Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Parkdale--High Park. I want to begin by saying that I echo the comments made by my colleague opposite. I believe that the time for tolerance of violent protest is at an end because violent protest is a type of terrorist activity. It is designed to intimidate and to disrupt the democratic process. However, I would stress in the same context that we would not want the legislation to interfere with rightful dissent and peaceful protest and I do not believe it does.
I would also like to echo the idea of a sunset clause. What is contained in the legislation is so profound, so important and so contrary to the way Canadians would like to see themselves and yet so terribly necessary in the context of international terrorist threats. I hope the government will seriously consider, instead of a statutory review, a sunset clause perhaps after five years, not counting an election year.
The reality is that a committee will never examine the issues contained in the legislation in the kind of depth that parliament should examine it. I hope the government will seriously consider that prospect.
The government may have to separate out from the legislation as a consequence the clauses dealing with the statutory creation of the Communications Security Establishment, and rightly so, because the Communications Security Establishment is a very important institution that pertains to national security and is little known and understood in this country. It ought to be subject to a separate debate in the House. That is something that I would like the government to consider.
More important, something that concerns me very specifically, and I sound the alarm, is clause 87 which would change the Access to Information Act. There are other clauses such as clause 103 and clause 104 which would change the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act and the Privacy Act. These clauses give the Attorney General of Canada the right to issue certificates that prohibit the disclosure of information pertaining to international relations, national defence or security.
We can see the rationale for that. There is certain information in times of crisis that one would want to protect, but the trouble with clause 87 is that it makes an exclusion instead of an exemption from the Access to Information Act. The clauses amend section 69 of the Access to Information Act by adding a further section, section 69.1.
Section 69 of the Access to Information Act excludes cabinet confidences. It provides for the release of cabinet documents after 20 years. By adding section 69.1 after section 69 there is no 20 year release date.
In other words, what happens is that the Attorney General of Canada would be able to exclude information from public view forever with no review, no outside ombudsman or court. No one can see what it is doing. One might argue that since this pertains to international relations and national defence there could be a case made that there are secrets in those two areas that should be kept indefinitely, however not security.
Section 87 enables the government to withhold information pertaining to security issues forever. Mr. Speaker, that is terribly dangerous. That is the excuse that has been used by dictatorships throughout history and around the world. We are talking about police information being withheld forever.
Mr. Speaker, we cannot have that. I hope the government will seriously reconsider what it is doing by this particular clause 87 and the ones relating to the other two pieces of legislation. This cannot be. I am sure it is an oversight on the part of the government.
I point out, Mr. Speaker, that the Access to Information Act does provide exemptions for security issues and for international relations. An exemption enables a review by the access to information commissioner and by a federal court, which in the interests of democracy I think is a much better situation, but the Access to Information Act is still flawed because these exemptions also withhold information indefinitely. At least there is a review by the courts, but nevertheless, the information can be held under the current legislation indefinitely.
One change I would like to see to the Access to Information Act, which could be put in this legislation, would be that security information, international relations information, defence information, should have some automatic release review, a timeline of, say, 30 years or even 50 years. The point is that when we are dealing with the need for government to act in secret, certainly in the public interest when it is acting in secret, we must make sure in a democracy that there is a time for disclosure. Under the current Access to Information Act with an exemption there is no time for disclosure.
This legislation makes the situation even worse because an exclusion makes it impossible for any kind of oversight or review. So, Mr. Speaker, I do hope the government will review its position on that.
There are other areas of the legislation that interest me that I would like to see a little bit more on, such as requiring charities and non-profit organizations to be financially transparent. It is one thing to put up penalties for fundraising for terrorism, but we have to have the mechanisms to see actually how funds are moving. We can see it in a casino. There are mechanisms to track how casinos use money. We cannot see how money is used in charities and especially non-profit organizations.
Mr. Speaker, charities have to send in a financial information return to Revenue Canada, which is a very incomplete document and anyone can fill it out, but at least it is some kind of information for the public, but when a non-profit organization sends its financial information return to Revenue Canada, it is not a public document. Consequently, there is no transparency whatsoever for a non-profit organization.
The difficulty with this legislation is while it has provisions for lifting the charity registration status, a charity that is raising money for abusive purposes, not just terrorist activity but for laundering money or for organized crime, can just move on to become a non-profit organization and have a higher level of secrecy.
So these are some things that I think should be reviewed by the government.
I also point out, just to go the full circle, the legislation would appear to capture the special interest groups that promote violent activity, like some of the animal rights organizations. I think we will probably hear from them in the course of this debate.