Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to speak to Bill C-20. The government introduced the bill to address the issue of direct marketing fraud. The bill is intended to protect consumers as well as legitimate direct marketing businesses. It is a code of conduct for the direct marketing industry.
I would like to focus on two items in particular. The Senate has recently returned the bill deleting sections 66.1 and 66.2 which deal exclusively with the issue of whistleblowing.
On the issue of whistleblowing I think the country needs more whistleblowers. We need people who expose the abuses of government. We need people to stand up when wrongs have been committed. As a result that is why I support whistleblowers. I not only want to see whistleblowers protected with regard to Bill C-20 in the direct marketing industry. I want to see other whistleblowers as well.
I would like to see some whistleblowers in the other chamber. Right now they are beholden to the Prime Minister; they are appointed by the Prime Minister. I want to see effective whistleblowers who can blow the whistle on problems with the federal government and not fear that they hold some allegiance to the Prime Minister for their appointments. I want whistleblowers who are accountable to the people who elect them rather than to the Prime Minister who appointed them.
Other countries have effective whistleblowers. Germany with its Bundesrat has effective whistleblowers. They gather people who are representatives of the various Landers or states in Germany. They get together to determine whether or not bills that have been passed in the Bundestag are effective. They whistleblow.
In other words, if people who represent the state or the Lander of Baden-Wurttemburg or Berlin, or any of them, decide that they do not like a particular piece of legislation, that it goes against the interest of their particular state or their particular Lander, they will whistleblow. They will go ahead and blow their whistle and expose the federal document or whatever was passed by the Bundestag for being ineffective or for not dealing properly or not dealing fairly with their particular grievance, with their particular state or their Lander.
Germany is not the only country that has effective whistleblowers. The United States also has whistleblowers. That country to the south with which we do 80% of our trade has whistleblowers. It changed its laws so that it would be able to elect its whistleblowers.
The first state that actually did that via a constitutional amendment, the 17th amendment to the U.S. constitution, was Oregon. Now effective whistleblowers are recognized within the constitution of the United States, those people in its senate. Those who come from the state of Idaho can have the same representation as those that have a more populous representation in the House of Representatives.
California represents more people than all the inhabitants of Canada and has two senators. Idaho and Wyoming, small states in comparison, have two whistleblowers as well. The whistleblowers in Idaho may blow their whistle about potatoes or injustices that have happened with regard to agricultural policy in the same way that whistleblowers in the state of California may blow their whistles with regard to whatever may be troubling California in its state of the union.
I want to see whistleblower protection. I have faith in whistleblowers. They are important to the system. We need to know what the problems are and have fair criticism. I want to see fair criticism and not rubber stamps of government legislation.
Right now in the other place we have a clear majority of people who were appointed by the Prime Minister for his party, the Liberal Party of Canada. We would like to see whistleblowers elected by the people from the various provinces who fairly represent the regions in the provinces. That is what we are talking about: real whistleblowers, not rubber stamps.
The whistleblower protections proposed in Bill C-20 are opposed by the Canadian Bar Association and opposed by the Senate. For Canadians who may be watching—