Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your giving me the opportunity to speak to this matter. I am speaking to a matter of privilege raised by the hon. member for Ancaster—Dundas—Flamborough—Aldershot.
I realize it is somewhat unusual to be speaking this long after the original point was raised, but I am deeply interested in the matter. In a way it relates to some of the discussions that just took place on the previous matter of privilege.
I will not go through the history of it as that has already been put on record and the government has had a chance to speak to it, but I want to raise what I believe is one of those generic, organic understandings we have of what our democracy is all about.
Eugene Forsey, when he was called upon to describe it for the new online system here, talked about a responsible government with a cabinet responsible to the House of Commons and a House of Commons responsible to the people. That is how we describe it too. That is what we teach children in school. That is how we understand it to be, that this is the place where citizen's rights are acted out.
I will contrast that with a comment contained within a report commissioned by the Privy Council Office that describes the Canadian House of Parliament as weak in most of its roles because of special Canadian factors that make the Canadian parliament especially weak, even in comparison with other parliaments based on the British Westminster parliamentary cabinet model.
I reference it in that way because for me one of the things that allows us to play our role as representatives of citizens and that allows citizens to hold their government responsible to them is their ability to access accurate information about the operations of government. It seems to be a very fundamental issue.
We rely upon an impartial public service to serve the members of the House equitably and to provide information to them that is, dare I say, policy neutral, not designed to spin or shape the attitudes of members but to give them the facts upon which we can come to a decision.
The member has brought forward information relating to a private member's bill. It is information that related to this side of the House because it was information that was supplied to members on this side of the House about why they should not vote in favour of his particular bill.
There are two specific points. In that information and in a document supplied to cabinet someone within the public service wrote that the privy commissioner believes Bill C-206 is a serious threat to the privacy of Canadians. The member, being somewhat surprised at this, wrote to the privacy commissioner and asked: “Is serious threat to privacy an evaluation that can be directly attributed to you?”. The privacy commissioner wrote back and said “No, neither my staff nor I have ever used that term”.
We have information supplied to cabinet and information supplied to members of the House because the same allegation is made in the documentation provided to members of House. It would seem to be at odds with the very person it is attributed to.
This is a chamber for debate and we are debating all the time. The information used in debates may be called into question by any one of us at any point in time, but there is a different bar to which I believe the public service needs to be held. It is incumbent upon them to supply us with information that is not just kind of accurate but that fairly represents the situation with which they are confronted or to which they are asked to respond.
The second point is that they also reference in this information a comment by the privacy commissioner in his annual report because he did have concerns about the bill. While they highlight that, what is interesting is that they forget to highlight that he had concerns about several government bills that were passed by the House and received royal assent.
What we have seen over the years is an erosion of the rights of members of the House. They are not our rights. They are the rights of Canadian citizens that we exercise on their behalf.
I have just a final point. In this documentation and in other things that have been written about access to information and privacy legislation there is the indication that the government has a process for this right now that it is being conducted by the public service in house. I think that is wrong. The review and the design of that legislation should be such that it is done by an all cabinet committee and in public. It is wrong to do that in the privacy of back offices because it relates to reference of the rules that we play by here.
I urge you to look at this issue very carefully, Mr. Speaker, as I am sure you will. I urge you to take it one step beyond the narrow focus you would put on the interpretation of the points raised by the member and to look at the position that every member of the House is in when we try to carry out the functions we are here to carry out, which is to hold the government to account.