Madam Speaker, needless to say, I take great interest in joining with my colleague for Mercier at third reading of Bill C-54 to support and promote electronic commerce by protecting personal information that is collected. I will not read the title in full.
In my opinion, the primary purpose of this bill is to promote e-commerce. If there is time, and if the government and public servants are so disposed, an effort will be made to protect the personal information that has been gathered using the increasingly sophisticated electronic equipment available on the market.
Bill C-54 contains a number of shortcomings. Primarily, this is an extremely fragile and confusing piece of legislation that is liable to interpretation and to problems in determining divisions between the provinces and territories and the central government. This bill hands discriminatory power to the governor-in-council, or in other words the cabinet. What is more, the commissioner has no real power. Finally, this legislation will interfere with the Quebec legislation which has already been in place since 1982 and which has been reinforced in order to protect personal information not only in the public sector, in publicly owned corporations and in government, but also in the private sector.
For all these reasons, therefore, the Bloc Quebecois will most definitely object to Bill C-54, to which we are speaking this afternoon.
In this context, there is danger that the bill will limit Quebeckers' right to privacy , and no certainty that it will be capable of meeting the expectations of Canadian consumers.
Since ensuring homogeneity across Canada in the protection of personal information would appear to require the harmonization of legislation, one might well have expected the federal government to at least take some of its inspiration from what has been going on in Quebec for the past four years, from our experience with the protection of personal information. But it did no such thing.
Privacy is a fundamental right. The experts equate the right to privacy with other human rights such as the right to equality and justice.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations over 50 years ago and to which Canada was a signatory, states that everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person. It also states that no one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation.
Privacy is also protected in Canada, although only partially. This protection is not specifically included in the Charter, but that is how the courts have interpreted two important sections of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, sections 7 and 8.
I will take a moment or two to read these sections. Section 7 reads as follows:
“Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice”.
Section 8 provides as follows:
“Everyone has the right to be secure against unreasonable search or seizure”.
This brings me to what happened a scant year ago in Vancouver, when the Prime Minister was host to APEC leaders. One of these leaders was Suharto, a head of state who was trampling the most elementary human rights within his own country.
While some 200 students demonstrated across from where the area where the meeting was to take place, the Prime Minister's Office and the Prime Minister himself issued no-nonsense orders to the RCMP to clear the area by 4 p.m. We all saw what happened. The duty RCMP staff sergeant gave orders to the demonstrators, students aged 17, 18 or 20 years old, several of whom were accompanied by their father or mother.
Imagine being with your daughter, who is exercizing her civic right here in this country to express her dissatisfaction with our Prime Minister for showing so much deference to a dictator like Suharto. This same Prime Minister then asks the police to give a warning, but 20 seconds later, the police go all out, using what our PM referred to as civilized methods, that is pepper spray. The next day, the Prime Minister mocked us by saying he only used pepper in his soup.
How do you expect our privacy rights to be respected in a country where even our civic rights are not respected? In this respect, I had the opportunity and pleasure to meet Roch Gosselin from East Angus Sunday morning. This middle-aged man was proud to tell me he got arrested, not under this government but under another Liberal government that was in office in 1970, when the current Prime Minister was a very high-ranking member of the cabinet that passed the War Measures Act.
Nearly 500 arrests were made among the Quebec elite, often without just cause. Roch Gosselin, of East Angus, was one of those who were detained for a dozen days without knowing why. His only fault was to want to give his children and grandchildren a country: Quebec. Like Pauline Julien, he was jailed.
Today, the government is apologizing profusely, but the same men and women are now sitting across the way and proposing Bill C-54 presumably to protect our privacy, our personal information. They want to see this legislation passed. Why do they not tell us the truth this afternoon? Why not say that the primary purpose of this bill is to promote the sale of electronic products?
Roch Gosselin is a distinguished citizen in his town of East Angus, yet his civic rights were trampled. He was jailed. What did the current Prime Minister, the member for Saint-Maurice, do when in cabinet at the time? Again, he mocked us.
In a free vote, this government refused to fund the legal representation of financially challenged Vancouver students by renowned lawyers. An artist slated to receive a $10,000 prize from the governor general, has agreed, and I congratulate him on this, to donate his prize money to the student legal representation fund.