Michael Geist: Bill C-22 lowers evidentiary standards for police access to subscriber information

Michael Geist: Since the Supreme Court decision in Spencer in 2014, the bulk of subscriber information – the names, addresses, account details, service types, and device identifiers that link a person to their online activity – requires a court order. The standard the courts have applied to obtain the information through a general production order is that there are “reasonable grounds to believe” that a crime has been or is about to be committed. Bill C-22 creates a new, specific production order for subscriber information, but lowers the threshold to “reasonable grounds to suspect,” which is the lowest standard in Canadian criminal law. That is the troubling tradeoff in the bill: the warrantless access for some subscriber information that was previously proposed may be gone, but in its place the government is establishing a lower threshold for a court order for that information than is currently required...