Bill C-567 (Historical)

An Act to amend the Access to Information Act (transparency and duty to document)

This enactment amends the Access to Information Act to, among other things,
(a) give the Information Commissioner of Canada the power to order government institutions to release documents;
(b) require government institutions to create records to document their decisions, recommendations and actions;
(c) establish an explicit duty to comply with orders of the Information Commissioner; and
(d) provide that those orders may be filed with the Federal Court and enforced as if they were judgments of that Court.

[Mathieu Ravignat, NDP, Pontiac, QC]

Mr. Speaker, the speech of my hon. colleague who just preceded me is a good example as to how the Conservatives have kind of convinced themselves that they are still the champions of transparency and accountability in this country. The reality is that they are not.

If they were listening, they would be hearing from the hundreds, if not thousands, if not millions of Canadians who are concerned with the secrecy and lack of accountability of the government. As the Treasury Board critic for the official opposition, I hear from a lot of Canadians who are worried that the democratic institutions of this country are being eroded by the need of a government to remain secret, to do things behind closed doors or in camera. In fact, the use of in camera meetings in committee is a great visible example of the government's commitment to transparency. I can imagine Canadians turning on their televisions at home, tuning into a committee that is dealing with a subject that is important to them, and seeing a blank screen. That is a great symbol of the approach the government has to open government.

The reality is that it did start with quite a broad vision of what an open government can be. The problem is that it got whittled down and whittled down, and whittled down again, as the government got used to power. It went from open government, to open data, to an open website. The committee studied that website and experts were not impressed. They were not impressed with the quality of information available on the website, the website's searchability, or its format.

The Conservative government must recognize that delays under the ATIP system, the number of complaints, and the level of public frustration have reached unacceptable levels. In wilfully abandoning the ATIP system through degradation and delay, the Conservatives have broken their own electoral promises. The Conservatives' growing blanket of secrecy endangers the very foundations of our parliamentary democracy.

I would like to remind Canadians that the Conservatives voted against Bill C-567, but I ask them to at least consider supporting Bill C-613, which is really just a weaker version of the NDP's bill, instead of voting another time against their electoral promises. Let me remind the House of those promises.

In 2006, the Conservatives promised to give the information commissioner the power to order the release of information, to expand the coverage of the act to all crown corporations, officers of Parliament, foundations and organizations that spend taxpayers' money or perform public functions, to subject the exclusion of cabinet confidences to review by the information commissioner. I would like to add that the government has used a record number of cabinet confidentiality excuses to totally bar information from Canadians, blacking it out. It is used in increasing ways and it is worrying.

The Conservatives further promised to provide a general public interest override for all exemptions so that the public interest is put before the secrecy of the government. They are beautiful words, but that is all they are. They further promised to ensure that all exemptions from the disclosure of government information are justified only on the basis of the harm or injury that would result from disclosure, not blanket exemption rules which is in fact the practice that is going on today.

Let us also remind ourselves of the Liberals' record on transparency. In 1994, the then justice minister Allan Rock pledged to strengthen the federal Access to Information Act, but it was not until early 2001 that then prime minister Jean Chrétien set up a government task force to examine the flaws. The Liberal access committee task force was just a delay tactic, as the federal government failed to act on the task force report. In fact, in late 2001, the Liberal government instead proposed new so-called anti-terrorism laws to keep more information secret from the public.

At their February 2014 convention, the Liberals passed a motion to promote “A more effective Access-to-Information regime with stronger safeguards against political interference”, but this bill does little to fulfill that motion.

By recommending that the Board of Internal Economy consider conducting internal exploratory consultations to help increase transparency, the Conservative-dominated PROC report essentially advocated the status quo on the Board of Internal Economy.

In their supplementary opinion, the Liberals recognized that transparency can be enhanced by mandating that the Board of Internal Economy hold its meetings in public and that these meetings would only go in camera if the board was discussing matters related to “security, employment, staff relations, or tenders, or...if unanimous consent of all members of the Board present...is obtained”. This exact phrase, which is also found in clause 1 of Bill C-613, provides the government of the day with huge elbow room and a grey area to act and to keep things silent from Canadians.

The Liberals are also silent on the issue of replacing the Board of Internal Economy with independent oversight. Let me remind the House of a motion passed by the NDP, with unanimous consent, on June 18, 2013. It sets out our vision for transparency and accountability by the government and at the Board of Internal Economy:

That, notwithstanding any Standing or Special Order or usual practice of the House: in order to bring full transparency and accountability to House of Commons spending, the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs be instructed to:

(i) conduct open and public hearings with a view to replace the Board of Internal Economy with an independent oversight body;

Now that is transparency.

(ii) invite the Auditor General, the Clerk and the Chief Financial Officer of the House of Commons to participate fully in these hearings;

(iii) study the practices of provincial and territorial legislatures, as well as other jurisdictions and Westminster-style Parliaments in order to compare and contrast their administrative oversight;

(iv) propose modifications to the Parliament of Canada Act, the Financial Administration Act, the Auditor General Act and any other acts as deemed necessary;

(v) propose any necessary modifications to the administrative policies and practices of the House of Commons;

(vi) examine the subject-matter of the motions, standing in the name of other members of Parliament;

(vii) report its findings to the House no later than December 2, 2013, in order to have any proposed changes approved.

That is a reasonable and transparent vision of government. That is what we are proposing as the official opposition.

Unfortunately, Liberals react only when they are caught, and when they do react, they respond with half measures and convenient grey areas in their legislative proposals to safeguard their discretionary elbow room, which they use abundantly to restrict access when they are in power.

On this side of the House, that is, at this end of the opposition benches, in line with the Auditor General's recommendations and in the spirit of the NDP June 18, 2013 motion, which was passed in the House unanimously, we propose meaningful changes to POCA that entrench independent oversight of Parliament's expenditures and operations and that make accountability to all Canadians, not just MPs, a priority.

We need the other parties to commit to pushing for a fully transparent and accountable system, the backbone of good governance, which is so lacking today and so necessary to restore the credibility of our parliamentary institutions and political system. We propose that we stress, however, that even with the best possible reform of the ATI Act and the BOIE, changing the rules will never be sufficient if the people in power aspire to thwart the system. Integrity should be at the heart of governance. Integrity cannot be legislative, and integrity is a missing element in past federal Liberal and Conservative governments.

Parliament of Canada Act

[Murray Rankin, NDP, Victoria, BC]

Mr. Speaker, it is hard to say a lot in six minutes on an area as important as access to information, but let me do my best.

Today, was a historic day. After two hard years of deliberation, our Information Commissioner, Madame Legault, brought forth a whole variety of recommendations to improve the Access to Information Act. I say that in the context of the debate on Bill C-613 that is before us, because this bill would not go nearly as far as even a tiny way toward what the commissioner said is necessary to fix our broken open government system.

A bill that would have gone much further than that was introduced by my hon. friend, the member for Winnipeg North, under the title Bill C-567, which I had—

Access to Information

[Ève Péclet, NDP, La Pointe-de-l'Île, QC]

Mr. Speaker, the Information Commissioner's report confirms what the NDP has been saying for years: the access to information system is outdated and ineffective.

The Conservatives campaigned on transparency and accountability. However, once in power, they voted against the NDP's Bill C-567, which would have given the commissioner the tools needed to expose government corruption.

Will the Conservatives finally listen to the commissioner and the NDP and strengthen the Access to Information Act?

Parliament of Canada Act

[Murray Rankin, NDP, Victoria, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I am so pleased to rise on this important initiative in the spirit of non-partisan debate, which is something Canadians expect when we are talking about fundamental reform to our parliamentary institutions. We are talking about two things in this bill: reforms to the Board of Internal Economy and reforms to the Access to Information Act.

In the very short time I have, I am going to comment mostly on the second order of problems involving the Access to Information Act. I am delighted to see that this bill incorporates something that had been promised before by the government and not delivered, and that is the need for independent ability for a court to order the disclosure of records. That is the best part of this bill, and one that I strongly support.

Indeed, Bill C-567, introduced by my colleague from Winnipeg Centre, would have done just that. Perhaps members will agree with me how ironic that bill was, because it was an effort to simply and only address those things left out of the Conservative government's accountability promises. Members will recall that 52 measures were promised by the Conservatives to increase ethics and accountability of the government, and the first thing the Conservatives said they would do when elected was to strengthen the Access to Information Act. When it all came out, their famous Federal Accountability Act contained a grand total of one of the eight open-government measures that they promised in the Federal Accountability Act. What the member for Winnipeg Centre did was simply present those things the government said it would do but did not do.

Perhaps I, as a new member, was relatively naive. I thought that all we were doing was asking the government to do what it promised in an election campaign. I am sad to report that the Conservatives spoke against that bill. However, at least one principle in this accountability legislation before us tonight was in that bill, which we completely and strongly endorse, and that is the ability for an information commissioner to order the disclosure of a record if it comes within the proper rules, even if the government wishes that not to occur.

An access bill, in any jurisdiction, must have three things: first, a statement of the right to openness, which is the default, as the member for Papineaunoted; the second critical thing, a list of exceptions to that rule, which would be narrow, that being the intent at least; and third, the ability for an independent officer to be essentially the umpire in the game and say that government should not withhold a particular record, that it should be disclosed. Those are the guts of meaningful access legislation. This bill would do that, and that is one measure, therefore, that we would strongly support.

The Conservative government has made fun of legislation of this sort in the past, and that is wrong. Mr. Crosbie, who was the first justice minister to live under an access act, said that this is merely a tool for “mischief-makers” whose objective “in the vast majority of instances” is to embarrass political leaders and titillate the public. That is not an access to information act.

It is a quasi-constitutional requirement, according to the Supreme Court of Canada. It is part of our legislative regime to ensure that the Government of Canada is held to account. This bill would go some measure toward that. It needs to go a lot further, and we hope that, when we get it into committee, we can improve it for all Canadians.

Opposition Motion--Safeguarding of Personal Information

[Françoise Boivin, NDP, Gatineau, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to conclude the debate on the opposition motion.

I will read the motion, because after hearing such garbage today, I was beginning to think that I was not talking about the right one. This is what the motion, moved by the hon. member for Terrebonne—Blainville, is asking of the House:

That, in the opinion of the House, the government should follow the advice of the Privacy Commissioner and make public the number of warrantless disclosures made by telecommunications companies at the request of federal departments and agencies; and immediately close the loophole that has allowed the indiscriminate disclosure of the personal information of law-abiding Canadians without a warrant.

I cannot believe that today, May 5, 2014, the Conservatives are going to vote against this motion. It is absolutely incredible. We heard all sorts of drama from the Conservatives about extremely important security issues. They shifted the debate from the opposition motion, which simply calls on the government to grant the Privacy Commissioner's request and make certain information public. It seems quite reasonable to me.

Today is the best possible day to be in the House. This morning, we debated Bill C-567, which was introduced by my colleague from Winnipeg Centre and is all about access to information. This motion is completely justified in light of the context, but they are saying all kinds of things.

I would like to comment on a question that my colleague from Timmins—James Bay asked the last Conservative member who spoke. That member laughed in his face even though the question was completely relevant. It was about peace officers, not as the local paper defines them, but as the Criminal Code defines them.

I would like to give my colleagues opposite a little lesson about the Criminal Code. It is important to define the notion of “peace officer” accurately, because Bill C-13, the government's supposed cyberbullying bill, refers to that notion. That bill is about much more than cyberbullying and the distribution of intimate images.

According to section 2 of the Criminal Code, a peace officer includes:

(a) a mayor, warden, reeve, sheriff, deputy sheriff, sheriff’s officer and justice of the peace,

(b) a member of the Correctional Service of Canada who is designated as a peace officer pursuant to Part I of the Corrections and Conditional Release Act, and a warden, deputy warden, instructor, keeper, jailer, guard and any other officer or permanent employee of a prison other than a penitentiary as defined in Part I of the Corrections and Conditional Release Act,

(c) a police officer, police constable, bailiff, constable, or other person employed for the preservation and maintenance of the public peace or for the service or execution of civil process,

(c.1) a designated officer as defined in section 2 of the Integrated Cross-border Law Enforcement Operations Act, when

(i) participating in an integrated cross-border operation, as defined in section 2 of that Act, or

(ii) engaging in an activity incidental to such an operation, including travel for the purpose of participating in the operation and appearances in court arising from the operation,

(d) an officer within the meaning of the Customs Act [or] the Excise Act...or a person having the powers of such an officer...

I could keep reading this definition until 6:15 p.m. It is not so far-fetched for my colleague from Timmins—James Bay to suggest that Mayor Ford could request certain information.

What is more, the NDP has been heavily criticized today for some of its requests. However, in La Presse this morning, there was an article by Joël-Denis Bellavance on the information we are looking for with the official opposition motion moved by my colleague from Terrebonne—Blainville. Mr. Bellavance reported that the Privy Council Office also made a request of all its departments. The PCO wanted to know who these people were who made 1.2 million requests for information about Canadians. There are 1.2 million Canadians who are allegedly affected by these requests.

All day, the Conservatives have been telling us that this is terrible, that what we are asking for is scary and that the NDP does not know what it is talking about.

I even heard one of the ministers of state, a junior minister over there, say the times have changed.

I think we all know that. Information circulates quickly, I agree. Regardless of the fact that times have changed, there are still laws that apply in this country.

We all know that this Conservative government likes to intrude on Canadian taxpayers' privacy and could not care less about almost every law around. When this government gets caught, it takes a holier than thou stance or it suddenly takes a few strategic steps backward and comes back with what I like to call the Trojan Horse tactic. In other words, it disguises its approach in another way.

Everyone in the House remembers Bill C-30, introduced by my favourite minister, the former minister of public safety. I was going to say something unkind, but I will be careful. Thank God the public woke up and made a concerted effort to ensure that the government backed down. This goes to show that ridicule never killed anyone. However, sometimes it kills political careers, even though politicians will often end up becoming a judge somewhere. Everyone kept telling the former public safety minister what he was in the process of doing. They ridiculed his bill. Sometimes that is what it takes with this government.

Their concerns were heard. The Conservatives withdrew the bill and suddenly we had Bill S-4 and Bill C-13, which deals with cyberbullying. Who in the House would not want to protect victims? Who would not want to say at some point that we passed legislation after a number of young people committed suicide as a result of bullying? That is rather disgusting, although there are other unparliamentary words that could be used. It is problematic to rise in the House and say that, on the contrary, we are in favour of cyberbullying. However, once again, the Conservatives introduced five or six pages of text that were more or less accurate and then combined them with tons of provisions that amend all sorts of legislation.

Fortunately, the Minister of Justice told me that he would give the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights the time needed to examine those provisions. Perhaps we, the members of that committee, are not the best people to examine those provisions. Fortunately, we will be hearing from many experts.

I still believe that the motion that I moved at the beginning of the debate on Bill C-13 made complete sense. I proposed dividing the bill in two so that that we could do what we do best: examine the provisions of the Criminal Code and make sure that the new provisions regarding the distribution of intimate images fall within the parameters and meet the test of the Criminal Code.

Instead, we are going to be spending a lot of our time looking at the aspects of the bill dealing with privacy and how certain telecommunications providers will be able to disclose information without a warrant, or with a warrant but with a lighter burden of proof, and so on.

Unfortunately, since the beginning, this government has shown us that it has no credibility. Every week, there is a new drama featuring one of the people sitting in the front benches. At the end of last week—and it has continued into this week—it was the Prime Minister and his serious insinuations. Sometimes, not saying enough is the same as saying too much. He attacked the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada.

Members on the Conservative benches are wondering why we do not trust them. Why are we suspicious when we get bills like Bill S-4 or Bill C-13? We are wondering what is behind those bills.

People have been debating this motion all day in the House. I repeat that it does not get any simpler than this motion, which calls on the government to follow the advice of the Privacy Commissioner. Who does not want to follow that advice? Who is against making public the number of disclosures, when even the Prime Minister's Office is quietly checking into this matter? The Conservatives are simply afraid of doing things. They want public information on our constituents, on Canadian taxpayers, but they do not want anyone other than themselves to have access to that information.

That is why the government does so much behind closed doors. The representatives of the people, here in the House, certainly have a right to know. We are getting questions as well. I hear from people, and I am sure that my colleagues in the House, even on the Conservative side, are hearing from people. I am shocked to see that many of these people, from the Reform Party of Canada and the Canadian Alliance, who made a point of calling themselves the voice of the people, are now the biggest puppets, sitting in their seats, terrified to rise and say that this makes absolutely no sense.

At some point we need to wake up and go back to our ridings to talk to our constituents, who are asking what is going on with their information, who has access to this information, when and why. Are there 1.2 million criminals somewhere in Canada? Is it because we have relaxed our rules so much that everyone—ISPs, telecommunications companies and others—feels justified in passing on information? The companies know that they will go unpunished if they freely share information on anything. That is dangerous.

Some people here in the House say that times have changed. That is true. I can do research. In fact, I do not claim to know all the sections of the Criminal Code, and I was able to find the section on the concept of peace officer right away, in two seconds. It was actually quicker than that as I think it took me one-tenth of a second to find the definition in the Criminal Code. Sometimes I tell young people or future lawyers that they are lucky because, in my day—I do not like to say this because it dates me, but it is a fact—when I did my research, I had to go to the law faculty library and open maybe 18 books before formulating an idea. Now, we just click on a button.

However, just because information travels at astronomical speeds, it does not mean that the privacy guarantees and protections granted to all Canadians under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms must be trampled by a government that does not care about protecting its citizens.

[Matthew Kellway, NDP, Beaches—East York, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to stand in the House this afternoon in support of the motion by my colleague, the MP for Terrebonne—Blainville, on this great opposition day.

It is a day in the House to be talking about privacy issues. This morning I had the privilege of speaking in support of Bill C-567, an act to amend the Access to Information Act (transparency and duty to document), put forward by my colleague from Winnipeg Centre.

This morning's bill and this afternoon's motion complement each other very well. Together they demonstrate to Canadians our NDP desire that it be the citizens of this country, not the government of this country, who are able to conduct their lives with a reasonable expectation of privacy and that it be the government of this country, not its citizens, that has the obligation to operate in a manner that is transparent, open, and accountable.

If there is a simple conclusion to draw from the sum of the whole day, it is that the current Conservative government has it backwards, upside down, and twisted all around. The Conservatives stand in support of government privacy, of, in fact, the necessity to operate free from the scrutiny of the citizenry of Canada and those they elect to hold the government accountable.

How, the Conservatives ask in response to Bill C-567, can they operate at once openly and honestly? If they are to tell the truth, it must be behind the curtain, they argue, in the dark, out of earshot, and away from the gaze of the public and opposition members of this place. On the other hand, they demonstrate no mere disregard of the privacy rights of Canadian citizens. They demonstrate an appetite, a voracious, seemingly insatiable appetite, for the private information of Canadians.

Much is made of the fact that we live in new and different times, with new forms of information and new means of accessing that information. There is truth, of course, to this, undeniably. I think all of us are alive to the ease with which information we consider private is accessible to those who want to put some effort, and not much is required, into accessing it. Our expectation of privacy is diminished as a result, simply because we know the ease with which we are vulnerable. Therefore, we see the narrative here being one of the need to modernize our laws to take these new circumstances into account. That does not account for the conduct of the current government.

The problem before us is not simply one of a government that has not come up to speed, that has failed to respond in a timely way to these new circumstances, and that has left exposed loopholes in the formulation of the laws of this country. That would paint a picture of an incompetent or slow, but certainly benign, government. No, the current Conservative government is anything but benign.

Confronted with a loophole for accessing the private information of Canadians, a benign government may simply fail to close that loophole. The current government lets through that loophole, fully, completely, and head first, with great enthusiasm and an obvious lust for what it might find on the other side. What we have before us is evidence of this lust.

Very recently, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, Chantal Bernier, revealed that Canadian telecom companies disclosed massive volumes of information to government agencies, including the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, Canada Border Services Agency, and provincial and municipal authorities.

Telecom companies disclosed personal data to the Canadian government 1.2 million times in a single year. We can of course concede that a balance is to be found between privacy rights, public security, and other concerns, including immediate danger to life. However, this can be nothing other than an indiscriminate fishing expedition of monumental proportions that the Privacy Commissioner has revealed to us.

These volumes equate to information requests with respect to one in every 34 or so Canadians. The vast majority of these requests are made without warrants. These volumes equate to a request for personal data, by the federal government to a telecom company, once every 27 seconds.

So great is the volume of information requests that one telecom company has advised that it has installed what it calls “a mirror” on its network so that it can send raw data traffic directly to federal authorities. Michael Geist, a digital law professor at the University of Ottawa, says this of what is happening:

This is happening on a massive scale and rather than the government taking a step back and asking is this appropriate...we instead have a government going in exactly the opposite direction—in a sense doubling down on these disclosures

It is easy to find further evidence of this doubling down, of this appetite for private information. One cannot help but note that Bill C-13, which is purportedly about cyberbullying, is more about lowering the bar on government access to information. The “reason to believe” standard is being replaced with a “reason to suspect” standard, opening up much greater warrantless access to electronic information. Moreover, Bill C-13 would allow a broader and lower range of government officials to have access to the private information of Canadians.

Bill S-4 will also be coming before this House, we suspect. That bill would permit non-governmental organizations and corporations to have access to information from telecom companies. FATCA, the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, buried deep in the budget bill, would expose the financial information of about one million Canadians to the U.S. government, and so on.

In light of all of this, one could argue that there is a kind of naiveté to the motion I speak in support of today. Certainly the first part of the motion is easy enough. It is, in fact, all the Privacy Commissioner has requested. She has said:

I'm not disputing that there are times when there is no time to get a warrant—life is in danger....

What we would like is for those warrantless disclosures to simply be represented in statistics so that Canadians have an idea of the scope of the phenomenon.

...It would give a form of oversight by empowering citizens to see what the scope of the phenomenon is.

It is a modest enough proposal: at least let me see what it is the federal government is doing here.

However, we are also asking the government to close the loophole that has allowed the indiscriminate disclosure of the personal information of law-abiding Canadians without warrants. In so doing, we must recognize that we are asking the predator to restrain itself, to bind itself, to limit its own appetite for our private information, to guard itself. It has no such impulse, no such sense of constraint, as is obvious from the 1.2 million requests, by Bill C-13, by Bill S-4, and by FATCA.

Here is the very saddest part of this. As we engage with each other through the technologies of this modern world, we do so with some trepidation about how exposed we are to the prying eyes and interests of others, and part of what we need to be concerned about now, we find out, are the prying eyes and interests of our own government. Rather than being able to rely on our own government to support us and to protect our privacy in this modern world, it appears that our government is itself a cause for concern.