Debates of Oct. 16th, 2001

Public Health

[Allan Rock, Liberal, Minister of Health]

Mr. Speaker, I am currently working in close co-operation with my colleagues. We are all fully engaged in the process in order to prepare Canada against these threats.

I have already made a statement today to the effect that Health Canada is working with its provincial partners. I am a member of the team and we are all working together.

At the end of the day, the most important thing is to assume our responsibilities, and we will do so.

National Security

[Darrel Stinson, Canadian Alliance, Okanagan—Shuswap, BC]

Mr. Speaker, customs agents do not have the ability to defuse potentially dangerous situations. They are advised to allow people they feel who are of high risk to enter our country. Then they are supposed to call the RCMP or the police afterward.

Will the minister give customs agents the authority of peace officers to allow them to protect our Canadian citizens more efficiently?

[Martin Cauchon, Liberal, Minister of National Revenue and Secretary of State (Economic Development Agency of Canada for the Regions of Quebec)]

Mr. Speaker, some months ago customs officers were provided with what we call officer power. Officer power has been implemented in some ports, at land borders, of course, and at seaports and airports.

As well, customs is not the police department. Over the past decade we have worked with local and national police. This is what we will keep doing in the future, making sure as well that the safety of our officers is a prime concern of Canada customs.

Highway Infrastructure

[Michel Gauthier, Bloc, Roberval, QC]

Mr. Speaker, the Minister of Finance, in a visit to Chicoutimi last week, expressed an interest in covering half the cost of work on a four lane highway in the parc des Laurentides.

The Quebec minister of transport, Guy Chevrette, immediately asked to pay for half of it, so the work can begin immediately.

Was the Minister of Finance serious in his remarks and, if so, when will he provide a cheque? We are just waiting for him.

[David Collenette, Liberal, Minister of Transport]

Mr. Speaker, my honourable colleague knows very well we have an infrastructure program for highways across the country. It is a $600 million program.

The provinces and the federal government split costs 50:50, and the provinces establish the priorities; this is a provincial responsibility in the context of a national highway system.

Presence in Gallery

[The Speaker]

I draw the attention of hon. members to the presence in the gallery of Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, Director-General of the World Health Organization

[Some hon. members]

Hear, hear.

Points of Order

[Herb Gray, Liberal, Deputy Prime Minister]

Mr. Speaker, if you look at yesterday's Hansard you will see a list of those who voted yea in support of the opposition day motion, but my name does not appear.

I want to say to the House that I was present during the vote. It was not my intention to abstain. It was my intention to vote with my colleagues in support of the opposition day motion. I shared the position of my colleagues in support of it then and I share that position now.

I hope there will be no misunderstanding on this. I did not abstain and did not intend to abstain.

[The Speaker]

Is the Deputy Prime Minister asking that his name be included in the list of yeas for yesterday's vote?

[Herb Gray, Liberal, Windsor West, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I would be delighted if the House would agree that I would be so included. I would appreciate that very much.

[The Speaker]

Is it agreed?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

Privilege

[Jim Gouk, Canadian Alliance, Kootenay—Boundary—Okanagan, BC]

Mr. Speaker, on October 4 the Minister of Transport appeared before the transport committee. In the course of his opening presentation he referred to a ministerial directive he had written requesting that cockpit doors of Canadian aircraft be locked for the duration of the flight.

I advised him I had flown on Canadian aircraft since the time the directive had apparently been written and had seen cockpit doors open on several occasions. The minister's response to that was that “On the question of cockpit doors, I have to say that if you have been on flights where this is the case, you have an obligation as a member of parliament to report that to me or my officials, the date, the time”.

I further asked the minister if he would be willing to table any ministerial directives issued to the department on airport security since September 11. His response to this request was as follows, that “Most government documents are available under access to information. If we can make them available to you, we will”.

That is not acceptable. On one hand the minister is stating that I have an obligation as a member of parliament to report any observations I make that contravene his directives. On the other hand he is advising me that I would have to rely on access to information to find out what that directive is. This is not unlike the situation that occurred in the case of Bill C-36 which is now before the House. The government provided information to the media before providing that same information to MPs.

In the case of the minister's departmental directives, he states that we need to report observed breaches of his directives without ever having been informed by the government of their existence. In such cases we are to rely on material acquired from access to information, and if we are, how are we to know that the material even exists to ask for or what we are supposed to ask for? Does the minister expect us to rely on reports in the media, which is how we got our initial information on Bill C-36?

I submit that the minister, by creating directives which he then claims MPs have an obligation to be in compliance with and by not providing those directives to MPs, has caused a breach of parliamentary privilege in that he has created an obligation for specific performance by MPs and then prevented MPs from fulfilling that obligation.

I ask that this be remedied by requiring the Minister of Transport to table all ministerial directives issued to his department on airport security since September 11.

[David Collenette, Liberal, Minister of Transport]

Mr. Speaker, I have just become aware of this so-called question of privilege from my colleague from Kootenay--Boundary--Okanagan. He is misplaced by raising this as a question of privilege.

It is true that in committee at the time he offered the fact, in response to the discussion about cockpit doors being ordered closed pursuant to regulation under the Aeronautics Act, that he had many occasions where pilots were not obeying us. I said to him that he had an obligation, as did any citizen, when they saw the law transgressed or if they suspected the law was being transgressed, to report it to the appropriate authorities. I would think that he should not contest that. That particular directive was well publicized.

I told the hon. member that we would make information available to him, as we do for committees in general. However, if he requires items that go beyond the scope of a particular discussion in a committee, he is free to use the access to information remedy.

He is mixing apples and oranges. He is somehow saying that his privileges have been infringed upon. I would say that he is not discharging his privileges if he does not come forward and give evidence, give flight numbers, give the time and the locations of these planes because the allegation is that he has been sitting on aircraft when the law is being broken.

[The Speaker]

It is hard to know how there could be a supplementary question of privilege. The Chair is prepared to deal with this at the moment. I have heard the two sides and I had real difficulty in even allowing this. This is clearly a dispute between members about what happened in a committee. In my view the matter should be dealt with in the committee.

If the member has a disagreement with the minister, I suggest he get the committee to call the minister back. The minister can attend with any documents that might need to be tabled and they could be tabled there. He can answer questions from the member and could indeed suggest remedies to the member for dealing with these matters, if there is a dispute.

This is not one in my opinion that involves the privileges of the member or of members of the House as defined in the works on this subject, including Maingot's description of privilege in the House and the description contained in Marleau and Montpetit.

In my view this is an inappropriate place for this matter to be raised. It is a matter that was raised originally in committee. The dispute arose out of committee proceedings and the matter ought to be settled in the committee and not here. I invite the hon. member to do so.

I do not want to get into an argument. By having allowed the matter to go this far, we have obvious disputes as to the facts and what happened in committee and what should happen between one side and another. I am not prepared to continue to go on with this because I know the hon. member will say this is what he wants and the minister will want to say what he wants. I am not prepared to allow this to continue here because in my view this is an appropriate matter for the committee and not for the House.

[Jim Gouk, Canadian Alliance, Kootenay—Boundary—Okanagan, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I would ask that you consider that there are certain pieces of evidence, not arguments or disputes, but very specific two single points of evidence, that should be considered before you render that final decision on this question of privilege.

[The Speaker]

I have considered the evidence and I have indicated that the evidence is something that should be dealt with before the committee, not in the House. This is a matter for the committee to take up and I invite the hon. member to go back to committee. No doubt the minister would love to appear again. The committee will be able to work something out, hear evidence and everything it needs to hear to resolve the matter. It is not an appropriate one for the House.

[Ken Epp, Canadian Alliance, Elk Island, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I am distressed because I fly all the time and I now hear that I have a legal obligation to report these things. What is the penalty? What is the document? Can we somehow get that information?

[The Speaker]

I am sure that if the hon. member asks legal counsel, he will be able to get any legal document that is required. If there are regulations or statutes in force, the hon. member can satisfy that without raising it as a question of privilege in the House. I am sorry it is not a matter of privilege. The laws and statutes and regulations are public. There is legal counsel who could give him advice on the subject. I am sorry, this is not to be discussed here.

The House resumed consideration of the motion that Bill C-36, an act to amend the criminal code, the Official Secrets Act, the Canada Evidence Act, the Proceeds of Crime (Money Laundering) Act and other acts, and to enact measures respecting the registration of charities in order to combat terrorism, be read the second time and referred to a committee.

[Reg Alcock, Liberal, Winnipeg South, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with great care to the member's remarks. I served with him on the justice committee and know him to be a thoughtful member in the area of human rights. We recently did work on the organized crime bill, the money laundering bill and others, but I was not part of the committee at the time. Those bills were subject to review, I believe.

Could the member share with us his position or his party's position on the review of those acts versus the review of this one, and give me a sense of how they are different?

[Michel Bellehumeur, Bloc, Berthier—Montcalm, QC]

Mr. Speaker, if the hon. member is referring to the review of this legislation that was authorized, we agreed to review the legislation and anything to do with its enforcement to see if it was properly implemented.

It is not the first time that the Bloc Quebecois asks for a provision to be added so that the legislation is subject to an automatic review. I cannot seem to remember what bills exactly we were dealing with, but at the justice committee, we oftentimes consider such bills. Unfortunately, I have no examples that come to mind right now, but I certainly could provide some to the member. Members of the justice committee are often asked to consider such issues and we frequently ask for these pieces of legislation to be reviewed.

What we have before the House is an extraordinary and lengthy measure that gives new powers to police officers, as I said earlier, including the authority to arrest people without a warrant and to proceed with preventive detention.

During question period, my hon. colleague from Saint-Hubert talked about the new powers granted to the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada concerning the enforcement of the Access to Information Act. There is a whole panoply of exceptional powers being granted to the Solicitor General of Canada, the Minister of Justice and the Minister of National Defence.

Since this is extraordinary legislation, a very special bill, the Bloc Quebecois is asking for a yearly review and wants the bill to have only a three year life expectancy. If, after three years, it is deemed necessary to renew it, parliament would again get to vote on this bill.

This is a very exceptional set of circumstances for which we need to take exceptional measures.

If the government truly intends to pass extraordinary legislation to balance national security and individual and collective rights and freedoms, if that is what the government really wants, then it should recognize that we are right and amend the bill accordingly.

[Monique Guay, Bloc, Laurentides, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I think we all agree in the House, and my colleague will say once again that we are in an exceptional situation that the House has never had to deal with before.

Terrorism is new to us. We have to deal with it, but we must also be sure that the laws we pass here do not infringe rights and freedoms. The public must also be protected. We do not simply want to say “We are going to arrest everyone for any reason whatsoever”.

So it is important that we review this bill and make sure we really need it at certain times. We do not know what will happen in the next year.

Does my colleague not think that it would be preferable, according to events, for us to return to the House and review, improve or change certain provisions contained in this bill?

[Michel Bellehumeur, Bloc, Berthier—Montcalm, QC]

Mr. Speaker, it goes without saying that, as the member for Berthier--Montcalm, I would support any act that seeks to improve national security, public security.

But we must not go overboard and let people use this bill, whose goals are good and laudable under the circumstances, distort its application and engage in abuse.

As I said this morning, we must not only look at Bill C-36. We must examine it, but with the existing criminal code, with the existing federal legislation. We must also look at it while keeping in mind the eventual implementation of Bill C-24, which is in the Senate and which is waiting for royal assent.

Let us not forget that Bill C-24, the anti-gang legislation, allows police officers to commit acts that would be considered illegal under any act passed by parliament.

When Bill C-24 was passed in the House, there was no anti-terrorism bill on the horizon. Now we have one. We must look at the bill in its entirety and understand that police officers have increased powers under the organized crime legislation and the anti-terrorism act. All this put together could lead to abuse.

This legislation should be reviewed every year and a three year cut-off date should be set. After three years, this act would become obsolete. It would no longer be in effect, unless parliament brought it back, debated it and passed it again.

[Reg Alcock, Liberal, Winnipeg South, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time. Given that I have a very short period of time, I simply want to frame two or three quick arguments by way of advice to the committee that will consider the bill.

As everyone has gone to some lengths to point out, these are difficult times.

I would like to start by congratulating all the public servants who have worked so hard to make the very necessary adjustments quickly to provide us with increased security and protection as we sort out what is going on in the world.

I want to congratulate the staff at the justice department. This huge bill amends more than 23 other bills. It deals with some of the most sensitive issues in our body of law, issues that affect our individual, personal and civil rights. It is not easy.

I also want to congratulate the members of the cabinet. It has been little more than a month since the events took place. They got all this work done and produced a bill that is, on a very preliminary reading, quite fair and balanced.

I do have concerns about some of it which I will speak to in a minute, but it was remarkably more balanced than I had feared when I first heard they were coming forward with a bill of this magnitude.

At the same time, there is an old saying that there are two things children should never see: the making of law and the making of sausages. Justice done in haste can carry within it some very big problems. To try to put through a bill of this size, which deals with so many important rights of individuals, raises cause for at least wonder and concern.

I congratulate the Prime Minister in this instance. I listened with great care to his speech last night. I was particularly taken both last night and today with not just his willingness but with his instructions to and urging of the justice committee. He said:

But we all recognize that the legislation has, of necessity, been prepared quickly. Therefore, the role of the justice committee of this House in scrutinizing the bill will be of particular importance. It must examine the bill through the lens, not only of public safety, but also of individual rights.

With his history in protecting human rights, I thank him for handing that responsibility over to the committee because I am sure it will do a good job. It will give us some time hopefully to reflect on some of these issues.

I really want to frame three arguments here.

By and large the bill does a very good job. It brings into force a couple of United Nations conventions that we had not yet ratified. I would recommend to everyone in the House that they read the speech of our colleague from Mount Royal who went through the 12 conventions in some detail and talked about Canada's leadership role in this area. It is an important opportunity for us to share with the rest of the world some of the expertise and feelings we have developed here.

Some of the issues regarding the changes to investigatory powers could be better understood as modernizing the body of tools that the police have available to them. In fact, the communication technologies have changed rapidly over the last couple of decades. Some of the instruments the police have to do investigations simply have not kept up.

There is a recognition that there needs to be more work done in this area and I believe we will see a more extensive review. This one was done quickly to deal with those most egregious or difficult areas in terms of mobile wiretapping to allow them to take advantage of the various technologies or to interact with some of the newer technologies to track people or to confirm their suspicions of terrorist acts.

I can broadly support that, but given the rapid changes in technology we need a more thorough review of this. I hope the minister will reinforce our intention to proceed with it, even though we have passed some of these articles of the law.

The second area is a more difficult one. Anyone who has dealt with privacy or access legislation knows that there are certain categories of information that not only are secret, but the very existence of them needs to be denied.

It is a funny conundrum in a free and open society. One of the simplest examples, and we went through this when we looked at freedom of information relative to organized crime, is that if we had the right to ask a question not about the substance of an investigation, but about the very existence of an investigation, that could be enough to alert criminals to something of which they were not formerly aware.

In this case some of the secrecy provisions are around information to be received from other countries. It is a necessary provision. The U.S. or any other country will not share with us information that has been uncovered by their systems if they feel that information may be leaked. However it is necessary to have comprehensive arrangements to track down terrorists worldwide. It raises questions though when things are done in darkness and are absent from public review.

There was a question, which I rather agreed with, about the need to establish third party review. It can be done in secrecy. Judges can be sworn. However there needs to be a mechanism. This is a fundamental question: Who watches the watchers?

One of our jobs in this Chamber is to ensure that people's rights are protected. If we cannot for legitimate reasons, and I would say this is only when there is legitimacy to the secrecy, we still need to have an oversight mechanism that is empowered.

In many cases there is evidence of that, there is reference to the courts and we have a lot of opportunities to get a third party involved. However it is not quite as clear in the areas of the Official Secrets Act and some of that information. The committee should have a look at that.

The final thing of which I want to speak is the thing that worries me the most. Perhaps I should not say worries me, but I would like to offer it as a solution to the problem. The problem is we are in an extraordinary time. There is a lot of need to act quickly to address this but we do not know how we will feel about this in two or three years. We do not know how effective it will be. We have made some fairly sweeping changes and they will have an impact on the body of rights that we exercise, so we should consider sunsetting certain clauses of the act.

By that I mean not just reviewing, I mean certain clauses of the act should cease to be in effect by a given date, and I have a recommendation on that, unless the House re-debates and re-passes them.

This is not a provision we use in Canada very often and I would not normally argue for it except for two things. The mechanism that we use is one of parliamentary review. We have 32 acts outstanding right now that contain review clauses. The trouble is we do not necessarily get around to it in a timely way.

I note there is a three year review for the Corrections and Conditional Release Act. The bill came into effect in 1992. The subcommittee was established to review the act in November of 1998 and to review it again in February of 1999. We have not been very good at following up on these reviews.

Also, reviews sometimes carry within them the sense that we will just look at it and tinker with it. When it is something as fundamental as our individual rights, they deserve more fulsome debate at a time when we are not immediately under the pressure of the anthrax, or the terrorist attacks or everything else that is going on in this environment.

I can support the passage of the bill, subject to the review and advice from the justice committee, but I would recommend that we do as the U.S. house did when it put a sunset clause that had an interesting kind of additional version to it. I would not sunset the whole bill. I would sunset only certain clauses in it.

The U.S. sunsetted it for three years. It said that those sections would cease to have effect on December 31, 2004, but it gave an out clause. It said to the president in that case, and we would say it to our Minister of Justice or the Prime Minister, that if it were indicated that the sections were required for national security they would remain in force for two additional years. That would buy a little time if there were concern about this thing failing.

I think that would work here. It is critical that when we get more distant from these events that we re-debate and re-pass these provisions.

I also want to share a bit of information from Canadians. Canadians are quite worried about what has been going on, as one would expect, and there has been a fair bit of surveying. Ipsos-Reid just did a lengthy survey on what people would be prepared to accept. This was within 10 days of the events in New York City.

The question asked was: “Do you agree or disagree with the statement, I would be prepared to see our police and security services get more powers to fight terrorism, even if it means they might tap my phone, open my mail or read my personal e-mail?” At that time, 10 days after those events, only 50% of Canadians agreed with that; 53% in the weighted sample.

Then they were asked “Would you be willing to give up some of your civil liberties?” Again there was an ambiguity about that.