The lawful access debate continued for a third day on Friday with Bloc MP Claude DeBellefeuille asking Patricia Lattanzio, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice, a critical question: why has the government chosen “the lowest possible threshold for obtaining information, that of reasonable grounds to suspect, rather than the more stringent threshold of reasonable grounds to believe.” She added that she did not understand the choice and would like a clear answer (I focused on this issue in a previous post). In keeping with the government’s discouraging defence of lawful access thus far (my posts on day one and day two of debate) Lattanzio’s response went for deception rather than clarity. After noting that reasonable grounds to suspect already appears in parts of the Criminal Code, she offered the government’s substantive defence of the lower threshold in a single sentence: “We also think that ‘reasonable grounds to suspect’ is higher than the threshold of mere suspicion.” The problem is that mere suspicion isn’t a threshold for search at all, but rather the standard the courts point to when a search is unconstitutional.

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