Information & Ethics Committee on March 18th, 2010

[The Chair, Liberal, Paul Szabo]

Thank you.

There being no further matters, I want to thank the witnesses kindly for your appearance.

The committee will consider the request of this meeting and report to the House.

Thank you. You're excused.

Colleagues, there was one other item on the supplementary estimates (C), which had to do with the Senate Ethics Officer, a $50,000 item.

We attempted to have the Senate Ethics Officer appear before us. There is a protocol between the Houses, and certain things have to happen for that person to be able to go to the green chamber, as it were, and that wasn't possible to do. But Mr. Jean Fournier, the Senate Ethics Officer, has sent a brief statement that I could read to you. It reads:

This is Vote 20c. It's for $50,000. The funding is to conduct an inquiry regarding compliance with the Conflict of Interest Code for Senators. The increase is needed to cover the costs of an opinion or inquiry the Senate Ethics Officer was asked to undertake by a senator on October 20, 2009, pursuant to subsection 42(1) of the Conflict of Interest Code for Senators. Inquiries are a rare occurrence and the related costs are not included in the annual estimates of the expenses of the office.

So there was no provision in their budgets for any investigations or inquiry, but there is one, in fact, and the estimated amount was some $50,000.

That is all the information I have, but I understand that is the amount included, I guess globally, in vote 45c and vote 20c.

Those are the two items.

Do we have further questions on those two items?

Ms. Davidson.

[Patricia Davidson, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

If I can go back to the explanation that you just read, this is for a broad study on conflict of interest, is it?

[The Chair, Liberal, Paul Szabo]

No, it's an investigation of a specific complaint under the conflict of interest code for senators. They have a separate conflict of interest code.

I understand that this reporting, where this matter has been referred to our committee to address, has raised some questions in that it likely will no longer be reported to us once they get this sorted out. The Senate matters will probably be handled in the procedure and House affairs committee, because it's not a House issue.

This matter has been referred to us by the Speaker of the House, so we have to in fact report back on it.

On the reason that we're dealing with the supplementary estimates (C), and I don't think I explained it to members, they have to be reported back to the House by the 23rd, which is next Tuesday. Our next meeting isn't until 11 o'clock. Routine proceedings are at the beginning of the day, at 10 o'clock. So we either do this now and have the meeting, and decide to approve or deny the request now, so that it can be reported to the House on time...

Madam Block.

[Kelly Block, Conservative, Saskatoon—Rosetown—Biggar, SK]

Mr. Chair, I'm wondering if you would circulate that statement to the whole committee.

[The Chair, Liberal, Paul Szabo]

Here it is in both official languages.

Do you have copies of that, Mr. Clerk?

Yes. Okay.

[Kelly Block, Conservative, Saskatoon—Rosetown—Biggar, SK]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Paul Szabo]

If there's no further discussion on the items, we have two motions. The committee can adopt, reduce, or negative each vote, but it cannot increase the amount of the vote.

We'll call each vote separately. Each vote forms a distinct motion that is debatable and amendable. As an example, a motion would be that vote X, Y, Z in the amount of x be reduced by y.

The circulation of the information to the members of the committee with the supplementaries included both these items.

I see there's confusion; our agenda only shows vote 45c on it.

Members can check the reference of the other vote, 20c, from the Speaker of the House to this committee. We actually discussed vote 20c about the Senate at steering committee on Tuesday, and the chair was directed to get the Senate Ethics Officer to appear and he was unable to appear. I don't think we're uninformed of the reference.

The members will be asked to dispose of both of these requests for votes under supplementary estimates (C). Of course the members will also know that if a committee does not report back on supplementary or main estimates, they're deemed to have been reported back without amendment. So this is our opportunity.

Mr. Siksay, you have a question?

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Thank you, Chair.

Could you report on the resolution of the confusion about a budget request for the ethics officer for the Senate coming to this committee?

I think it is important to be clear about the relationship between the House and the Senate. I think it would be helpful to all of us to know that has been clarified for the future--although I have to say I would relish the opportunity to go after ethics concerns with regard to the unelected Senate, which I think is a huge concern for most Canadians. I find it appalling that we still have such a body in our democracy. If that isn't an ethical question, I don't know what is.

I hope you can report on how that's resolved.

[The Chair, Liberal, Paul Szabo]

Well, certainly there is the relevance of it coming to our committee. But it always has been there. That vote has always been there for us; we've just never dealt with it. We're learning.

The question you raised has already been discussed, and we will get a resolution and any other information that would be helpful for the committee to understand the logistics of properly addressing appropriations, whether it be for this House or the other place. We will do that.

Shall vote 45c under Justice with regard to the privacy matter carry?

JUSTICE

Offices of the Information and Privacy Commissioners of Canada

Vote 45c--Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada–Program expenditures..........$100,000

(Vote 45c agreed to)

PARLIAMENT

Senate Ethics Officer

Vote 20c--Program expenditures..........$50,000

(Vote 20c agreed to)

Shall I report the supplementary estimates to House?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[The Chair, Liberal, Paul Szabo]

Thank you, colleagues.

All right, we have a bit of time. We're definitely going to complete this meeting before 1 o'clock, but we'll carry on.

Do you have a question, Mr. Rickford?

[Greg Rickford, Conservative, Kenora, ON]

[Inaudible--Editor]...for the benefit of the committee that we've been working on.

I had a great meeting with the senior legal counsel for Google, and we went over a number--

[The Chair, Liberal, Paul Szabo]

Could I ask you to hold that for a second? The steering committee had a full meeting on Tuesday and that did come up. You may want to comment to the full committee, because Mr. Poilievre raised this as a matter that we could possibly do a report on.

[Greg Rickford, Conservative, Kenora, ON]

I appreciate that, sure.

[The Chair, Liberal, Paul Szabo]

We will deal with it.

Let me see if I can help the committee move forward and tell them where we are. In our first meeting the committee instructed the chair to retable the 10th and 11th reports from the last session to the House and indicate that we were not requesting a response from government since we have already received one. We are having ongoing discussions with the Minister of Justice about getting the responses to every recommendation, as well as making arrangements for him to come before us.

I want to confirm that this morning I did table the first and second reports of this session, the privacy quick fixes and the access to information quick fixes. That has been done.

I don't have a written report on the steering committee meeting because we had so many items and points that we thought it would be important to engage the full committee in making decisions. We also had the problem of trying to schedule things, because our commissioners are not available in the next couple of weeks.

What we do may require some stickhandling, but next Tuesday will be another steering committee meeting. It won't be a full meeting; it will be a steering committee meeting that will consider the input members give now. We will try by that time to lock in the four commissioners to appear before us to deal with the issues. To the extent that we don't need the commissioners, other business would be slotted in to make sure we make good use of our time.

The committee did agree that in addition to doing the supplementary estimates (C) today--which we either dealt with or they were deemed to be reported, and thank you for that--we are going to be dealing with the main estimates from Access, Privacy, and Justice. We will also have the Ethics Commissioner and the Commissioner of Lobbying. The access and privacy offices are under the Justice umbrella, and the Ethics Commissioner and Commissioner of Lobbying are stand-alone.

Now, the committee wanted to address the work we did on Google and Canpages. At the last meeting Mr. Poilievre asked whether the committee felt it might construct a report on the issue and whether we had any recommendations. I asked Mr. Poilievre if he could give more thought to that, and at this meeting we would have an opportunity to get the views of the committee as to whether there was something we could constructively contribute to a report to the House.

Is this what you would like to discuss, Mr. Rickford?

[Greg Rickford, Conservative, Kenora, ON]

This might be a good segue. I had a great meeting with the senior legal counsel for Google, and he wrote a very thoughtful memo here on a couple of different subject matters that he thought the committee might benefit from discussing or looking at. I have that memo here. It is only in English. I would be happy to share it with the members of the committee, subject to any sort of technical requirements for its translation or what have you.

If I may, by way of introduction, the subject matters were “Privacy by Design”, so the committee might study how the private sector can develop and does develop pro-privacy products as a competitive edge in winning and keeping customers; open data, government, looking at the possibility of opening vast added resources of the Government of Canada to the public. A study of successes and challenges in other jurisdictions would provide the committee, in my view, with a solid base of knowledge to make a recommendation to the government on how best to implement a potential strategy.

Data portability was another subject—again, I'm just briefly going over some of the areas of potential study—whether data portability has a pro-privacy impact, and explore other market-driven pro-privacy solutions.

Then, of course, there is privacy in data security, which is further divided into two major subject areas. HTTPS, which of course is the hypertext transfer protocol secure, is used to encrypt data. The suggestion would be that we might explore the barriers to the greater adoption of HTTPS across a variety of websites, including the Government of Canada websites. As a second subsection of that, privacy and data security, would be anti-malware, which is actually quite an interesting area for us to perhaps look at. We would examine the integration of privacy and security, and the committee might consider how the government could further foster anti-malware collaboration through the creation of a registry or phishing or malware site.

So I have that document, Mr. Chair, and do I have to...?

Sorry, go ahead.

[The Chair, Liberal, Paul Szabo]

If you could provide that to the clerk, we'll get it translated and properly circulated to the members—

[Greg Rickford, Conservative, Kenora, ON]

Thank you. I apologize for not doing that.

[The Chair, Liberal, Paul Szabo]

—in time for our steering committee meeting next Tuesday. Okay?

[Greg Rickford, Conservative, Kenora, ON]

That would be great.

[The Chair, Liberal, Paul Szabo]

That's a new study. It really isn't exactly Mr. Poilievre's Canpages Google street map. That was the work that we had already done. I think I will try to consult with Mr. Poilievre to see whether or not it says “recommendation to the steering committee”, that he would like to do a report. If so, I don't think the committee would have any problem doing a brief report to be brought to this committee in draft form for consideration, if he so wishes. It's work done, unless he says there's more work to be done directly related to that, but we have done the work there.

[Greg Rickford, Conservative, Kenora, ON]

I want to be clear. We do want to do the report. I'm just...

[The Chair, Liberal, Paul Szabo]

What you talked about is not what we did, the Canpages and the Google street map, because that's with the camera going around the streets and photographing, and what they are doing with people's faces and licence numbers.

[Greg Rickford, Conservative, Kenora, ON]

Some of it is related to it, but that's okay.

[The Chair, Liberal, Paul Szabo]

Yes, this was a very specific matter. Again, I think maybe if I have a conversation with Mr. Poilievre, we'll get an indication of whether he would like to recommend to the committee a draft report be done on the work done and report it to the House.

Ms. Davidson.