moved that Bill C-206, an act to amend the Access to Information Act and to make amendments to others acts, be read the second time and referred to a committee.
Mr. Speaker, it is a great pleasure to rise and to speak to this, my private member's bill to reform the Access to Information Act. The bill has a very long history and it has been quite a struggle to get it to this point where it is being debated before the House.
I believe that Bill C-206 is legislation that has the potential of dramatically changing how government operates. Indeed, I believe Bill C-206, because of the new standards of transparency it would bring to government operations, could put Canada in the forefront of not only transparency, but in the forefront of the efficiency of the delivery of government services and, if you will, the spending of taxpayers' money.
The world has changed since the Access to Information Act was first introduced 17 years ago. It has changed in the sense that we now have the Internet, we now have different procedures of accounting and we now have the potential of putting documents that are generated by the government on the Internet for the entire world to see almost as soon as they are generated.
In order to take advantage of that potential we will have to modernize the Access to Information Act which, at the time it came in, was very, very good legislation, but over time has become more and more an instrument to retain government documents rather than to open government documents.
I became interested in this issue as soon as I became elected for the first time in 1993, and in 1994 and 1995 pressed the Department of Justice and the then justice minister to make reforms to the Access to Information Act.
Despite the various recommendations I made, those reforms were not forthcoming, and I soon came to realize that it was not the lack of will on the part of the justice minister of the day. The problem was that freedom of information, if you will, is something that affects every government ministry. Unfortunately, all government legislation emanates from the Department of Justice. That is not bad in itself, but the Department of Justice of course, because it is composed primarily of lawyers, would tend to opt for withholding information or protecting information rather than discovering ways of openness.
Moreover, I realized that in legislation like this it would be impossible to get consensus across all the government departments. Can hon. members imagine, even from the Department of Justice, trying to get the approval for various prospects of change in the Access to Information Act? We would have to consult every government ministry, and not only would we have to consult with the deputy ministers, we would have to consult the ministers themselves. So I realized that the real reason why there would be no progress in reforming the Access to Information Act was the simple reality that it was almost impossible to do it with the kind of consensus that the bureaucracies normally operate when they develop legislation. Therefore, I undertook to write it myself.
I hired legislative counsel and we sat down together in my office at my desk. Side by side we went through the existing legislation and made the changes.
There has been some criticism to the effect that legislation of this importance should not be developed from Private Members' Business. The argument is that this should be put out in a forum, debated, there should be committees struck and so on and so forth, and another consensus developed. Indeed the current access to information commissioner has suggested just that. I think the justice minister at one point in time suggested that perhaps there has to be another round table to examine the reforms to the current Access to Information Act.
In making the reforms that I did make that are in the bill, what I relied upon was the recommendations that emanated in the 1993-94 reports of the then information commissioner who had more than a decade with the act. He also derived his recommendations from another parliamentary committee that studied reforming the act.
In other words, the recommendations that we see in this bill, the changes, the amendments that we see in the bill before us are actually derived for the most part from 10 to 12 years of consultation with the stakeholders, by not only previous MPs but by the access to information commissioner of longstanding, Mr. John Grace.
What we find in this bill are things that are directly from the recommendations made by these groups. That involves, to summarize, things like opening up crown corporations because of course crown corporations use the taxpayers' money and they should be subject to the same amount of transparency as exists with government departments, opening up opinion polls and opening up, which is quite controversial, some of the contractual arrangements between third parties. There is a great concern that when the government enters into negotiations or bidding contracts with private enterprise, it is sometimes in the public interest to know the details of those various proposals.
One of the things that I introduced, as my own contribution to the bill, is that all government documents more than 30 years old should be automatically released unless there is a very apparent threat to national security or public safety. That actually conforms to something that was done not too long ago in the United States.
One of the most dramatic changes in the legislation that is before the House now is the total elimination of schedule II. Schedule II in the old act is a list of exemptions. It started out with five or six when the act was first passed and it has since grown to 42 exemptions from the scrutiny by the Access to Information Act. One of my amendments eliminates that schedule II entirely.
What that means is that every piece of legislation, like the Income Tax Act or any other legislation that has a section protecting information, that section has to be subject to the test of the Access to Information Act, the changed Access to Information Act. When I came to examine how to change the act, one of the things I tried to do was to develop a theme that runs through the act that gives the public service guidance in what to open and what to close.
That theme is that information should be only withheld if there genuinely is a concern with respect to the national interest, public safety or public security. There is an injury test that runs right through the changes that we see before us.
This is all dramatic stuff. In making changes like that, I had to consider how I could possibly bring it forward. The tradition of freedom of information legislation around the world is that it is very difficult to get it through legislatures because there is so much self-interest by some government departments and by some ministers perhaps. It is always difficult to overcome the political hurdles to move this kind of legislation forward. Actually, the word is fear. While we all speak of transparency, while we all speak of openness, while we all love to speak about these words as politicians, in fact though, even we as MPs sometimes are fearful about seeing everything we do open to the public. I believe improperly so because in the end transparency is good for everyone. Nevertheless, there is fear.
My first problem to advance this as private member's legislation was how to force my own government, the cabinet and the executive branch of my party to take this legislation seriously, to not discard it and to not turn away from it.
Therefore, the very first amendment in Bill C-206 is to change the name from the Access to Information Act to the open government act. How can any politician turn his or her back on legislation that calls for transparency and puts transparency in the very title?
The next amendment establishes the theme which is in the interests of government efficiency so the people can see how taxpayer money is spent. The government should try to opt for openness wherever possible.
The default mode of the current Access to Information Act is to withhold. The default mode in my open government act is to disclose, the idea being if in doubt, the bureaucrat should release the information, not withhold it. This theme I hope runs right through it.
What is being called for is a change in cultural attitude in the bureaucracy and in the executive leadership of the government. We should be always thinking in terms of what we can disclose, not in terms of what we can withhold. Openness is a kind of contract. One cannot take the position that everything must be open because the government has to operate. The government has to have necessary secrets.
When I came to look at all these amendments, and I think there are some 42 amendments to the Access to Information Act, I tried to pay attention to the needs of government to function. I tried to make sure that the provisions as to why a document should be withheld were very, very clear. Consequently, members will see, for example, concepts like certain documents can be withheld if it is in the government's monetary interest or if it is in the interest of public safety or cabinet function. So it goes.
In the end, the government can pass whatever kind of legislation it wants, but if we do not have broad agreement from those who are going to be affected by the legislation, the legislation is not going to work.
I must tell you right at the outset that, while I enjoy tremendous support from the backbenchers here, there is no guarantee that the frontbenchers of my own side are in favour of this legislation. I am sure some are, I am sure some are not.
So the evolution of this bill is going to be the debate in this Chamber. Even more important, because it can be stretched out over a longer period and can be gotten into in greater depth, will be the time that this bill will spend in committee.
Just to go a little further, having presented the bill with all these changes and in particular the change to the open government act at first reading, I still had the dilemma of how to move it forward. Then, as chance would have it, there was a change in the standing orders to the effect that if one could get a hundred seconders to a private member's bill, that bill could bypass the lottery.
I think I am probably the first person to take advantage of the rule change and I did get a hundred seconders for the bill to bypass the lottery. Those seconders, I should say, were principally from my own side, of course, and as required by the rule change, from at least two opposition parties. At that time, the seconders were from the Reform Party and the Bloc Quebecois.
Mr. Speaker, if ever there was a doubt about the utility of that change in the standing orders, I can tell you that when I had those 100 signatures, then everyone paid attention to Bill C-206, which was then Bill C-264 but is Bill C-206 now.
Then I had representations coming from the bureaucracy. I had Statistics Canada wanting to visit to explain why it needed a special exemption. I had the justice department come forward to make some very, very helpful suggestions. I had representations from the privy council office. They wanted to get in on it as well.
The reason that I suddenly got this serious attention from the bureaucracy was that the 100 seconders meant that this bill had a very, very high chance of going forward.
I took advantage of the advice I got at that time, and it got me into trouble in the end, I have to say, but I did take advantage of it because some of the advice was very good in my eyes. I thought it would solve the problem of the debate, when the bill finally got to committee, being derailed toward avenues which were not constructive.
I will give an example of one of the changes that was proposed. In my original legislation, Bill C-264, at first reading I proposed opening up the House of Commons and the Senate; everything that you, Mr. Speaker, might have, financial records and that kind of thing. The justice department people pointed out to me that I probably stood a good chance of losing the entire support of all my backbench MPs because the way I phrased that particular clause would have opened up the private files of individual members.
So one of the changes I made as a result was to eliminate that particular clause from the original version of the bill and transfer it, as you will see, into an amendment to the Parliament of Canada Act, which basically applies, thereby, only to the financial records of the House of Commons and the Senate, but not to the private records of members of parliament.
That kind of change I thought was in my interests and in the interests of the House of Commons, to change if I could, by unanimous consent, which I brought forward in June of 1997, and I did get unanimous consent to make that change. There was another change with respect to cabinet confidences. I can explain that in further detail either now or at another time.
The change that caused all the controversy, which I did not think was a very important change at all, was a change that gave the government the clear option of withholding documents if they were planning documents pertaining to the possibility of the secession of a province.
Much to my surprise, the Reform Party challenged that particular change on a point of privilege and required me to get all my 100 signatures again. I did get those signatures, but the sad part of that challenge, and I think it is a basic misunderstanding, is that particular change only reflected what already exists. It reflects what exists in the Quebec freedom of information law, because the Quebec legislation has similar protections for that kind of thing.
I thought I was doing something that was a mild change, but unfortunately, I feel that it was misunderstood by the Reform Party and probably, to a certain degree, poisoned my relations—or this bill's relations—with the Bloc Quebecois.
I am hoping as the debate goes on that the Bloc Quebecois will see that this change did not materially affect the legislation, it is not unreasonable, and that they will come back onside and examine this bill, Bill C-206, for the merits it really has, because I would really like to see broad support, not just two parties or three parties, I would like to see all five parties in the House, the backbench MPs here and all the opposition MPs—reasonably all the opposition MPs—get behind this legislation and make whatever changes are necessary to make it workable.
There are problems in the legislation. It is not perfect. There are areas that have to be developed and examined in committee. There may be some questions about whether I went too far in my changes to cabinet confidences. There has been some concern about giving the department the power to refuse frivolous requests. That was a proposal from the access commissioner.
Some concern has been expressed about forcing people who constantly use the service to pay a certain portion. The people who use the access to information law, or the open government law, when they use it for private or personal gain, for profit, my bill provides that they receive a certain charge for service, whereas people who use the open government legislation in the public interest would be charged nothing at all. There would be no user fee whatsoever. These are things that have to be clarified and debated.
Probably one of the most contentious things that I would like to see the committee examine is the clause dealing with solicitor-client privilege. As recommended by the access to information commissioner, in my original version of this bill I eliminated the exemption for solicitor-client privilege. I put it back in the new version. I am not sure that was a good idea. This is what my colleagues have to examine.
I have tried to do something that I think is in the interests of all Canadians and in the interest of government. If this legislation goes through, with whatever amendments we agree upon, in the end we will have the best freedom of information legislation in the world. I have compared this with the freedom of information legislation in the United States and we would be miles ahead. If we are ahead, the government will be miles ahead because transparency leads to accountability and accountability leads to efficiency.