Mr. Speaker, I want to make some comments on the private member's bill, Bill C-206. I appreciate the efforts made by the hon. member for Wentworth—Burlington to look at access to information. I guess I am just a little jaded in my feelings on access to information and having any kind of legislation that allows the head of a government department or the Prime Minister to make a decision on whether information will be released.
My experience with access to information with government departments has not been a pleasant one. I find that whenever there is information that might embarrass or undermine the government's agenda, the department makes every effort to ensure that any information that is released is either highly blacked out, whited out or completely removed from the documentation that one receives.
I do not like the idea that someone can consider an access to information request to be frivolous. It may be frivolous to the people in the department or to an individual in a department but it is probably not frivolous to the person who is making the request. I cannot support the idea that a person in any government department can decide on his or her own that something seems to be frivolous, or that somebody seems to be asking for access to information more than somebody in a government department deems necessary, or that he or she personally does not think that the person requesting the information is acting on behalf of a group or organization.
Access to information should be very clear. When a citizen of Canada asks for information it should be provided to them. The gathering of the information is done using taxpayer dollars. The people who are overseeing the spending of taxpayer dollars are paid by taxpayer dollars. If an individual is concerned enough about an issue to ask the government for the information in order to do research, to support a position or for whatever reason, nothing should be blocking the flow of information.
I particularly do not want the head of some government department being able to say “I think that is frivolous. I think that may be a secret or an issue that we cannot release because of national security”.
I have found, in my research and in my position, that buying a case of toilet paper for a government department can be considered a national security. I do not want the head of any government department able to say that the request is frivolous or that it might be a danger to the welfare of the country if that information is released.
This legislation, although it is a private member's bill and it does reach into some of the corners, it is still basically protecting the government from having to release information that it does not want anybody to know.
All we have to do is look at the human resources department and the boondoggle of the waste of government money. That fact is it is through access requests that we get little tidbits of information which lead to other tidbits of information instead of getting full documents released, instead of getting audits released without access to information. A government can use any legislation that it wants to hide facts and information from embarrassing itself or from coming clean with Canadians.
With all due respect, I do not think think this legislation will make it any easier for people to get information from government departments that do not want that information released. It points out a number of areas that could be cleaned up, but on the whole it does not deal with completely opening up access to information for ordinary citizens.
What it does do is if an ordinary citizen is concerned about issues and digs deeper and deeper and asks for more and more requests, the citizen can be asked to pay more and more money for it. In other words, instead of a simple $5 fee it can be deemed that a request is frivolous, is of a personal nature or whatever and the individual will have to pay not only the cost but an extra 10%.
I do not think it is good enough. Either the government will come clean and release information or it will not. I am not convinced that this legislation will make it any better for Canadians to get access to information that the government would just as soon not share because it is trying to hide its mismanagement of government funds.