Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to have some opportunity to speak on Bill C-36 and the amendments.
Obviously one of the concerns that we have is the limit on debate. Just for the information of the members and the listening public, this is at least the 72nd time, and some members have told me it is the 73rd time, that the government has brought in time allocation to limit debate on bills before the House and has simply called closure in the minds of most parliamentarians. In other words, it has limited debate on the most important bill to come before the House in many decades.
In fact, our party's justice critic, the member for Pictou--Antigonish--Guysborough said yesterday that this week we were debating the most important bill that we would probably see in the lifetime of this parliament or perhaps in the last 50 years and that the government was going to shut down debate.
That pretty well sums it up from this side of the House. We think the Canadian public wants to see some transparency in this process. Not all of us had the opportunity to tune in to the committee meetings and I think that most members expected that it would be debated on the floor of the House. We are not alone in that. It is not simply confined to members of opposition. The information commissioner, John Reid, who at one time was a member of the House, had some criticisms of the bill. He suggested that it had been rushed through the House with some pace.
Ken Rubin, an Ottawa researcher, has mentioned the same thing. Yesterday he said that it would permanently scar Canada's access to information legislation in terms of what the bill would do. He said that it would basically keep information away from the Canadian public.
That is reminiscent of what the Prime Minister has done in the House on so many occasions. I am sure that I do not have to remind members of Shawinigate or the APEC hearings, and the list goes on.
The Prime Minister prefers to have arbitrary power by executive decree. I do not think the Canadian public enjoys that type of government. It is heavy-handed and pretty tight-fisted. If we are going to rush through a bill in the House, and there is some sense of urgency to that, I do not think too many parliamentarians would object to extending the hours of the House. We still have 24 hours in a day. Most members would enjoy the opportunity to get up in their places and debate the merits of the bill or the weaknesses of the bill to make sure we get it right. There is a lot at play here in a sense that if we do not get it right, we will have to come back to this place to make it right. How many casualties will there be along the way?
One of the groups that appeared before the committee was the Canadian Human Rights Commission. It submitted a brief to the committee. It was not particularly overjoyed by what it saw. The opening paragraph in its presentation to the committee stated:
However, it is vitally important that, in our haste to introduce new measures to counter terrorism, we do not put in place measures that exceed this aim and jeopardize human rights... Let's fight back against terrorism and bring the guilty to justice but let us not endanger the innocent in our haste or abandon the very rights and freedoms which are the terrorists' target.
The justice critic for our party pointed out that the Liberal justice minister at one time was a member of the civil liberties association, so she is going against everything that in a previous life she raged against. That tells us a little about what Liberals are saying in private about the bill.
I will quote from a newspaper article that appeared in today's National Post , November 27. The article is entitled, “Grits snuff debate on terror bill”. It said:
One Liberal back-bencher, (the hon. member for Scarborough East), has broken from Liberal ranks, criticizing the anti-terrorism bill as “a deal with the devil.”
I do not think it can be expressed any stronger than that, but unfortunately when push comes to shove, every Liberal will stand in his or her place and vote with the government and the Prime Minister.
It is the long term harm that we have to be concerned about. We cannot emphasize that enough. We have to be very cautious in what we do in the House with the bills we put through that may infringe our rights and the rights of every group in the country from the east coast to the west.
In the government's haste, today for example, we are going through the amendments. We are only on Group No. 2. I would say it was a stalling tactic on the part of the government, but some of the motions will not have been put tonight before we vote on them and we will not have had the opportunity to debate them.
I use the case of Motion No. 9 by the member for Pictou--Antigonish-Guysborough. It will never be debated on this floor because we are going to run out of time. We have five or ten minutes left on the debate. I guess that is the way the government wants it.
I remind the Canadian public again that when the bill came forward, we had six justice teams, as was said in the article in the National Post , which go backabout a month now , who lived on fast food, worked weekends and into the wee hours of the morning to hastily put this bill together. They did it in haste, which tells us that there is a lot of sober second thought that should go into the bill, and the place that that should happen is right here on the floor of the House of Commons.
That brings me to a book, which I think will probably be on the Christmas best seller list, called The Friendly Dictatorship , written by Jeffrey Simpson.
It chronicles the tenure of the Prime Minister since his coming to office in 1993. Earlier in my opening remarks, I reminded the House that this is at least 72 times that the Prime Minister has brought in closure; hence The Friendly Dictatorship .
When it is over at the end of the day, the Liberals will all stand in their places, bow to the friendly dictatorship and rush the bill through the House of Commons without the opportunity to debate it fully on the floor.
For example, the listing of terrorists is wrong. The ability of the executive to abuse the power in the bill goes way beyond with what we would be comfortable. If I had my wish, it would be that we would continue to debate the bill, to go through it clause by clause with every member receiving the opportunity to at least debate it, so that we would know what is in it before we vote on it.