out of any indictable offence, including relatively minor transgressions, if done for the benefit of a foreign entity. This, along with other new or modified offences, would be punishable by either life in prison or consecutive sentences that could amount to life in prison, provisions that are normally reserved for the worst forms of crimes and raise concerns of proportionality in sentencing.

Finally, we also have concerns about the new sabotage offences and the proposed foreign influence registry.

I will finish by commenting on changes to the Canada Evidence Act. Our coalition is fundamentally opposed to expanding the use of secret evidence in Canada's courts under the guise of protecting national security, national defence and international affairs. Introducing a standardized system for withholding information from those challenging government decisions that have significant impacts on their lives will normalize this process and is likely to facilitate the spread of the use of secret information further into our justice system.

Thank you. I'm looking forward to the discussion and questions.