Madam Speaker, today we are debating a new bill that has been introduced in the House of Commons, Bill C-17, but really the name of it is the public security act. As others have mentioned, this is the third public security act that the government has introduced in the House of Commons in this Parliament. We find it a little odd that the government has been so unable to get such an important piece of legislation right. It should not take three tries for the government to address such clear cut issues as safety and security and public safety for Canadians, but here we are again, with three strikes and the third strike on this particular legislation.
There are a number of provisions in the bill which a number of colleagues also have mentioned. One of the most controversial is the giving of airline passenger lists to the government and also the giving of immigration information to other governments, foreign governments. It is very interesting that our country has been so dilatory and so slow in addressing these important issues. As others have pointed out, the United States, the direct target of a terrorist attack last September, introduced a bill to deal with these security issues only 10 days after the after the attack on the World Trade Center. The bill was actually passed into law eight weeks later.
Other governments, especially those most directly concerned, have been very effective and very prompt in dealing with these key issues. We here in Canada, after over a year since the terrorist threat became very real to us here in North America, are still trying to get something acceptable to legislators through the House.
One of the interesting things about the bill is that it really lacks specificity in so many areas. Although it mentions dealing with health issues such as hazardous products and protection of food sources and water sources, although it talks about transportation issues, and although it talks about protection of our navigable waters and the environment, the fact is that there are very few specifics about precisely how this protection would be put into place. In fact, the bill relies very heavily on what are called interim orders. An interim order can be issued by one of four ministers, and presumably in a time of crisis or need these ministers can step forward and issue an interim order.
The problem with that, of course, is that it leaves a lot of uncertainty about what actually can and will be done in circumstances where our health, our food, our water or the safety of our transportation system is under attack. We do not really know what the government has in mind in order to take steps to protect us or to deal with those situations. My guess is that the government does not know either and that this kind of policy is going to be made up on the fly should circumstances dictate.
This seems to me to be an extremely poor way to administer Canadians' affairs. It is true that we cannot exhaustively prepare for every eventuality, but surely, as the U.S. and other countries have done, there can be a great deal more certainty and a great deal more detail as to process, procedure and the resources that will be called upon in some of the most obvious circumstances. We criticize the government for saying that it will make it up when the time comes. That is just not acceptable for Canadians. Also, this kind of approach delegates very large powers into the hands of ministers, which is not in accordance with our democracy and our parliamentary precedents. The government needs to fix this. There will be amendments brought forward for that purpose.
As we also know from listening to the debate, there has been a lot of criticism about sharing passenger lists and immigration information with the government and with other governments. I think it is fair to say that some of this information sharing is just sensible, but it is sensible only within the context of our purpose to protect Canada from terrorism. Strangely enough, the legislation is silent on that purpose to a troubling degree and leaves the door open for information sharing willy-nilly at the discretion of different people, which makes both legislators and Canadians very uneasy.
Our recommendation is that if we are going to share this kind of personal information it should be for a very narrow, very specific purpose and for that alone. I think if that amendment were made to the bill we would find a lot less opposition to the wide-ranging scope that information sharing now has.
As the immigration critic for the Canadian Alliance, I would like to address a couple of immigration issues that have come up in the bill. There is of course this information sharing that the immigration minister can undertake with provinces, with foreign governments and with international organizations for “national security, the defence of Canada or the conduct of international affairs”. As I mentioned just a moment ago, such a broad window, actually a doorway, for the minister to throw information about is simply troubling to many Canadians. We would ask that it be restricted to really protecting Canadians from terrorism and not be so broadly defined.
In one of the previous iterations of this public security act, there was a provision that those who engaged in people smuggling would be given large fines. This provision has been put into the new Immigration Act. The problem is not that the sanctions for people smuggling are too small but that they are never applied. People smugglers are not pursued and thus are not caught. Of course a lot of the time the kingpins are out of harm's way while very low level followers do all the work. There really is a need to be more effective in dealing with people smugglers.
Also of course there was a provision in the previous bill to allow certain individuals to be detained without warrant until they satisfy authorities of their identity. There is a real problem here. Many asylum seekers do arrive in Canada without documents. Often these people are smuggled in by international crime gangs and yet they are allowed entry without any system of tracking or following up. They are supposed to appear at a refugee hearing but over 25% of them do not even bother to show up. These are some of the concerns that have led our U.S. neighbour to become more stringent in its procedures along the border, but they are also concerns for Canadians. Therefore, on the immigration side there needs to be a more effective way of dealing with people who arrive at our borders with no documentation or with patently fraudulent documentation so as not to allow these people to enter our society until their identities have been ascertained in some way. In our view, the government has a real duty to Canadians to enact legislation that protects our security.
Although the legislation is a big step in the right direction, we think it has deficiencies. I am hoping the House will address those in amendments to the bill during the legislative process.