Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague from Sault Ste. Marie for an excellent speech on this important subject matter. I was particularly interested in his concerns around the private sector and its involvement in this project. I am interested in how that combines with our concerns about the vagueness of this legislation and the fact that the NDP, through our critic from Halifax, was not able to get greater clarity about certain provisions of the legislation, certain key facts in the legislation, especially given the sensitivity of this kind of technology.
I think we only have to look back to the outcry from Canadians when this government moved to let Lockheed Martin take over the census. There we had a situation where another American corporation, one with a connection to the military industry, a private sector corporation, was going to be given access not only to an important task in Canadian society but also to important information and important data. There was a huge outcry from Canadians, including people from Burnaby—Douglas, who found this an absolutely outrageous proposition, yet it does not seem that the government has learned anything from that experience.
Here we are going down that road again, in perhaps a slightly different way, but we are having these discussions about a private corporation controlling very sensitive information and very sensitive technology and we are not being very clear about the requirements around that.
I wonder if the member for Sault Ste. Marie might just comment on the parallels he sees there or expand further on his concerns about the private sector and this kind of technology and information.