Justice Minister Peter MacKay. (Canadian Press)

The “Protecting Canadians from Online Crime Act,” or Bill C-13, creates a new crime – the non-consensual distribution of intimate images – in the aftermath of high-profile cyberbullying cases. But the bill also includes broad new powers for police.

Critics have suggested changes to both aspects of the bill, though the police powers have proven far more controversial. Many groups, including Canada’s new privacy commissioner, have called for the bill to be split in two, so the cyberbullying crime and the police powers can be examined separately. Government has said the powers are necessary to enforce cyberbullying. “It makes no sense to split the bill,” Justice Minister Peter MacKay said in the House on June 4.

On criminalizing the distribution of intimate images, critics have said the threshold is too vague and could be applied too broadly. For instance, one can be charged without any malicious intent to spread photos. But this provision of the bill is nonetheless widely supported.

The remaining parts of the bill have less of an apparent connection to cyberbullying and create a host of new police surveillance powers. Broadly, they extend police surveillance powers into an online era, by generally giving police increased access to transmission data, or metadata, in the same way they can monitor a phone line.

Many experts, however, have told a committee considering the bill that you can glean far more information through transmission data and online than through a phone.

Most of the new powers require warrants, though critics say the requirement to get one – an investigator must only have reasonable grounds to “suspect” a relation to a crime, not “believe” – is too low.

Most controversially, the bill also puts in stone a broad immunity for anyone that hands over data voluntarily, such as a telecom company. Government says this is a formality that already exists in practice; if so, critics ask why it needs to be put in the bill. This provision is widely opposed by privacy critics.

The bill also allows government to monitor people (with a warrant) by using a tracking device or a software program, raising the prospect, for instance, of police tracking or monitoring someone by hacking into their mobile phone. Several other warrants are created in the bill.