House of Commons Hansard #25 of the 36th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament's site.) The word of the day was decision.

Topics

Criminal CodeGovernment Orders

1:25 p.m.

Some hon. members

Agreed.

Criminal CodeGovernment Orders

1:25 p.m.

The Acting Speaker (Mr. McClelland)

It being 1.30 p.m. the House will now proceed to the consideration of Private Members' Business, as listed on today's Order Paper.

Access To Information ActPrivate Members' Business

1:25 p.m.

Reform

Bob Mills Reform Red Deer, AB

moved that Bill C-217, an act to amend the Access to Information Act (disclosure of results of public opinion polls), be read the second time and referred to a committee.

Mr. Speaker, most Canadians believe that this is the best country in the world in which to live. They are proud of the country in which we live. However, most of them would agree that the status quo is not acceptable. We cannot keep on doing things the way we have always done them. Now there is a demand across Canada for more open and accountable government.

Open government means a free flow of information between government and its citizens. It means government informs the public, rather than manipulating them. Open government means that when tax dollars are used to commission polls about the thoughts and opinions of Canadians, then everyone has the right to access that information in a timely manner.

Canadians want to be able to access to these poll results in an easy manner, not in a manner in which they have to jump through a whole bunch of bureaucratic hoops and satisfy a whole bunch of requirements before accessing the information. If that is what has to happen, people will be discouraged from accessing poll results.

Unlike the Parliament of the Conservative Party which was very secretive, this Parliament has shown itself to be more willing to open up the process. This government believes there should be changes and that things will have to be changed to satisfy Canadians. As well, this government believes that Canadians should never have to face the situation, as happened in the Mulroney years, when the information commissioner had to take the prime minister to court in order to release information from publicly funded polls.

It will take a long time for Canadians to forget the reign of terror brought on by the Mulroney government and the secretive administration which existed then. I am sure this government does not want to have a repeat of that sort of regime. Of course, it does not want to leave those kinds of memories in the minds of Canadians.

There is no doubt in my mind that this kind of backroom government that was so common before must be changed and it must be changed quickly. The Canadian public will not accept any more of this sort of blind faith in politicians. Canadians have learned from experience that they cannot trust politicians who tell them “trust me”.

Politicians who selectively release important information to manipulate the public, particularly when the public paid for those polls, is just not acceptable. To simply advance the ideas of the government through polling is just not acceptable.

We recently witnessed a perfect example of this sort of behaviour. On October 29 a Globe and Mail article by Hugh Windsor is an example of what Canadians will not accept.

I am going to quote from the article and talk about it because it was so timely that it was published just a couple of days ago. It really points to exactly what the bill is all about.

I will give a bit of background. This is with regard to the finance minister who we all know hates to be criticized and we know that he will go a long way in order to prevent criticism.

This issue relates to the harmonization of the GST and provincial taxes. He would not make any moves without conducting massive numbers of polls and many focus group studies. This was paid for by the Canadian taxpayer. Then, of course, a number of people wanted to see the results of the polling and focus groups.

Another issue which arises from this is the fact that the minister also chose his political friends for this hundreds of thousands of dollars in polling that was done. David Herke, a former member of his leadership team, did most of the polling along with Elly Alboim, a former CBC journalist. After the polling and focus groups were finished, the minister said this cannot be made public.

The question Mr. Windsor asked very clearly in his article was how we can the opinions of the Canadian people on the topic of taxation and say that they should be state secrets. The minister is quoted as saying that this would be deemed injurious to conducting the Government of Canada and injurious to federal and provincial affairs. He also said that it would be materially injurious to financial interests, and he went on. Those were the grounds on which he said these polls could not be published.

The access to information commissioner said it was not a national threat to the country or to provincial relations. The minister then requested that the information be made public.

Just to show how far the finance minister would go, he hired his own lawyer to challenge the information commissioner on releasing polls that were paid for by the Canadian public. This blockage continued for 18 months. Finally, after his own lawyer advised him he cannot block these anymore, that if this goes to court he would lose, his lawyer advised him to release the information.

Now, 18 months after the polls which were paid for by the Canadian taxpayer were done, they were released. What did they contain that was so injurious? I will quote from the actual poll results:

[They] will be seen as a bribe and a waste of taxpayer's money if the reform is seen to be a political exercise unrelated to improving the tax system; the issue is political, not substantive; no evidence that people think the GST is in need of reform; the GST reform has no relief for consumers, it has a patchwork look and the appearance of more confusion for business and more bureaucracy; the GST commitment needs to be dealt with politically rather than substantively; the most effective method is likely to come clean now about the promise and the inability to fulfil it rather than pretend to have fulfilled it.

These are the claims that were made by the opposition parties in this House about the harmonized GST. Yet this minister took 18 months to hold this public polling in secret just because it was politically against what he was trying to do. Obviously if the taxpayer is going to pay for it then the taxpayer has the right to know about it. If a political party wants to do polling it certainly can keep it secret because it paid the bill.

Certainly the current government, as I have said, has not been as secretive as the previous one, but the whole red book concept of open government obviously is really being held to question now when we examine the actual facts.

I know we are going to hear from members across the way that there is no need for Bill C-217, that they really are not interested in blocking any poll results. However, what we are saying is that when any federal departments, boards or agencies commission polls paid for by the House they should be made public.

I have a lot of arguments that I think we will hear against the need for this bill. I do not think I have to go through all of them other than to simply say that many Liberal members in the House have stood up and said that results should be open and that the justice minister is going to fix the access to information. We have been promised since 1994 that there will be substantive changes to the access to information. Those have just not happened.

When we see a minister, as the example I have just described, doing that we can see just how old-fashioned and unwilling to change this government may have become.

Let us examine the Treasury Board changes which I can go through item by item. There are seven major items. I can provide that information to anyone who wants it. The key thing is that the headlines probably say it all, “Liberal poll rules are much like the Tories. Liberals will still allow polls to be kept secret”. That does not go with the promise by the Liberals of an open government.

I am standing here today pleading with this government to allow these polls to be subject to access claims, that it be done in a reasonable manner, not 90 days but 15 days from the time the poll is commissioned if it is paid for by the public, that these polls then be presented to the Speaker of the House, that he then has the authority to release that information in due course, and then the public has the right to know what those results are.

That is the major part of the bill. Those are the reasons behind it. I think the government will be hard pressed to justify to those Canadians who are asking for accountability that a poll paid for by them should be kept secret.

Access To Information ActPrivate Members' Business

1:35 p.m.

Bloc

Richard Marceau Bloc Charlesbourg, QC

Mr. Speaker, you caught me somewhat off guard, because I was expecting my Liberal colleague to speak. I am pleased to start.

The motion before the House today is quite interesting. It concerns one of Canada's principles, namely, democracy. A simple principle of democracy provides that the electorate through its elected representatives must control the expenditures of the government. This is fundamental to democracy.

In the same vein, if taxpayers' money is spent, taxpayers are entitled to know how it was spent. This too is part of democratic control of government. It is a very simple matter, it is a matter of transparency.

We all know the role opinion polls play in our society. They play an important, some say too important, role. The fact is, their role is important because they provide not only qualitative information but quantitative information on very specific subjects. The government uses them to direct its policy, because all governments are influenced by opinion polls.

If what the government is trying to achieve through these polls is to give direction to this policy, the information collected should be shared with all elected representatives, who need to be “enlightened” too, because while the government must do a good job, the elected members of this House must be as “enlightened” as the government team across the way in order to perform their duties as parliamentarians.

This issue ties in with the problem of national unity, for we know what this government does with the polls it commissions in Quebec. It uses them to identify the fears and concerns of Quebeckers. Not only was Quebec taxpayers' money used to identify their fears, but it was also used to develop Plan B and to turn the information gathered against the same Quebeckers whose money was used to pay for these polls. That is utterly unacceptable.>These poll results are used to add fuel to the scare campaign and pervert the democratic process.

We will recall that, two years ago yesterday, a referendum was held in Quebec. There were passionate, serious, yet healthy discussions around the issue. I think that, with a 93% rate of participation in this referendum, we were a model of democracy to the world. We are proud of this. We are often accused of acting outraged. Well, we are boasting now, and with good reason.

What has happened since the Quebec referendum? There was the federal government's scare campaign and Plan B. There was the diversion of democracy toward unelected officials. They said the sky was going to fall if Quebeckers ever took their destiny into their own hands.

It is perfectly normal for Quebeckers to know what they are paying for. Quebeckers ought to know that the taxes they pay are used against their best interests. In a democracy, elected representatives should, as a minimum, monitor government expenditures and know what the government does with public funds.

If the government decides to spend millions of dollars on polls which are sometimes totally ludicrous, it should be pointed out in the House to show that, fortunately, ridicule never killed anyone, otherwise there would not be many government members left.

The bottom line is that the government is using Quebeckers' own money to finance its fearmongering campaigns.

This is why the Bloc Quebecois will strongly and passionately support the motion tabled by the Reform member.

Access To Information ActPrivate Members' Business

1:45 p.m.

NDP

Dick Proctor NDP Palliser, SK

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to take part in the debate this afternoon. I begin by acknowledging the hon. member from the government party who allowed me an opportunity to speak in order that I can return to my constituency this afternoon.

This is an interesting debate. There is absolutely no question that the government should and could do a lot more to let the sun shine in on the release of polling data that is paid for by the public. As the hon. member of the official opposition noted in his speech earlier, the Minister of Finance went to great lengths to hide the poll results on the goods and services tax of 1996, including the retention of a private lawyer to try to keep that information out of the public view. Clearly that kind of behaviour in a free and democratic society is totally unacceptable.

Our caucus is certainly supportive of change in this area. We also recognize and realize that we live in the real world. This private members' bill seems pretty utopian in its outlook. That is not surprising as it comes from a political party that is 10 years and one day old as I have read in the paper, but a party which is much older in terms of some of its views and attitudes. It is also a party that has consistently refused to run provincially.

In my home province of Saskatchewan, the Reform Party is cosying up to the Saskatchewan party, that ridiculous blend of Conservatives and Liberals. We see evidence of similar activity in the province of British Columbia. There is recognition and realization of why this is so.

The leader of the official opposition is clearly a student of political history. He knows what happened to his father's party, the Social Credit Party of Alberta. He knows what happened to the Social Credit Party of British Columbia and he knows what ultimately happened as a result of that to the federal Social Credit Party. When Peter Lougheed came into Alberta, the Social Credit Party disappeared. In this decade we have seen the demise of the B.C. Social Credit Party. I stand to be corrected but I believe there has not been a Social Credit member in this legislature since 1979.

The member from Stornoway does not want to see history repeat itself so he is not going to run the risk of having the Reform Party elected at the provincial or territorial level, thereby attempting to remain as pure as the driven snow. That is not the way we do it in our caucus and our party. I am very proud to represent a party which runs candidates federally, provincially and sometimes municipally. As our party constitution states, if you are a member of the provincial or territorial New Democratic Party, you are automatically considered to be a member of the federal New Democratic Party.

I will refer to what we do in Saskatchewan. I will take a minute to set the scene. There is no question that in the 1980s the Devine government, probably the worst government in the history of our province if not Canada, had flagrantly abused the public polling situation, as the member noted about the Mulroney government. In 1993 the Government of Saskatchewan introduced some significant reforms. I want to go through them because they are legitimate. I hope the members on the government benches are listening because these are reasonable.

In Saskatchewan four times per year, once per quarter, the Government of Saskatchewan releases all polling information which has been completed for it during the previous quarter. The government has been doing this for the last four years. The information released includes all reports from polling companies, including both the questions asked and the responses made.

The material is released by the government and provided free of charge to the media and opposition parties, and I assume as well to the speaker of the legislature. The same information is available at a modest charge to other users, including interested individuals and corporations. The only material which is not released by the Government of Saskatchewan on its polling data includes that which refers to questions of market research, commercially and prices, in the case of crown corporations for example.

There is a lot more the federal government should be doing in the area of opening up the process and letting the sun shine in. There are some legitimate reasons why an appropriate or reasonable amount of time, 90 days, should exist before government polling is made public.

Access To Information ActPrivate Members' Business

1:50 p.m.

Ahuntsic Québec

Liberal

Eleni Bakopanos LiberalParliamentary Secretary to Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada

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.

Access To Information ActPrivate Members' Business

2 p.m.

Reform

Bill Gilmour Reform Nanaimo—Alberni, BC

Mr. Speaker, it gives me great pleasure to speak to my colleague's bill on access to information regarding polls.

It boils down to a very basic premise. If a poll is commissioned by public money, then there should be public access. It is very simple.

My colleague has also made the good point that if a political party commissions a poll, that is private. If private money is being used, then there should not be access to the poll. However, when taxpayer money is being used to commission a poll, then surely the public has the right to ask for the results.

We often hear about accountable government. We hear it particularly during election time. This government, which is supposedly accountable, is doing all that it can to suppress not only access to information regarding polling but also access to information in many other areas.

The key issue here is manipulation. When the finance minister can stall for months and months and suppress information obtained from a poll, that is manipulation. That is what we are trying to avoid.

Members of this House, regardless of their political stripe, must agree that this is wrong. We want to have free access right across the board. There is nothing clandestine about it. We are asking for open government.

This type of thing is creating cynicism among Canadians. They do not hold this place in esteem. We as politicians, collectively, are on the scale somewhere down below snake oil salesman because of public cynicism, and rightfully so in many cases.

Canadians pay their taxes. They do not mind paying taxes if they know the money is being spent well and if they can find out how the money is being spent. However, we are not allowed to discover that.

This government is unwilling to change. We often hear the prime minister talk about moving into the next millennium. Let us do that. Let us move this House ahead, and the other house for that matter, so that we can have a system of government that works for Canadians. It does not work for Canadians when they have one hand tied behind their backs.

This is not the only private member's bill respecting access to information. At the latest count there are four. My colleague has presented this bill today. I have a bill respecting crown corporations. The government also has two bills relating to this subject. On both sides of the House there are concerns regarding access to information.

I was pleased to hear the comment from the member opposite saying that there may be a review. I think a review of the access act is long overdue.

The member also said that access to information is a cornerstone of democracy. If she really believes that, I hope we will open it up, not close it down.

I believe this to be a very good bill. As such, I would ask for the unanimous consent of the House that this bill be deemed votable.

Access To Information ActPrivate Members' Business

2:05 p.m.

The Acting Speaker (Mr. McClelland)

The hon. member from Nanaimo—Alberni has asked for unanimous consent to have this bill made votable. Is there unanimous consent?

Access To Information ActPrivate Members' Business

2:05 p.m.

An hon. member

No.

Access To Information ActPrivate Members' Business

2:05 p.m.

The Acting Speaker (Mr. McClelland)

There is not unanimous consent.

It is customary that the member who moved the bill have a further five minutes of debate.

Access To Information ActPrivate Members' Business

2:05 p.m.

Reform

Bob Mills Reform Red Deer, AB

Mr. Speaker, to sum up what we have heard, and it is a rather ominous thing that we have heard, we have deteriorated even further than we did in the last session into looking at the past, thinking we need more big government, more government control, less accessibility for the public, less accountability.

In 1994 on a similar type of bill a government member stood up and said “We are going to open up access to information and we are going to reform it and make it better. It is under review within the next 12 months and the justice minister will be coming up with new legislation within 12 months”. That was in 1994.

Now the government members have the audacity to stand up and say “Some of these things are good and we have to open up government. However, it is under review so we will not support anything like this”.

How long can they keep saying that? Going into the 21st century it is still going to be under review. I trust the Canadian public will put them under review very carefully in the year 2001 or before.

The government talks the talk. Some of the opposition parties talk the talk. It is very interesting that some of the opposition parties talk about changes and being accountable to people and yet most of their speeches sound like they come out of the 1960s.

I do not feel we have moved very far. We have a finance minister who conducts a poll, who has his former leadership member conduct that poll, a former membership of his team in 1990, for which hundreds of thousands of dollars of Canadian taxpayer money is paid. There is nothing wrong with that. He then proceeds to keep it secret for 18 months because it was politically unwise to put it forward. There were political reasons. He decides to make it public after his own lawyer said he could never win in court. Mulroney challenged the court and lost, and he even had some reasons. He said the minister is going to challenge it and but does not have any reasons at all other than political.

I see this as a very negative point. Obviously the government is not interested in accessibility and accountability in letting the taxpayers know what they are getting for their money.

In conclusion, that is the reason we came down here. We came here because we felt the status quo must be changed. The Canadian people feel it must be changed and the debate today has further confirmed why we have to change the way this place operates.

Access To Information ActPrivate Members' Business

2:05 p.m.

The Acting Speaker (Mr. McClelland)

The time provided for the consideration of Private Members' Business has now expired and the order is dropped from the Order Paper.

It being 2.10 p.m., the House stands adjourned until Monday next at 11 a.m., pursuant to Standing Order 24(1).

(The House adjourned at 2.10 p.m.)