Mr. Chair, PV-26 moves us into a really important area of substantial amendments to the bill. It was one of the problems with the current way political parties operate, which was identified by numerous commentators, both by Chief Electoral Officer Mayrand and by Democracy Watch, and by a number of people who testified before the committee. It certainly has troubled me ever since I left the NGO world at Sierra Club, where we had to abide by the Privacy Act in the treatment of the names of our members, to find that Canada's privacy laws don't apply to registered political parties.
We have a lot of examples of fairly invasive practices by political parties, in maintaining databases of huge amounts of information on Canadians, without their knowledge and without their permission. Of course, if political parties were not exempted from the Privacy Act, such behaviour would be outrageous. Somehow, political parties are outside the normal rules of privacy protection of every other body and agency that operates in Canada.
My amendment would create a new clause, 24.1, to be inserted on page 18:
24.1 The Act is amended by adding the following after section 54: 54.1 (1) In order to ensure that the collection, use, disclosure and retention of Canadians' personal information by political parties is subject to commonly accepted principles of privacy protection, transparency and accountability, political parties shall develop and make available upon request policies and practices necessary to ensure compliance with Schedule 1 to the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act.
The rest of it is consequential to that.
Obviously, there's a paragraph 3: (3) If a political party fails to comply with subsection (1), the Chief Electoral Officer may withhold from that political party any information contained in the lists of electors.…
I find it very troubling that in the world of big brother, nobody has bigger databases on Canadians than the larger political parties. No offence to my colleagues across the way, but I think the CIMS database has them all beat. We have information on what people buy, what they own, where they shop, where they worship, and I really think that all of us, as members of political parties, should be troubled by this exemption.
I don't have a lot of hope that you're about to pass it, but I really want to make the case that I bet your constituents would be really proud of your voting to ensure that political parties are not above the laws of privacy in this country.