Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to join in the debate on Bill C-55 on behalf of the New Democratic Party. I want to follow on some comments made by my hon. colleague from the Bloc along the lines of what was needed after September 11.
Did we hear any questions after September 11 as to what the government ministers were unable to do that did not allow them to proceed and protect the security of Canadians? We have not heard of anything. In all the meetings I have attended and in all the discussions, I have not heard once that something was missing, that some legislation was missing where the ministers were not able to act responsibly.
Quite frankly we have heard there was great reaction at the airports from the workers and from the people in the communities. In spite of all the tragedy that was taking place and everything that was going on and the chaos in the industry, everyone responded wonderfully. That says to me that Canada has a good system in place. Good honest people throughout the country were willing to jump to the measure that was needed. They came through when everything was going on. Therefore it is hard for me to understand why we are in this situation today.
The Minister of Transport calls the bill the public safety act. How Orwellian. What a misleading name. This bill has very little to do with enhancing public safety and has everything to do with grandstanding by the Liberal government. That kind of grandstanding is very dangerous to the freedom of Canadians. It is a knee-jerk reaction to the terrible events of September 11. All the government has been capable of since September 11 is knee-jerk reactions like this bill.
This approach to public security has more to do with public relations and trying to look like the government is doing something about security than actually doing the things necessary to counter the threat of terrorism. The bill gives sweeping powers to government ministers to do whatever they want whenever they want supposedly in the name of security.
The only precedent for something like this in the history of this great democracy was the War Measures Act. The last time the War Measures Act was used was in October 1970. Hundreds of innocent Canadians were dragged from their homes, arrested and held without charge while the government tried to find a tiny group of terrorists who had assassinated Quebec cabinet minister Pierre Laporte and kidnapped a British trade envoy.
History came to show that using the War Measures Act to crush the FLQ was like using a wrecking ball to squash a fly. A fly swatter would have worked just fine and would have knocked the wall down. All the unjustified arrests of innocent people who had nothing to do with the FLQ terrorists shook Canadians' faith in their government. It showed us just how fragile our freedom really is.
At least the War Measures Act was repealed after the FLQ was crushed. However this bill is like a permanent War Measures Act. It allows government ministers to issue executive orders covering a huge range of areas anytime they want to. These orders have the force of law the moment the minister signs them. This kind of power in the hands of one individual is unheard of in a democracy like Canada.
Normally when a minister wants to make a change or a regulation, he or she has to go through a process that involves public consultation and a regulatory impact study. The change then has to be approved by cabinet. Again I remind everyone that there has not been a single indication that ministers were not able to respond on September 11.
With this bill the Liberal government is saying it wants to bypass the democratic process and issue decrees at its whim. That means no public input and no impact study. The government says it will only use these new powers in an emergency but here is the kicker: there is absolutely no accountability to the public when a minister uses his or her power. When ministers make one of the decrees that this bill allows them to make, they never have to explain to the public why they did it. They can just do it and never have to explain themselves.
One of the great legislators and statesmen of the 20th century was Senator William Proxmire who represented the people of Wisconsin in the United States senate for over three decades. He once said “Power always has to be kept in check; power exercised in secret, especially under the cloak of national security is doubly dangerous”. Those words were especially meaningful coming from Senator Proxmire because he was elected to the U.S. senate in the seat vacated by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy in 1957.
Senator McCarthy is of course known for McCarthyism, the time in the 1950s when America tore itself apart looking for communists. Like the Canadian government did to hundreds of suspected FLQ terrorists under the War Measures Act, McCarthyism wrongly persecuted thousands of innocent Americans who had absolutely nothing to do with communism.
When Senator Proxmire, McCarthy's successor, spoke those words about the need to keep power in check and about how power exercised in secret under the cloak of national security was doubly dangerous, America was just coming to grips with the mistakes and excesses of the McCarthy era. He did not want Americans to forget the hard lessons they had learned in the McCarthy era about how fragile their freedom was.
Canadians learned that lesson in October 1970. It is a real tragedy that the Liberal government has forgotten that lesson in its mad rush to look like it is doing something about terrorism since September 11.
The so-called interim order powers in the bill would give to ministers and the Minister of National Defence the power to create military zones. That is exactly what Proxmire warned us against. It would give these ministers the power to exercise in secret under a cloak of national security.
The Liberal government wants us to believe that these powers are limited. It even went as far as withdrawing the original version of Bill C-42 and reintroducing it in a slightly watered down form. That action was supposed to make us all think everything was fine now.
Canadians are supposed to be reassured because these executive orders must be reviewed by cabinet within six weeks, instead of three months under the old bill. The name of military security zones has been changed to controlled access military zones and a few vague limitations have been inserted where they can be applied. The fact remains that individual cabinet ministers can exercise these powers in secret.
There is no public accountability for the government's actions. There is no obligation to show the public that a decree issued under the authority of the bill is justified. It can do what it wants and never have to explain why. The public's ability to challenge an action taken under the legislation in the courts is also extremely limited, which removes the courts from their constitutional role as a check on executive power. The other check on executive power, namely parliament, is reduced to an afterthought.
Decrees issued under the legislation only have to be tabled in parliament 15 sitting days after they are issued and there is no authority for parliament to override them.
By sidelining parliament and the courts the Liberal government has done the other thing that Proxmire warned against, it has removed the checks and balances on power.
I cannot help but ask why the Liberal government thinks a bill as draconian as this one is necessary. Bringing in a permanent War Measures Act like this is not a rational approach to dealing with terrorism. Terrorists like Osama bin Laden are out to destroy western democracy. If our reaction to the threat of terrorism were to undermine freedom and democracy in the name of national security, as Bill C-55 does, then we would be giving the terrorists what they want. The government clearly has not thought through the consequences of what it is proposing.
In my role as the NDP transport critic I have spent the last few months fighting against another one of the Liberal government's knee jerk reactions, the new $24 government security tax on air travel. This is another case where the government acted without thinking. It imposed this huge tax on an industry that was already in deep trouble without any impact analysis whatsoever. Indeed, the government based the amount of the tax on a poll done by the ministry of finance, not a sober economic analysis, but a poll taken shortly after September 11 to see how much it could squeeze out of Canadians.
Because it acted so irrationally and introduced the tax without thinking through the consequences, tourism this summer is projected to drop over 10%. The economy is taking a huge hit because of this tax and it is putting all kinds of jobs at risk.
The worst part of all about this $24 security tax is that most of the money is not even going into airport security. The tax is just a smokescreen the government dreamed up to try to give the impression that it is improving airport security and cover for the fact that it really has no plan whatsoever. Has the problem of security guards not receiving quality training been addressed? No.
Has there been a document prepared as to what items should be checked at airport security gates? Who really believes that a nail clipper or a conductor's baton are a risk? For what possible security benefit are eye shadow compacts being checked or pages of a Bible and pages in a folder being flipped through after the items have gone through x-ray? Is this the transport minister's answer to security? It is a farce. However if one questions him about the security that he has in place he cannot tell us because it is too secret.
In that sense Bill C-55 is exactly like the airport security tax. It is obvious that the Liberal government has no idea what to do about the threat of international terrorism. If it had any kind of plan for dealing with terrorism it would have a bill full of specifics. Instead it has written itself a blank cheque. It has as much as admitted that it does not know what to do about terrorism.
With the bill the government is saying, to give it a bunch of sweeping powers to bypass the entire democratic decision making process to do whatever it wants if it thinks there might be a security threat. That is not how we protect the public. We protect the public by being proactive, by identifying risks and threats and doing something about them before they threaten the public.
To be fair there are specifics in the bill that the NDP supports. We support provisions to fight money laundering by terrorist groups. We support the new criminal offences for bomb threats and the implementation of international conventions to fight the proliferation of biological weapons, explosives and people smuggling by organized crime.
Unfortunately these are just tangents to the main thrust of the bill, a blank cheque for government ministers to do whatever they want. There are plenty of proactive things the government could do to make us safer from terrorism, rather than this blank cheque approach. It could give more resources to the RCMP, to CSIS and to the military. It could tighten things up at the border and work to improve the ability of Canada customs and immigration to do background checks. Like the lack of specifics in the bill, the government's failure to take any proactive steps to stop terrorism betrays its lack of a plan.
The privacy commissioner has also indicated his grave concerns with the bill. Those I know will be discussed further in committee. The controlled access military zones without absolute specifics as to when they could be applied does little to alleviate the fear Canadians have that they would be applied any time the government wanted to infringe on the democratic rights of freedom of expression and the right to assemble and protest. We should not forget the actions taken at APEC.
I want to comment on how strange it is that a bill dealing with public safety in a variety of different areas, and we have all recognized that it is quite the omnibus bill, would be referred to the transport committee. One of the greatest problems of the bill is the infringement on the civil liberties and democratic rights of Canadians and the bill is being referred to the transport committee.
The bill deals with the Aeronautics Act; the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority Act; the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, 1999; the Criminal Code of Canada; the Department of Health Act; Explosives Act; Export and Import Permits Act; the Food and Drugs Act; Hazardous Products Act; Marine Transportation Security Act; National Defence Act; National Energy Board Act; the Navigable Waters Protection Act; Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions Act; Pest Control Products Act; Proceeds of Crime (Money Laundering) and Terrorist Financing Act; Quarantine Act; Radiation Emitting Devices Act; and we have another one, the Canada Shipping Acts.
Does this sound like a transportation issue? Is this the committee that should be taxed with dealing with the civil liberties of Canadians, the greatest infringement of the bill, and the right of military access zones to infringe on the democratic rights of Canadians? I do not think so.
The bill says to me that a weak government would pass a blatantly undemocratic piece of legislation that puts no faith in the people of Canada and no respect for the people of Canada. The bill may satisfy the Liberal government's pollsters and spin doctors who say the government has to do something, anything so that it can say that it has done something about security.
The bill will not satisfy the real need to take a proactive approach to eliminating terrorism. The cost of Bill C-55 to our democratic freedom is far too high. I hope the government and all members in the House will take note of that and make sure that the bill does not pass.