Madam Speaker, I appreciate this opportunity to continue to press the government on an issue that I believe is very important to all Canadians, their personal privacy, which is at risk because of the U.S. patriot act. It was introduced by the Bush administration a number of years ago and now threatens Canadian privacy. It is doing so today in a context that I think it is very important for our government to move on to protect Canadians.
Specifically, section 215 of the patriot act provides for the FBI to go to any U.S. company or subsidiary and request personal information about people. Let us say, for example, that the CIBC contracts out its information and data gathering and storage management to an American subsidiary, which makes Canadians vulnerable to the records taken from them. The CIBC does not know about this. It is not allowed information on when the data is being accessed from that company. Second, the customer does not allow access to that.
This has been challenged in the United States by the American Civil Liberties Union. It won a case on section 505 of the patriot act and now it is actually pushing on section 215. We are waiting for decisions on that.
In the interim, the real issue here is why we are letting a foreign government have access to Canadians' personal and private information. We literally do not have to leave this country to have our information accessed by the FBI. We can be sitting here right now watching TV, never leaving Canada, and our information can be accessed by the FBI. We do not even know how many people are actually being investigated.
It is an issue of privacy that speaks to the heart of democracy. If we do not have the ability to have our information protected, it threatens our privacy, our freedom of movement and also our rights as individuals, because we have seen what governments do with information.
There is no due process. That is the problem. This is all done in secrecy. When the information on Canadians is collected and taken, we do not even know where it goes. We do not know what other agencies it is shared with. We do not know how it is stored. We do not know what they do with it at all. That is a problem.
In the United States, we have seen some high profile cases involving Senator Edward Kennedy and another congressman who were put on a no-fly list through mistaken information related to the patriot act.
We also do not know whether the United States has had an influence on other significant cases here in Canada, cases that have led to some Canadians having trouble abroad, because we do not know about that situation.
This brings me to the questions that we have been pursuing. The government has a duty to act on this. Other provincial governments have done so because they know what has happened. They know it is a threat that affects their citizens. We have witnessed this federal government doing a lot of outsourcing to American companies. That provides the opportunity for all that information to be lost in terms of control and security and the government has to act on this.
The Privacy Commissioner has asked the government to do so. We have not seen that yet and that is a real problem. There have been rumblings about a potential summit with the provinces on this, or on having an international treaty, as the American Civil Liberties Union has testified about in British Columbia.
This government needs to act to protect Canadian privacy. I would hope that with the recent visit by the president and the delegations that there would have been some correspondence, some objections and also an inquiry as to how many Canadians are being affected by the patriot act and what the government is going to do to stand up for our information to be protected.
I live in a border community. I know right now that some of my citizens are being fingerprinted up to 2,000 times when entering the United States. They are Canadian citizens and this happens over and over. They do not even show their ID sometimes anymore. They are known by name. They are just fingerprinted and sent right through. We want to know what happens to that information. And the patriot act is even more obtrusive, because we do not know what is being accessed and when.