Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for Nanaimo--Cowichan.
I am pleased to rise and speak to Bill C-49, another piece of legislation by the government that seems a little disastrous and roughly drafted. I was going through the bill a minute ago. The first thing I draw to the House's attention is on page 3 of the bill. Clause 5, Establishment and Mandate of the Authority, says:
(2) The Authority is for all purposes an agent of Her Majesty in right of Canada.
It says for all purposes.
Clause 28 on page 9 says:
(1) The Authority may enter into contracts, agreements or other arrangements with Her Majesty as if it were not an agent of Her Majesty.
We can have it one way or the other way but we cannot have it both ways. This is the attitude of the government. It wants everything its way. Will the agency be an agent for the Queen in all ways as subclause 5(2) says?
The hon. member for Nanaimo--Cowichan has reminded me he would like to say a few words. They will be important words because he will bash the government as much as I am doing.
The point is it will either be an agent of the Queen at all times or it will not. Let us be specific and get these things clarified. This type of drafting of legislation should never get this far.
In a typical Canadian way we have had the private sector running airport security. There has been a big debate in the United States about whether it should be private or public. The United States decided it would be public. In a true Canadian way we said we would create an agency that was neither private nor public but somewhere in between. It is rather strange. The government still does not know whether it will tax the Canadian travelling public or charge it a fee.
We had a briefing yesterday at the finance department. The department told us it will charge $12 per ticket. Of that, 78 cents will be GST and $11.22 will be a fee. The money will be taken from people with no debate and no chance to object. It will be spent not only on the travelling public but on the entire airline industry.
It is a tax. The government did not get rid of the GST. It now wants to charge GST on a tax it will impose. Not only that, it will not put it into the consolidated revenue fund. It will give it all to the new agency.
The government does not know what it is talking about. I wish it did because the Canadian travelling public's safety is at stake. The bill seems like something thrown together by the government on a whim at the last minute when it realized it had no real objectives.
My colleague pressured the minister into getting air marshals on planes. After months of stalling and saying there was no way we would have air marshals in Canada the minister said yes, we would have them. This happened courtesy of our member. It is more of the same.
I am concerned less about the bill's security provisions than about its secrecy. I know the auditor general would be the auditor because the bill tells us that in clause 31. However Clause 32 says no information could be made public without the authorization of the minister. On the next page it goes even further. Subclause 32(2) says:
The Authority, authorized aerodrome operators and screening contractors must keep confidential any information the publication of which, in the opinion of the Minister, would be detrimental to air transport security or public security, including financial and other data that might reveal such information.
Not only is the government saying it would not tell us what it was doing. It would muzzle private industry subcontractors who work in the airline security. We would not know what was going on. If I read the act properly I am not sure the auditor general would be able to make public her analysis and audit of the institution.
We need to seriously examine this piece of legislation. I hope to have much more to say when we resume after question period.