Mr. Speaker, there is an amusing story behind clause 96.1 of the bill we are considering. As amusing stories are rare in this House, I will relate it briefly. Clause 96.1 does not appear in the text of the bill we passed at first reading. It appears now, because the bill before us was amended by the Standing Committee on Transport. It added this clause under the amendment proposed by our party.
No need to remind the House that the majority of members sitting on the Standing Committee on Transport are Liberal and therefore, with the government's motion to delete this clause, which was added by the Standing Committee on Transport, we have the minister rejecting a proposal from his own committee with a majority of its members from his own party. At the very least, we can say this is a different approach.
And what does clause 96.1 say? It says:
96.1 The Privacy Act applies to the Corporation as if it were a federal institution.
The purpose of the amendment we proposed, which the committee accepted, was to ensure that Nav Canada would protect personal information on personnel and clients, just as if the government were still responsible for all air navigation services.
My colleague on the other side says there are other corporations, such as the CN, that are not subject to the Privacy Act; but by saying this, he is giving me other arguments. He says there are entities created by the government which no longer have the same obligations as before privatization. These government creations are now private sector corporations. Yes, but they took on responsibilities for public services and, as such, they should give the public the same services the government was providing before. It is clear, it is only logical. But they have forgotten all about that on the other side.
The fundamental principle is this: it is unacceptable for a government creation to reduce services to the public when this creation is a private corporation serving the public. It is inappropriate to create such screens.
My colleague, the member for Argenteuil-Papineau, said it again this morning, there is a stunning parallel between ADM, another government creation which manages the Montreal airports, and this corporation which is being created so that the public will not have access to information concerning the studies on which ADM based its decision. You can be for or against the decision, that is not the point. The point is that the public has the right to know about the studies used by ADM. Our offices requested those studies, but the request was turned down because this organization is under no obligation to provide them.
What we have here is a deliberate attempt, on the part of the government, to hide behind corporations which act as screens, allowing it to dodge responsibilities it had before they were created.
I now come to the argument that, as Mr. Philips is reported to have said, what should be changed is the Privacy Act. If this argument was logical, Liberals would have applied it in the bill we are discussing today. Yet, in that bill, what do we see? We see a section that we agree with, but that contradicts the principle just mentioned.
Section 96 says:
- The Official Languages Act applies to the Corporation as if it were a federal institution.
This is excellent but, if it is valid for the Official Languages Act, why is not valid for the Privacy Act? Why do we not say: "The Official Languages Act will not apply to Nav Canada, so we are going to amend the Official Languages Act". That is not what the bill says.
All of the sudden, we are told: "As for the protection of privacy, it is not the same, it is the Privacy Act that has to be amended". This does not make any sense.
The result of all this, and I will conclude here, is that we understand perfectly what the federal government is up to. It is transferring public property currently under the management of the federal Minister of Transport to Nav Canada, and then will hide behind Nav Canada in order to withhold important information from the public.
Such an approach goes against the transparency the government as a whole is bragging about, and its effort to defeat our amendment, which was accepted by the committee and rejected by the minister, shows I am not making a case based on assumptions, but on facts.
The Liberals want to use their majority in the House to defeat an amendment that was passed in committee, because they know a majority of Liberal members will vote as the government tells them to, without even knowing what this is about. And they call that democracy.