Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak on Bill C-217 which would amend the Access to Information Act in relation to disclosure of the results of public opinion polls.
I take offence to the hon. Reform member's contention that the PM's so-called friends are getting these contracts. Once again the Reform Party has proven its non-partisan and different way of doing things in this House.
I wish to make a general comment immediately which is that I firmly believe the Canadian people should be able to get easy access to government information with few limited and specific exemptions. In my opinion easy access to most government information is a cornerstone of democracy.
The government supports the rights that Canadians have to access information about their government, except in certain specific cases where it is required for reasons of security intelligence, law enforcement and confidential commercial information received by the government from companies.
Indeed Canadians would not tolerate a government that did not give them easy access to most of its information. I believe an open government is essential to the trust that Canadians place in their government and to the preservation of the respect which members of the public give us as politicians representing them in this House.
I would like to talk about specific amendments to the Access to Information Act proposed in this bill. I will explain my concerns and my reservations regarding the bill.
In order to explain the concerns and reservations I have about this bill, I must describe the amendments being proposed to the Access to Information Act.
The amended act would require any department, branch, office, board, agency, commission, corporation or other body established by or pursuant to any Act of Parliament or established by or pursuant to any proclamation, order in council or other instrument made or issued by the Governor in Council or by those under his authority that commissioned a public opinion poll, to give notice thereof forthwith to the designated minister and to the Speaker of the House of Commons.
It seems to me that the amendment would apply to crown corporations, the Canada Labour Relations Board, the Canadian Human Rights Commission and various agencies of the federal government. But I could well be mistaken and that is precisely what worries me.
By defining the institutions affected by the proposed amendment as it does, this bill completely departs from the structure of the Access to Information Act. This act applies to the 140 odd government institutions listed in the schedule.
The purpose of this list is to identify clearly the agencies or bodies to which the act applies and thus exclude the others. Departing from this kind of designation risks creating uncertainty about whether the act applies to a given institution and opening the way for legal challenges to settle the matter.
The result of Bill C-217 could be that institutions that were not covered by the act until now, such as Canada Post, would now be included because of this particular amendment adding section 5.1. In short, I find it inappropriate to include in the same law two procedures to determine to which institutions it applies, even if they are in two different parts.
There is another aspect of Bill C-217 which strikes me as problematic also from the legal point of view. The Access to Information Act currently creates a legislative scheme whereby a person can make a formal request for government information specified in the request and pay a small application fee. The information is then provided within a period of time specified in the act unless one or more of the limited and specific exemptions applies and the requester is denied access to some of the requested information.
My point in describing the process is to illustrate that the act does not oblige any department or minister to provide information to the public unless an access request has been received. This is because the act is not meant to replace existing ways of obtaining government information as specified in section 2 of the act. The act is an additional way of obtaining government information by means of a formal request.
Now, what would be the effect of Bill C-217? It would create an anomaly in the Access to Information Act creating an obligation for ministers to report to the House on results of public opinion polls, thereby doing away with the formal request for information scheme.
Even if we admit there is a case for creating a new system different from the one currently found in the Access to Information Act, I believe the proposed legislation could create another problem. The bill requires the minister to provide a report of the results of public opinion polls to the House of Commons or to the commissioner no later than 15 days after their completion. I think it can easily take longer than 15 days to analyze the results of a large scale public opinion poll.
I also have a problem with the requirement that every public opinion research contract be reported to the minister and to the Speaker of the House of Commons, and that reports be tabled in Parliament or with the information commissioner and published in The Canada Gazette . This would appear, in my opinion, to be overkill.
I am concerned with the definition of public opinion poll which I find extremely broad in the bill. It would include quantitative and qualitative research conducted among members of the public using a prepared questionnaire or interview schedule. A good proportion of this research would be very limited public interest.
Looking at the bill from a different point of view, my general position is that an existing piece of legislation should only be amended if there is a problem that needs to be fixed, and I stress that. I would even go further and say that the problem should be a significant one if there is to be a bill containing just one amendment. If the problem is not particularly significant, although still valid, then I think the fixing of it should wait for a larger comprehensive review of the act. I am not sure that this amendment would fix a significant problem.
It is my understanding that the act already provides for access to public opinion polls. Section 4 of the act in fact provides that everyone has a right of access to any record under a government institution. In so far as opinion polls constitute such records, they are covered by the act.
If specific poll results are not disclosed to the public, it is because in specific circumstances a legitimate interest that competes with a presumption of access is invoked. It should be noted that the act performs a careful and complex balancing between a variety of interests and I am concerned that amending the act to address a specific and limited aspect of the act would disturb the various balances within the act at the moment.
It should be noted also that the courts have already ruled on the application of the Access to Information Act to public opinion polls. The Trial Division of the Federal Court has in fact made a ruling on the issue of disclosure of results of public opinion research in the case of the Information Commissioner v the Prime Minister, that dealt with a public opinion poll requested in relation to previous constitutional negotiations. The Court ordered disclosure of the information to the person who requested the documents, because it was not convinced that disclosure of the poll results would be prejudicial to the government.
In addition to section 4 of the act and the Federal Court decision, there is a third reason why I would ask what great problem this bill could help solve.
The Secretariat of the Treasury Board has issued guidelines for the disclosure of poll results by federal institutions. Broadly speaking, all departments are requested to make every effort to disclose the results of public opinion polls outside the formal framework of the Access to Information Act and its mechanisms.
That is not to say that the issue does not require examination. Indeed, the disclosure of public opinion polls is one of the issues being monitored by the Department of Justice at this moment in assessing the need for a review of the act.
I do not believe there is a need for Bill C-217. There is already a right of access to public opinion poll research under the current Access to Information Act. There is case law which provides guidance to the government on disclosing such polls. There is a government policy on disclosing poll results.
In addition, this issue is being examined together with other issues related to the whole act.
Given all of this, I do not think it is appropriate or necessary to proceed with an ad hoc amendment on the specific issue of public opinion polls. In addition, I have problems with the fact that the bill would introduce significant new bureaucratic reporting requirements, deviating from the way the rest of the act defines government institutions, which potentially could apply to research of a very limited public interest.