Bingo. We found it.
Chair, I move that Bill C-12, in clause 72, be amended by adding after line 3 on page 31 the following:
87.3031(1) If an order is made under subsection 87.301(1), 87.302(1) or 87.303(1) or (2), the Minister must cause to be tabled in each House of Parliament, within the next seven sitting days of the House after the day on which the order is made, a report setting out
(a) the reasons that the order was made;
(b) the number of applications or documents affected; and
(c) a description of the persons or groups affected by the order.
(2) The report stands referred to the committee of the Senate, of the House of Commons or of both Houses of Parliament that may be designated or established for the purpose of reviewing the report.
(3) At the request of the committee, the Minister must appear before it to explain the reasons for making the order and plans to prevent—
Actually, Chair, I'm just going to make it read as follows, “At the request of the committee, the Minister must appear before it.”
Colleagues, here's my rationale. In part 7 of the bill, the government is asking us to devolve powers from Parliament to the government wherein, through the cabinet, the department can do a lot of things with regard to documents and applications.
We did hear from a lot of witnesses that there was concern about using these powers. We heard from different legal groups and different stakeholder groups. We also heard from officials that they wanted a more efficient way to use some of these powers going forward than having to go through legislation.
I was trying to find a way to square the circle of all of these concerns. What this amendment does is pretty simple. It just says that if the government is going to use these powers, it needs to report to Parliament that it's done it and give us some pretty high-level details on what's happened. That allows Parliament to scrutinize these decisions.
What we're saying is that Parliament wants to know. If there's a situation where the government used it and a system needs to be corrected, or if it's impacted a certain group of people, Parliament should know.
Some of us might agree with that decision and others might not, but I think that information is what is important. This is an attempt to square the circle. It's basically to give a more clear and more robust reporting requirement than simply putting it into the Gazette with not a lot of detail.
I hope this actually makes everybody happy, including my colleagues from the NDP and the Green Party, and maybe even the department officials, who might hate me less after this.
We're saying that there are going to be circumstances where the department needs to use these powers quickly, but we want to know about them. That seems pretty smart to me.