Mr. Speaker, it is with pleasure that I rise to speak to Bill C-206, an act to amend the Access to Information Act by defining more precisely what records held by governments are to be disclosed and providing more severe penalties for those who would wilfully circumvent the intent of the legislation.
First, I am very supportive of this legislation, as is our party. It is a step in the right direction. The updating of this act, which was introduced and served its purpose well during less complicated times, is long overdue. Clearly the act needs to be updated and strengthened at this very critical time.
It is notable that the government of the leader of my party, the Right Hon. Joe Clark, first introduced the freedom of information legislation in Canada in 1979. It is in that tradition that we are supportive of improvements to the act at this time to bring it up to date with today's circumstances.
Under the current Access to Information Act the government almost got away with what was perhaps the most egregious abuse of government power recorded in a long time, perhaps even at any time during the country's history, and that was the HRDC scandal. There was an obvious abuse of the public trust and mismanagement of public funds, which ultimately uncovered innumerable counts of unethical or at least dubious uses of taxpayer money to buy electoral support. The improvements brought forward in Bill C-206 would help to guard against this and perhaps bring to light these types of abuses earlier.
One thing we have to consider is the degree to which the government is privatizing many of the government services which previously were the exclusive purview of government departments. Whether this is within the new Revenue Canada agency, the new money laundering agency or any of the new arm's length agencies that are separate from government, we have to ensure that we are being vigilant in ensuring that we continue through the Access to Information Act to have an opportunity to seek information that should be in the public domain.
It is a fear which I have and which others validate that sometimes when we see these new agencies access to information may be compromised. That is something we have to be awfully careful of, particularly given the degree to which the trend in government service provision in Canada is to that sort of agency model. I would urge all members of the House to consider this very carefully to ensure that as this trend evolves we do not see a compromising of the access to information mechanism.
One of the most glaring concerns with the legislation is that it proposes to prohibit access to information to users who make frivolous and abusive requests. As a member of the fifth party in the House of Commons I would certainly hope that the hon. member, or any member of the governing party, would not see requests coming from my party as being frivolous or abusive.