Madam Speaker, I trust the member was not being sarcastic and that it was really an attempt at gentle humour, because actually I do feel that here in the Liberal backbenches we can have an impact and we can sometimes get an amendment put forward. I do hope that the member will move his own amendment on that in committee.
He gives me an opportunity to make a further comment. He triggers the comment by the reference to Nav Can. Possibly one of shortcomings in what we are trying to do here with this legislation, Bill C-27, is that by off-loading federal enterprises or federal ministries or federal responsibilities, shall we say, to the private sector, as in the case of the port authorities and the airport authorities, it is certainly true that if we put in the proper regimes for accountability we have enterprises that should run like a public business. My problem is that we lose the ability, however, to examine them internally with the Access to Information Act.
Nav Canada is a good example. To me it is not enough in the end that the airport authorities operators or the port authorities conform to the standards set out in Bills C-44 and C-27. What we really need to do is to bring these arm's length institutions under the Access to Information Act so that we do not just see audited financial statements, so that we do not just see the numbers. Those things are important, but what we really need to be able see is that there is no nepotism in the operation, that there is no fundamental mismanagement.
One of the reasons why I campaigned so vigorously to reform the Access to Information Act is not that I believe the bureaucratic part of government is being run so badly. There are a lot of checks and balances in the way government ministries are actually operating in delivering services to people. What concerns me is this terrible movement in the provinces and in Ottawa here in the federal government to off-load the provision of services to arm's length organizations, be it the CRTC, Nav Canada, or these airport authorities, because they are then out of the reach of the Access to Information Act. They are out of the reach of our ability to really ensure in the public interest that they are being managed appropriately.
So my ultimate target in trying to reform the Access to Information Act is to create a model, particularly with crown corporations, that could be applied to institutions like these authorities we are talking about and that ultimately could be adopted by the private sector. Because I really do believe that in this global economy where competition is everything and survival is everything, how one wins in the global market is not just by one's prices but by one's efficiency as a corporation.
I think that Canadian corporations have much to gain if the Canadian government can lead the way to harness the Internet so that there can be protocols of transparency the likes of which have never been seen before. I think that will enable Canadian enterprises, both public and private, to lead the world in their ability to compete.