Madam Speaker, I trust that the next speeches by my Reform Party colleagues will address the bill itself and not how many criminals they have in their ridings.
The Bloc Quebecois has always set itself the fundamental mission of defending and promoting the rights of the Quebec people here in Ottawa. In reading Bill C-54, I realized once again how vital the Bloc Quebecois presence here in the House is for Quebec.
Bill C-54 is once again clear evidence of the incompetence of this centralist government, and of its lack of understanding and total arrogance toward Quebec and its people. First of all, I add my voice to those of my colleagues in the Bloc Quebecois in condemning and strenuously opposing Bill C-54.
Bill C-54 is entitled 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.
Instead of that title, the government ought to have called it Bill C-54, an act to promote electronic commerce at the expense of privacy. It could have called it Bill C-54, an act using electronic commerce as a pretext to invade the jurisdiction of Quebec and the other provinces. This is one of the many fundamental realities of the bill.
Bill C-54 would introduce measures to protect personal information in the private sector, to create an electronic alternative for doing business with the federal government and to clarify how the courts assess the reliability of electronic records used as evidence.
Bill C-54 is a component of the Canadian electronic commerce strategy announced by the Prime Minister on September 22, 1998, which seeks to recreate in cyberspace the best conditions that currently exist in ordinary commerce to promote confidence and reliability.
The government's stated objective is to establish Canada as a world leader in electronic commerce by the year 2000. This bill is one of the measures that would allow us to achieve that objective.
On this issue, the federal Minister of Industry purposely decided unilaterally to introduce the legislation on personal information without waiting for the outcome of the consultations with the provinces that he himself had undertaken. Let us look at the chronology of events.
On June 12, 1998, the ministers responsible for the information highway met in Fredericton and agreed to consult each other at the appropriate time when reviewing the opportunity to legislate the protection of personal information in the private sector.
On September 21, 1998, the federal Minister of Industry sent a draft bill to his provincial counterparts, asking them for their comments on a bill that the federal government wanted to introduce.
On October 1, 1998, the Minister of Industry introduced Bill C-54 in the House of Commons, without waiting to hear from his provincial counterparts.
On October 30, 1998, the 12 provincial and territorial justice ministers unanimously called on the federal Minister of Industry to withdraw his bill, which is a major intrusion into provincial and territorial areas of jurisdiction.
On November 11, 1998, Quebec's minister responsible for relations with the public and immigration and Quebec's minister of culture and communications respectively criticized this unacceptable interference by the federal government in Quebec's jurisdiction.
What justification can the minister give today for introducing this bill? Quebec is the only government in North America to have passed legislation protecting personal information in the private sector and it did so in 1994. The legislation in question, Bill 68, an act to protect personal information in the private sector, has to do with personal information that anyone collects, holds, uses or communicates to a third party in the carrying on of an enterprise within the meaning of article 1525 of the Civil Code of Quebec.
In other words, Quebec's legislation applies to all activities in the private sector, for profit or not. And I would point out that it is regularly mentioned by the experts as being cutting edge.
How do we explain Bill C-54? How do we explain such an infringement upon these areas of provincial jurisdiction? The Constitution clearly stipulates that privacy is a matter of provincial jurisdiction.
Also, for the people of Quebec, Bill C-54 represents an incredible step backward in the protection of personal information. For instance, where consent is required for the release or use of personal information, this bill does not protect consumers because its ambiguous statements of principle lend themselves to a broad interpretation.
Let me quote what Claude Masse, the former president of the Quebec bar association and a consumer law professor at UQAM, had to say:
Having carefully read Bill C-54—and in my view, it is clearly a huge step backward for Quebec—this regulation, or this type of voluntary standard which will be given a legal connotation through a schedule, I can tell you it is not strong enough to protect consumers. It is chock-full of loopholes for businesses. It is largely based on a completely outdated approach to consumer protection, and any recourse is practically non existent.
Having read Bill C-54, I realize that it will apply to Quebec, which means that the people and the businesses of Quebec will be subject to two systems for the protection of personal information. What sense will the people make of all this confusion?
Thus, a Quebec company that would like to transfer information outside Quebec will have no choice but to abide by two different systems for the protection of information, the Quebec system and the federal one.
When the Bloc Quebecois says that the federal government is doing everything it can to hinder Quebec's economic development, this example is proof positive. Here is what the representative of the Alliance of Manufacturers and Exporters of Canada said:
If we are trying to promote e-commerce...the last thing we need is a patchwork or layers of regulations, private standards and legislative frameworks that would only make things more difficult for business people. I do not think our members are convinced that we should have a national framework that would be incompatible with the systems already in existence in Quebec or other provinces.
Those words show clearly that the federal government should go back to the negotiating table with the provinces in order to come up with more adequate legislative proposals to bring about harmonization in the whole area of the protection of people's rights.
In short, Bill C-54 as it stands now has too many flaws from the constitutional, democratic, and legal points of view, and it does not adequately protect personal information. It is almost unenforceable, it lacks clarity, it will created unneeded complications for Quebec companies, and it substantially reduces the rights of Quebecers to protect their personal information.
For all those reasons, the Bloc Quebecois disapproves of this bill, and it is absolutely out of the question for us to support it.