Mr. Speaker, it is important that we appreciate the motion that has been allowed to proceed to this point. I just want to quote from it. It will have the effect, if carried through by vote of the House, of not giving second reading to Bill C-55. The motion states:
...it constitutes an autocratic power grab by the Liberal government at the expense of parliamentary oversight and the civil liberties of Canadians.
Quite frankly, I could not have said it better myself. In effect that is what the bill is all about.
As I said in the House yesterday when I made some other comments about the bill, it is really an unnecessary bill. When I was reviewing it, I could not help but think of the implementation of the War Measures Act back in 1970. I was in the third year of law school. I recall the effect its imposition had on civil liberties in the country at that time, specifically on some of the groups I was involved with. I recall the chill that it cast over this entire country regarding free expression of speech and the exercising of other civil liberties and the fear that it created.
As we know historically as a result of the imposition of the War Measures Act and all we have learned from it, to a very significant degree the invocation of that act and its imposition on the province of Quebec and on the rest of the country more generally clearly came out of a sense of panic by the government in power at that time. When I look at Bill C-55, I have exactly the same sense of what the reality is. What I want to say to the government is that September 11 was nine months ago. The panic should be over by now. We should be able to stand back, take a look at the bill and realize that there are all sorts of provisions in here that are generated only by panic and not by any meaningful legislative purpose. We do not need a repeat of 1970 in this country.
I will quote from an article that appeared under the name of Ken Rubin in the The Hill Times this Monday past, May 27. This is his analysis. I think we should acknowledge the work that Mr. Rubin has done over the years in ferreting out government miscues, mistakes and, yes, abuses. We should recognize the work that he has done to better the debate in the country around a number of those issues.
Mr. Rubin stated:
Ottawa misses the boat by obsessively dealing only with potential security safety risks rather than tackling actual lethal health and environment problems including how to deal with dangerous drugs and toxic wastes. The bill strings together a host of peripheral and unrelated measures like tighter explosives regulations and prevention of unauthorized use of Defence Department computer systems, but it does not deliver the legal tools needed for building an effective public safety emergency prevention plan to deal with post-Sept. 11 threats. The bill's usefulness is questionable.
I think that it summarizes in a one paragraph statement both the dangers that are in the bill and the usefulness of the bill.
I will come back to the motion by the member for Pictou—Antigonish—Guysborough, which we are debating at this point. What he is saying to the government, and I would urge the House to support him in this regard, is this: pull the bill, do a review of it, and then bring back to the House those parts of it that do have a proper purpose, a proper function. He is telling the government to get off its panic seat and drop those parts that are clearly abusive of the civil rights and, potentially, the human rights in the country and of civil liberties in general.
This is an omnibus piece of legislation. It should not be. A number of these provisions in the bill should in fact be siphoned off into individual bills. If it were to be done that way, the provisions could be dealt with more appropriately by House committees. Some of the provisions that are required could in fact probably move through this House fairly quickly.
I will use as one example a portion of the bill that probably could be dealt with fairly quickly. That is the provision that deals with the port authorities in Canada. What it provides for is that the federal government, under the amendments it is proposing in that section, would be able to fund security measures for the port authorities. I know from my own experience with the authority in Windsor that in fact this is sorely needed. It does not have anywhere near the financial ability to provide the type of security that is warranted and needed in my area. That type of an amendment and provision, if siphoned off into a separate bill, should be able to move through the House very quickly. There are a number of other provisions like that.
Speaking from the position of an opposition party, there is absolutely no way that we can support the bill in its totality as it is. That is just not possible. That would be abrogating all the responsibility we have to Canadians because there are so many provisions in here where there is the potential for the bill to be used in an abusive fashion against Canadians. In its attempt to protect us, the bill in fact does just the opposite. It exposes us to potential gross abuses by government action, again, much as we saw in the province of Quebec in 1970 with the invocation of the War Measures Act and all those useless arrests and the denial of all the basic freedoms.
There is the old adage that if we do not learn from history we are going to repeat it. One would think that the government would have learned from that experience. One would think that out of respect for one of its former leaders who fought valiantly to get us a charter of rights the government would remember that. One would think that today, rather than dealing with a bill that takes away those rights in a variety of ways, we would be standing up in this House championing legislation that does not do that, that instead provides Canadians with security but does not take away their civil rights as this bill does.