Mr. Speaker, I will start by thanking the departmental officials who gave us a briefing this morning. I think they did their best to give us an indepth briefing of the aspects of the bill they thought were important. They did a good job.
This is a reactive piece of legislation. The government feels it must have something on the books so it has put this legislation before us. It is a number of half measures. It does not deal with the serious issues about which Canadians have expressed concern and with which the committee has been dealing over the last number of weeks.
The bill has 96 pages and 125 clauses. It deals with 19 current acts and would introduce one new act, the biological and toxin weapons convention implementation act.
Most of the major amendments would apply to only a couple of acts. The first one, the Aeronautics Act, has a number of half measures dealing with public security. As my colleagues stated previously, the bill does not deal with the issues Canadians were expecting it to deal with. It would give a lot of regulation making abilities to the government and the minister without being specific as to what they are. The bill seems to be another step toward removing parliament from the mix.
The bill would not create a new agency to take over airport security. It would give the minister the ability to take these measures. It seems to be another bill that transfers a lot of responsibilities and decision making power to the minister and bureaucrats while taking it away from parliament and the committees.
The thing that stood out when I was reviewing and listening to the presentation is that the bill would take away the authority of the House to tax. It would give the minister the authority to appropriate who would pay for the measures that would be taken.
Although the explanation by the department was that the bill was intended to apply only to airports and airlines and not to the public, it would apply to the public. It does not state that the public is not included. In essence the bill would give the minister the ability to lay taxation on the Canadian public. It was my understanding that was parliament's role, not the role of the minister or the executive branch.
The bill would allow the transfer of information to the passenger lists of foreign countries. As one of my hon. colleagues mentioned, it would not allow Canada to participate in the CAPPS program, which is, as we heard in the committee, an important part of intelligence sharing to prevent terrorists from accessing Canadian planes.
Although CAPPS is in the development stage it concerns me that in coming up with a new piece of legislation Canada is not in the forefront of the issue. It concerns me that we are not an active participant in this international passenger pre-clearance profiling system that can be effective if everyone participates. I am disappointed there was not more of an effort to make sure legislation was there to allow Canada to be in the forefront of the process.
Not only does the bill deal with the Aeronautics Act, it deals with an awful lot of other acts, 19 in total. Some of what the bill would do is good. For the first time under the National Defence Act, and I am sure my colleague who is defence critic will be interested in this point, the government is taking measures to protect reservists and make sure they are able to maintain their jobs if called for duty. That has been a long time in coming. It is nice to see the government addressing that.
I am concerned about the looseness with which it deals with the military being able to establish military security zones to protect personnel, property or things that the military protects. There was some concern that this would allow the military or the government to use the military in this instance for G-8 and G-20 meetings. Parliamentary oversight is definitely lacking in this piece of legislation.
We must be careful when we start talking about giving the Minister of Transport, the Minister of National Defence or ministers of other departments certain authorities to react quickly to emergency situations. There is always a need to have a parliamentary oversight ability to ensure that when decisions are made there is some recourse. There should be some followup to ensure that if a decision is made, which in many cases is good for a year, parliament can challenge the government on how it handled the situation.
There is a lack of parliamentary oversight in the legislation which gives some outstanding authority to various ministers. I wish that the government would have seen the need to include parliamentary oversight. The coalition addressed that issue when it tabled a long term proposal that addressed this need. It called for the creation of a parliamentary oversight committee. The government would be well advised to consider that not only in this legislation but in Bill C-36 as well.