Mr. Speaker, I wish to thank the member for Mercier, our colleague from the Bloc Quebecois, for raising the alarm. She reminded us that privacy and personal information are issues of great importance and concern in our modern world and that the bill before us is not acceptable.
This is not the first time that the member for Mercier tries, with intelligent and forceful arguments, to make the government see the light. She did so for the employment insurance. She did so for the special legislation on the rail industry. However, we are constantly faced with a government that is dense, stubborn, insensitive and blissfully ignorant, one that rejects any possibility of co-operation.
Now, what we have to do is refer the bill to the committee, where the members can contribute fully. It is in committee that we can really improve a bill and ensure that we hear from our fellow citizens and understand their wishes.
The debate surrounding this bill is about the whole issue of protecting personal information, particularly in this case personal information detained by the private sector.
Mr. Speaker, you are a scholar and a human rights defender, so you will argue that it is a basic right in a world where electronics are so powerful, in a world where one can access extremely personal information just by pushing a button. It is a basic right and the question is why should it be considered, primarily, as a business matter.
Should we not be entitled to expect that the whole issue of protecting personal information be related to the Canadian Human Rights Act? That part should be related as much to the Canadian Human Rights Act which, as we know, not only forbids discrimination on several grounds but ensures that individuals can feel protected in an extremely important legislation governing the relations between the government and citizens as well as the relations between individuals within federally regulated corporations.
Before this bill can pass, the opposition, led by the member for Mercier, will use every means to see that this bill does not pass. I say bill, but I mean a mishmash piece of junk, written in the conditional, whose essence lies in the schedule.
Any law student knows as well as my colleague, the member for Berthier—Montcalm, a distinguished lawyer, that what is quintessential in a bill is its main body and its architecture. In this case, we have an absolutely incredible situation where what we are asked to pass as legislators lies in a schedule drafted in the conditional, with all sorts of confusions and imprecisions, so much so that any well-informed lawyer would give a C to a bill as bad as it is dreadful.
At this moment, I ask you to refrain from laughing. The strangest part in all of this is that we do not seem to be able to approach this bill in the context of privacy and access to information, and in the light of our sacred human rights—something which should be protected against all indiscretion and disclosure. The very title of the bill will help you understand readily the kind of confusion this government is dragging us into. Let me read it: “An Act to support and promote electronic commerce by protecting personal information that is collected, used or disclosed in certain circumstances, by providing for the use of electronic means to communicate or record information or transactions and by amending the Canada Evidence Act, the Statutory Instruments Act and the Statute Revision Act.”
How blurry can you get? How far can you go to confuse things. These people must be living on some other planet to be able to write so awkward a title. Not a single freshman in law school would dare hand in an assignment containing a title like this.
What is the message we get from this bill? What are we to understand as legislators? I would not want to disturb government members, but I would like to know what we should make of this bill. We are told that the government should be concerned about privacy only in a commercial context or, more narrowly, in a context of electronic commerce.
For once in his life, could we not have expected the Minister of Industry to see reason and model this legislation on the one we have in Quebec, one of the most modern and avant-garde pieces of legislation, one which has stood the test of time during the four years it has been in force and which could have been built on by this government?
No, that is not what happened. After all, it is out of the question to take Quebec as a model. As the member for Mercier indicated, with clause 27, the federal government reserves the option of deciding whether or not a province that has similar or related legislation should be exempted from the application of the act.
This does not make sense. Mr. Speaker, you should herewith call back the bill, call on the government to do so immediately. The government would come away enriched from this debate, having gained the support of the member for Mercier, and of the Bloc Quebecois. I think it would also have the support of the Progressive Conservative Party, which obviously still has a long way to go before forming a government. It would also have the support of the NDP. Then we would all go to the committee and keep improving the bill, based on the legislation we already have in Quebec, to ensure that this half-baked, poorly drafted rag, which lacks vision and whose main feature is a schedule tacked on to the back of the bill, reflects the true guidance any state concerned with the public good should offer its citizens.
This is no trifling matter, when one thinks of it. As I said, had they taken Quebec as a model, they would have found out that our legislation on the protection of personal information deals not only with commercial transactions but also with labour relations.
I know that we have to treat the government members like school children, because they do not catch on very quickly; so, let me give the House an example. Let us take the example of an employee at Eaton's. His employer has in his file, in Toronto, personal information about him, about his career plan and other personal matters. This employee works at Eaton's in Montreal. Pursuant to the act that has been in effect for four years in the province of Quebec, that employee working in Montreal could have access to every bit of information that is related to him, even though the head office is in Toronto.
Would it be the case if Bill C-54 was in effect? No, because, in its present form and if it is not amended, the bill would not apply to staff relations. Even though there is interprovincial trade and Eaton's has branches outside the province of Quebec, the access to information will not be in a business context but in a staff relations one. We were told this is a flaw in the bill and that that Eaton's employee would not have access to that information.
Mr. Speaker, I see that my time is up, so I urge you to recall this bill. It does not make any sense. For heaven's sake, let us send it to committee so that it can be reworked.