On its third try, the Liberal government is hoping to move quickly to pass a security bill that protects courts and nuclear power plants, but also repeals a Second World War-era statute that allowed police to round up protesters en masse during the G20 meetings in 2010.

Community Safety and Correctional Services Minister Yasir Naqvi, also the government house leader, said Monday the plan is to get the bill passed by the end of the year.

"This is a priority for us. We want this bill to be passed as soon as possible," he told QP Briefing after question period.

The bill's quick passage would ensure the widely criticized police powers used during the G20 meetings would be repealed before the Pan/Parapan American Games, and not replaced with any similar legislation.

Introduced in the house last Thursday, the new bill comes out of a 2011 report from former Ontario chief justice Roy McMurtry, which was commissioned by the Liberals after the Public Works Protection Act was used by Toronto police to round up more than 1,000 people during G20 protests.

The police used a technique commonly known as "kettling," which involved boxing in hundreds of people at a time and sweeping them all up in a mass arrest.

The PWPA was passed in 1939 to protect critical infrastructure from sabotage, but was invoked by Toronto police after they declared the G20 conference a "public work." The PWPA was used as legal authority for the kettling action.

Naqvi said the new bill can be passed quickly because previous versions of it it have already gone through extensive hearings.

Two previous iterations of the bill died before becoming law. The first time was in October 2012, when then-premier Dalton McGuinty prorogued the house and resigned. The second time was last spring, when the election was called.

Naqvi said the new bill incorporates the consultations and amendments made to previous versions.

"The good work that has gone into the bill, starting with the work that former chief justice McMurtry did, and the stakeholder consultations, the committee process … we have just taken that bill and reintroduced it, and look forward to working with other house leaders to see if we can have speedy passage of the bill," he said.

Groups consulted on the previous bill included the Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police, the Ontario Provincial Police, the Ontario Bar Association and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.

Naqvi said that as far as crowd-control measures go, the bill simply adopts McMurtry's recommendation that the police have the tools they need already, and the crowd-control measures in the old PWPA can be repealed without replacement.

The court security measures on the bill allow police to, "where reasonable," search anyone attempting to enter a courthouse, and to deny entry, remove or arrest a person who refuses to identify themselves or submit to a search.

It sets out similar measures for "prescribed nuclear and electricity-generating facilities," including the authority to use force to deny entry to areas with a "restricted facility."

Essentially, the new bill reintroduces the powers in the PWPA that allowed routine searches and other security measures at courthouses and power plants, but scraps the other aspects of the bill that gave legal cover to excessive crowd-control measures.

"We did extensive outreach and consultation with our stakeholders, municipalities, police services, civil liberties groups … that due diligence has been done," Naqvi said. "So I'm really hoping that the bill will pass sooner than later."

Liberals plan to quickly pass bill that repeals police powers used during G20

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