Madam Speaker, I want to begin my comments by stating that I clearly support the general goal of the bill. I commend my colleague, the hon. member for Brampton West—Mississauga, for introducing it but have a couple of concerns about it.
I have a bit of concern for what the hon. member for Cumberland—Colchester said. I admire him to a point, that point being that he does a little research. He made a few calls. Unfortunately the hon. member did not dig far enough.
He alleges that there are no penalties for this kind of action when access to information documents are destroyed. He is correct that there is certainly no argument that events, say Somalia or the blood inquiry, have drawn public attention to the fact that the Access to Information Act contains no penalty and that there is clearly a need for an infraction in the Access to Information Act.
However I went one step further than the hon. member for Cumberland—Colchester. I went to the Criminal Code to find out if anything could be done. I had a look at the Criminal Code, specifically section 126, and this is what it states:
Everyone who, without lawful excuse, contravenes an Act of Parliament by wilfully doing anything that it forbids or by wilfully omitting to do anything that it requires to be done is, unless a punishment is expressly provided by law, guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years.
In other words, section 126 of the Criminal Code might apply to the situation of someone deliberately destroying a document in order to thwart the Access to Information Act, in so far as the destruction would result in the person “wilfully omitting to do anything that it requires to be done”.
Let us have a look for a moment at what my colleague from Brampton West—Mississauga is proposing in Bill C-208 which would amend the Access to Information Act to add an infraction to the act. Specifically the bill states that a person who, with the intent to deny a right of access under this act, destroys or alters a record, or falsifies a record, or makes a false entry in a record, or does not keep required records is guilty of an indictable offence and may be imprisoned for up to five years or fined up to $10,000 or both.
That brings me to my main concern with respect to my colleague's bill. Section 126 creates an indictable offence, which is the most serious type of offence in the Criminal Code. Section 126 often carries a maximum penalty of two years. The seriousness of an indictable offence in section 126 is one of the reasons it might be necessary to add a specific offence to the Access to Information Act. In this case the specific offence of deliberately destroying documents subject to the Access to Information Act should not be quite as serious as an indictable offence with a maximum of two years imprisonment.
That is not what my colleague's bill proposes. It proposes to create a specific offence in the Access to Information Act. This specific offence not only would not carry a lesser maximum penalty than the one attached to the offence in section 126 of which I spoke. It would carry a heavier maximum penalty of five years.
It is important to outline that the Criminal Code slices offences up into three different categories. There are summary convictions, indictable offences and hybrid offences that the crown can elect to prosecute either as an indictable offence or as a summary conviction offence.
Summary conviction offences carry the lightest penalties and indictable offences carry the heaviest. With the hybrid offences the attached penalty depends on the procedure selected by the crown. An important point is that when an accused is prosecuted by indictment, he or she can choose to be tried before a judge and jury, which can be a very slow process. In addition, the accused is entitled to a preliminary inquiry when the offence is indictable.
I understand the hon. member wants to mark the seriousness of the offence by making it an indictable offence, but I would have to ask my colleague if it might also be counterproductive if—