Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for Winnipeg South for an interesting speech. While I do not share his views nor his boosterism about the current budget, I am reluctantly compelled to acknowledge the work that he has done in the area of e-government and information technology and his efforts to bring that to the attention of the House of Commons, the subject of which occupied the bulk of his speech.
I would like to ask the hon. member one question dealing with an issue that he raised on information technology, privacy and access, and I will tie it to the budget.
The issue deals with the wrestling match that we have between information stored by government, a person's right to access to it and another person's right to privacy. The context in which I wish to raise it is the guaranteed income supplement.
Another issue in my low income riding of Winnipeg Centre is that we now know there are many senior citizens who are eligible for the guaranteed income supplement, have never applied for it and are who not getting it. As many as 10,000 people are being shortchanged in this way.
The government knows who these people are by virtue of their income tax returns. It knows their income levels and that they are eligible for the guaranteed income supplement. We have challenged the minister of HRDC and the minister of revenue. We have asked these questions. If one minister knows who these people and the other minister is responsible to get these low income seniors the benefits they deserve, why does one department not tell the other department and share that information? The answer has been it would be a violation of the senior citizen's privacy for the revenue minister to tell the HRDC minister.
Does the hon. member think that is a bastardization of the interpretation of the Privacy Act? Does he think that would be a fair thing to do, in terms of juggling privacy and access to information?