Thank you, Mr. Chair.
The National Citizens Coalition is a supporter-based organization founded in 1967 and counts tens of thousands of supporters in its ranks. Our organization is founded upon the principle of more freedom through less government. We advocate on issues regarding the reduction of waste in the public sector for the more efficient delivery of services to Canadians.
Government accountability is very important to our supporters, and indeed to all Canadians. Whenever taxpayer dollars are in the mix, we believe on a philosophical level that Canadians deserve transparency for where those tax dollars go and accountability by those who spend them.
Recent scandals in the Canadian Senate with regard to how our senators are spending their housing allowances serve to underscore the need for transparency and accountability in our public institutions. Canadians lose faith in their institutions when those institutions abuse the public trust. Since human fallibility seems to be fairly consistent, the system must account for it, and accountability measures must be built in. We are here to provide testimony in support of Bill C-461. The CBC and public service disclosure and transparency act is an important piece of legislation to bring transparency and accountability to the spending of public dollars at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The CBC is the recipient of over $1 billion taxpayer dollars every year.
Section 68.1 of the Access to Information Act is deficient, in our view, because the CBC has used it as a blanket exclusion to allowing oversight of how it spends public money. The Information Commissioner, the Federal Court, and the Federal Court of Appeal all agree to the limitations of section 68.1 as written. Further to the changes to the Access to Information Act, the legislation also makes other important changes to current statutes.
Canadians have been well-served by the so-called “sunshine list” in provincial jurisdictions, which list salaries and expenses of public servants. Unfortunately, such a list does not exist federally, and this legislation does not go far enough, in our view, in establishing such a list. Mr. Rathgeber's middle measure, however, is to provide specific salary figures and expenses on an individual on the federal payroll upon request.
Also troubling is the proposed amendment by this government to raise the threshold for the reporting level. In Ontario, for example, we benefit from disclosure of salaries of $100,000 and above. Mr. Rathgeber suggests a federal list should require disclosure at or above DM-1. We implore the members of this committee to resist pressure to raise the threshold from Mr. Rathgeber's proposed figure. Ideally, though, we'd like to see the disclosure set at around $100,000—perhaps wishful thinking.
Also less than ideal is the per request mechanism. We hope the committee will see the benefit of full and automatic disclosure of salaries, expenses, and bonuses on a public website in a machine-readable format. The world is moving to the open data model of governance. I note that Canada has fallen to 55th place in the world for freedom of information.
Canada is watching what its legislators do in this place. As scandal looms regarding the abuse of taxpayer dollars, some have suggested abolition of the Senate. Transparency provides an automatic mechanism that helps protect against those who would abuse the public's trust. Such transparency does not exist at the CBC.
The National Citizens Coalition's view is the privatization of the CBC. This isn't a big secret. I know this view is not yet shared publicly by many in this room. However, if the CBC is to receive public dollars, it suffers a legitimacy gap when it refuses to disclose how those dollars are spent. For those who do believe in a public broadcaster, you bring legitimacy to it as a public institution when it is accountable to the public for how it spends our money.
Regarding the CBC-related amendment to this legislation, that is, to include an exclusion for journalistic source protection while allowing for an injury-test exemption on programming-related information disclosure, this sounds acceptable in principle. However, the CBC has acted in bad faith on previous access to information requests, claiming blanket exclusion under section 68.1 of the Access to Information Act. The Information Commissioner has taken the CBC to court at least twice on this matter. We are concerned that the CBC will use any loophole to protect against reasonable disclosure.
We believe that the voting public is the best judge for how its money is spent. We do believe in less government; many of you believe in more of it. However, shrouding this information from the public view is not an honest mechanism for protecting government largesse. Indeed, it delegitimizes the view that advocates for it in the absence of such disclosure.
Government members may be looking to amend this legislation to raise the reporting thresholds and ranges for disclosure with respect to public sector salaries and bonuses. This will put more data out of reach of the public on how public dollars are spent on public services.
l'm told that this legislation will pass with such an amendment. Indeed this bill faces a fork in the road. If this legislation fails because it lacks this particular amendment, it will be scandalous for the majority governing caucus. This is legislation that calls to the very heart of the conservative base. Such transparency is a core theme of why conservatives elect Conservative Party candidates to serve in Ottawa.
If this legislation is amended to raise the disclosure limit and passes, it will be a watered-down, paler version of itself. I implore the government members to resist amending the disclosure threshold, because recent troubles facing this government on accountability issues provide the impetus for passing the legislation that we small-c conservatives desire.
With that, I welcome your questions on this presentation.