Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to see that Bill C-17 is back on track. It is an extremely important bill. It has deep roots through a number of iterations and I want to remind members of the extent to which the bill touches matters related to safety and security issues.
Part 1 would amend the Aeronautics Act to enhance the scope and objectives of the existing aviation security regime. That is a very important part.
The amendments would permit the minister to delegate officers to make emergency directions of no more than 72 hours duration to provide immediate response to situations involving aviation security. They would permit the minister, for the same purpose, to delegate power and make security measures.
The bill would amend the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority Act; Canadian Environmental Protection Act, 1999; Criminal Code; Department of Citizenship and Immigration Act; Department of Health Act with regard to the health risk areas related to potential terrorist activities or other related difficulties related to terrorism; Explosives Act; and Export and Import Permits Act, by providing control over the export and transfer of technology. Most people are probably not aware of how pervasive this bill is and what it touches. I know why members are very interested in it.
Other acts that would be amended include the Food and Drugs Act; Hazardous Products Act; and Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. The amendment in Part 11 would allow for the making of regulations relating to the collection, retention, disposal and disclosure of information for the purposes of that act. The amendments would also allow for the making of regulations providing for the disclosure of information for the purposes of national security and the defence of Canada, or the conduct of international terrorists.
This is one of the most controversial parts which many members have talked about during debate.
The bill would also deal with the Marine Transportation Security Act because we have security issues on our waterways; National Defence Act; National Energy Board Act; Navigable Waters Protection Act; Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions Act; Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, which would permit the collection and use of personal information for reasons of national security. Again, it touches that area of privacy.
The bill would also deal with the Pest Control Products Act; Proceeds of Crime (Money Laundering) and Terrorist Financing Act; Quarantine Act, Radiation Emitting Devices Act; Canada Shipping Acts, and it would enact the biological and toxin weapons convention.
The House created a special legislative committee to address the bill because of its wide ranging implications. It was extremely important. Quite frankly I think the quality of the work that was done by that special committee is reflective of the need for us to consider whether standing committees, with the broad range of responsibilities that they have, are in fact the place where significant pieces of legislation should be dealt with. But that is for another day.
However, I certainly would suggest to members that down the road we give consideration as to how we deal with significant pieces of legislation; how we ensure that we do not have problems with quorum; that we have continuity of people; and that we have the proper scrutiny of legislation, particularly legislation that touches literally dozens of acts. It is extremely important and yet the current system makes that difficult under the standing committee arrangement. I raise that for further discussion that someone might want to have on the whole aspect of parliamentary reform.
Today I received a document entitled Pole Star: Human Rights in the Information Society . I would like to quote from it because this aspect of privacy is probably one of the most sensitive areas of discussion. It states:
Privacy includes protection of personally identifiable information and freedom from bodily intrusion. The UDHR, art. 12, provides that a person shall be free from “arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence”.
There is one last paragraph, which states:
Any discussion of privacy moves quickly to consideration of identity and community and the interplay between these two concepts. There are two senses of identity. First, there is having and maintaining human identity, individuality, selfhood, autonomy, integrity, and personality. This includes the self-conception of who one is, the communities to which one belongs, such as family, religion and ethnic group, and one's relationship to these various communities. Secondly, there is identity in the sense of being identified, the extent of identification, the manner of identification, whether by an external token such as a card or password, or by an intrinsic token, such as a biometric or behavioural characteristic, the purpose of the identification, and when and under what circumstances identification is made, including the choice to be non-identifiable or not to be identified.
I do not know if members were able to follow all of that, but the gist of it is that there are privacy rights in our society. When it comes to security issues, now we get to a debate on what is an appropriate balance. We have gone through a period since last spring during which the Office of the Privacy Commissioner has been discredited, for a variety of reasons, as members know. Very little has been said about whether the quality of the work coming out of the privacy office was good work and was appropriate.
When I was on the transport committee, we dealt with this bill in a previous form. We had the opportunity to visit with our U.S. counterparts in Washington to discuss what they were doing in terms of airline and airport security. Not until that time did I realize how profoundly and deeply the American people were hurt by the events of September 11, 2001. I was in a meeting with my colleagues from the transport committee when a senior state official broke down in tears just while talking about the date.
That was a year after it had occurred, but they were still at the point where they were saying, “We will do absolutely anything that anybody wants who feels it would be important to have safety and security and the confidence level built up again within our people”. At the time, they were hurtling toward Thanksgiving week. They were hoping that by making all these promises to do this, this, and that, right down to teaching flight attendants martial arts, it would improve the confidence level, which would be reflected in a recovery in the use of their airline system during the Thanksgiving period, which is historically the most active airline transportation period in the U.S.
As it turned out, notwithstanding that they pulled out all the stops, put everything in their bill and rammed through very quickly everything anybody could possibly think of, that Thanksgiving week only 80% of the aircraft were in operation with only about two-thirds of that 80% used to capacity. It demonstrated that the confidence level had dropped to points at which airlines were not going to survive. It demonstrated that our passenger confidence levels could never come back quickly enough to help airlines survive.
We are seeing that ripple effect in Canada, so suddenly now we have people talking about the propriety of things that might have something to do with racial profiling.
I would say that we have had pretty fiery debates on something as simple as the RCMP in the city of Kelowna being asked to put up surveillance cameras in a particular park area where there was habitual crime. Those cameras were running only when there was a report that there was a problem, only when there was a call from someone who said the cameras should be turned on because they believed there was a situation occurring or about to occur. The Privacy Commissioner of Canada actually took the RCMP to court to stop it. The interim Privacy Commissioner has abandoned the case; he said that was going too far.
That is the point I would like to make in my intervention. It shows that not only is this bill wide-ranging, and necessarily so, but it also touches on some sensitivities about privacy, about things like personal information about racial profiling. It touches on using information for a purpose for which it was not intended, on using information to in fact initiate, and on the sharing of information not only among departments of government but sharing information even with the United States, let us say, whose requirement was that for every flight originating in Canada and going to the United States a manifest of those passengers had to be provided in advance. Now this starts to touch things. Are we now in a North American security perimeter? Is this the beginning?
When I went through the bill the last time we debated it, as I heard the debate here, and as I look again at where we are in our focus on the points, there was and is no question in my mind that there are legitimate concerns about the protection of the privacy rights of Canadians, but there also is a need for us to come to a balance, to balance that with the need for the security of Canada and its people.
We have had continuing threats not only to our troops abroad, as we have seen, but even in identifying Canada as a target, even to the extent we understand that the proximity of 80% of our population is within 100 kilometres of the U.S. border. Anything that happens within 100 kilometres of that border on one side or the other affects both countries. Collaboration with the United States is going to be an important element of this, but not to the extent that it compromises the fundamental privacy rights of Canadians and also, though, to the extent that it does not make security interests secondary.
In closing I will simply say that if we do not have security, then we have no sovereignty, and if we have no sovereignty, we have no country. Bill C-17 must pass now.