Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak to the government's motion relating to extending certain clauses of the Anti-terrorism Act that are subject to sunset at the end of this month.
The Liberal opposition has thought long and hard on this issue. This party, while in government, introduced the Anti-terrorism Act and this House passed certain provisions subject to a five year sunset which we are considering in the House today.
The position of my party is clear. These provisions providing for preventive arrest and investigative hearings should sunset and they should sunset because they are flawed.
The Commons committee and the committee in another House that reviewed these provisions believed that while some of the provisions are worthwhile they were seriously flawed. The committees had made extensive recommendations on how to address these flaws, how to ensure they better contribute to our public safety and how to better safeguard against the potential abuse of human rights.
The Liberal Party is proud of its record on defence and public safety, and I want to stress that this record is in line with civil liberties.
The point is that government has ignored the recommendations of the House and Senate committees. The government has failed to present to this House clear proposals to extend these provisions in a modified form which take into account the concerns of parliamentarians.
In fact, the government has not formally engaged the opposition in any way. It has not submitted any proposals to us. We have known since last October that Canada's Anti-terrorism Act needed a complete review. The government has done nothing.
This has presented the House and the country with an up or down choice. The government seeks to present all parties in Parliament with the following choice: vote to extend these provisions or risk being labelled as soft on terror.
Let me be clear. This party has never been soft on terror. As the leader of my party has repeatedly stated, if the government presented this House with clear proposals to redraft the anti-terrorist legislation to take into account the sensible suggestions made by the House and the Senate committees, the official opposition would act expeditiously and responsibly.
To repeat, the party has never been soft on terror. The House knows and the government knows that after the attacks of 9/11 the Liberal government acted decisively and we will always do so.
The Liberal government at the time also knew something else: measures that may be necessary in an emergency must always be reviewed once the danger has abated. That is why the original legislation included sunset clauses so that, once the immediate danger had passed, Parliament could calmly assess whether those measures should be renewed and, if so, how.
This is where we are today or where we ought to be if this country were led by a responsible government. If this country were led by a government that said, “We are in a minority position in this House. Let us reach out to the opposition. Let us listen to what the committees of the House and the committees in another chamber said. Let us come back with revisions to the legislation that better balance security and liberty”, we would have responded positively. Instead, in the government everything is political. Everything is an opportunity to jam the opposition.
That is fair enough. We are all politicians in the House, but there are some issues on which we should try to put politics aside and put the security of our country first.