Mr. Speaker, I think the member for Vancouver East has put the argument against a national identity card well and I hope to be able to elaborate a little bit on it, but first I want to reiterate what was said by the member for Vancouver East, that the NDP sees itself today as providing the House with an opportunity to hear people out on this emerging issue. It is an emerging issue in part because the minister has made it one by going around and talking about it in committee and elsewhere. Clearly he would like to hear not just from Canadians but, I presume, from other members of Parliament about this, and that is what this debate is about today.
I think we will find or I hope we will find that this is an issue that does not fall neatly into any sort of right or left categories, that there will be people on all parts of the political spectrum who will have concerns. Obviously as the NDP and as a left wing party we have concerns, but I would imagine that people on the right wing of the political spectrum would also have concerns about this to the extent that this increases the power of the state, et cetera. To the extent that Liberals have any principles at all, perhaps they could draw on whatever principles they have to come up with an analysis, but I am just not sure what those principles are.
I see that the minister is in the House and presumably he is going to respond in the debate. I thank him for his presence here today. I look forward to hearing what he has to say on the matter.
One of the things that disturbs me most about this is that I see a pattern developing here. I was the justice critic during the time of the introduction of the anti-terrorism legislation, Bill C-36 . I certainly had the feeling at that time from the then justice minister, now the health minister, when I listened to her in committee, that we were not doing this entirely of our own accord, that we were not doing this entirely for our own reasons.
Many times I would listen to the minister and it would seem to me that what she was saying was code for the fact that “we are doing this”, and in that case they were actually doing something and at this point the minister is only thinking about it, but he is thinking about it, it seems to me, because somebody else wants him to think about it. Here I am thinking of our neighbours to the south.
I know that certain elements of the anti-terrorism legislation were designed in order to please Washington and I wonder whether a similar thing is not happening here. Of course one of the other similarities is that sometimes we actually go further than the Americans themselves would. There were elements of the anti-terrorism legislation, Bill C-36, that went further than the anti-terrorism legislation that we found in the United States.
For instance, I think that the sunset provisions in some of the anti-terrorism legislation in the United States were actually better than the sunset provisions or so-called sunset provisions in Bill C-36. With respect to a national identity card we have a similar thing happening because here we have Canadians considering whether or not to have a national identity card, yet the issue is not really an issue at all in the United States.
In fact, I understand that the United States Congress, at least, is so wary of such an idea that it inserted a line in the bill that created the Department of Homeland Security which reads like this: “Nothing in this Act shall be construed to authorize the development of a national identification system or card”.
If there is any truth to what I am saying the minister will have an opportunity to stand up and deny it, I suppose, although whether that will change my mind or not is another matter. But if there is any truth to what I am saying, that this is somehow in part responding to what the Americans want us to do, that somehow they do not feel a Canadian passport is good enough anymore at the border so they want Canadians to be able produce a national ID card, it is not the first time that we have gone further than the Americans themselves are willing to go when it comes to this whole response to the new environment created by September 11, 2001.
I think the government is once again set on this course. When listening to the minister it seems it is. Even though we are having a discussion and he wants to hear what people have to say, it seems to me that he is pretty intent on this. Once again we are striking the wrong balance between freedom and security and erring, I think, too much on the side of so-called security.
I say so-called security because it seems to me that there is not a whole lot of evidence that a national ID card will make anybody any safer and will prevent terrorism or be the kind of tool that is absolutely necessary for the detection of terrorists or whatever. Terrorists are terrorists and they know how to produce false ID. It will be ordinary Canadians who will have their lives most significantly changed by this if the government goes ahead with it. This is why we are very much against this idea.
We have the privacy commissioner, who is very concerned about this, and I think that if we appoint these people like Mr. Radwanski to be the privacy commissioner and to think deeply about these issues, we should pay attention to what they person has to say about these things. Clearly he is very concerned about the idea of a national ID card.
He is also concerned, and this is another area where the government is not listening to Mr. Radwanski, about the invasion of privacy that the government is contemplating through the legislation which would enable the government to collect data on where Canadians travel on every plane they take and keep that information for up to six years or something like that, I think. At one point, still, but not for very long if the government has its way, one would like to think that one could catch a plane, travel around the country and not have that information going into a data bank somewhere and being analyzed for a variety of purposes, not all of them necessarily for a good purpose. The existence of that kind of data at all, it seems to me, is unwarranted.
Here we have a pattern emerging, I guess this is what I am trying to say, we have a pattern emerging where, on the basis of what happened on that one day on September 11, 2001, we are transforming our whole way of life. We are transforming our notions of what constitutes appropriate power, power of the state. We are transforming our notions of privacy. We are transforming our notions of freedom. We are transforming our notions of security. I think the government is consistently getting it wrong on this and it is going to get it wrong one more time if it proceeds with the national ID card.
As a final point, one can only imagine how much this will cost. In the short term, if it happens quickly, it will be run by Liberals. When one thinks of what they were able to do in terms of mismanagement when it came to the gun registry, when it comes to this they could bankrupt the country. This could make the gun registry look like a molehill compared to the mountain that the Liberals certainly would be able to create with this. I do not know which company that is a friend of the Liberals this would be contracted out to, but--