Mr. Speaker, I will gladly strike those references and refer to them as the previous Liberal prime minister and the current Prime Minister.
The SPP essentially comprised executive level and bureaucratic discussions among Canada, the United States and Mexico. These discussions have been conducted outside Parliament and have been conducted in secret. We have found that in these discussions over 300 separate areas of government involvement have been under discussion with a view to harmonizing these standards, things that involve food safety, consumer protection, water. Almost every aspect of our country's sovereignty has been up for discussion in these talks.
One of our concerns is regarding the essence of the matter before the House right now and of which I am speaking, which is, the criteria that go into security clearance for workers. The United States has imposed draconian requirements upon workers in the United States ever since 9/11. Many of these violate long-standing principles of Canadian jurisprudence and law, including our human rights, our rights to privacy and our rights under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
For example, in the United States it is considered lawful and there is legislation to require workers who are not only involved in the transportation and handling of dangerous goods but in all sorts of areas to provide things like biometric information, retinal scans, fingerprints, hand shapes, and DNA samples. They have been asked and, at the risk of losing their jobs, are required to provide invasive information, such as their sexual orientation, the ports of entry when they immigrated, notwithstanding that they may have been citizens for decades, criminal records, marital status, and educational institutions they attended. This information has also been required of their spouses.
In the United States this information is not only required of these workers but they are required to sign forms that authorize the United States to share that information with any other country in the world. In many countries these workers do not have the same protection and many countries do not have the same respect for human rights that Canada has.
Those of us who have been following the SPP talks for the last three years are very concerned that Canada has tacitly agreed to follow the standards set by the United States in these areas. Because the criteria that will go into the granting of a security clearance are not specified in the legislation, we have grave concerns that these criteria will drop to those invasive standards that have been imposed by the United States.
One might ask what the difference is, that this is about the transportation and handling of dangerous goods, and people who have to cross the border into the United States should be subject to these standards. Here is where there is a major problem. It may be justifiable for these standards to be imposed on workers who transport dangerous goods across the border. That may be reasonable, but it is not reasonable to impose those standards on workers who never leave this country, those workers who work in warehouses and storage facilities in the body of our country. For them to be subjected to the extraterritorial application of American law when they may choose never to leave our country is wrong. It leads to concerns about people's democratic rights where Canadian citizens are subjected essentially to American-made requirements when they have no democratic right or means to influence those standards.
There have been cases where workers in the United States have lost their jobs when they decided to enforce their privacy rights, or they have lost their jobs when some aspect of the information that they have provided has caused concern.
If this were to happen in Canada, if someone were denied a security clearance certificate, how would the individual be able to challenge that?
In this case, we in the New Democratic Party are concerned. Canadian workers should have their right to privacy and their human rights respected.
We do not, in any manner, dispute the requirement to impose standards that ensure Canadians are safe and that the transportation of dangerous goods is conducted by people to protect the safety of the public. However, I would point out that there has not been one instance, not one in this country, where anybody who has transported goods in the transportation industry has been charged with any offence.
It is a great price to pay for Canadian workers to subject collectively the potential loss of their civil liberties when there has not been demonstrated in even one instance across this land, a need for same.
We must jealously and sedulously guard our civil rights at all times. It is easy in a time of peace to stand up for those rights, but it is harder when we are under threat. It becomes even more incumbent upon us as parliamentarians, I would respectfully submit, to stand up for those civil rights, those rights that our forefathers have fought for and that people are currently fighting for across this globe, to make sure that our rights are protected at all times and are only deprived of those rights for good and sufficient reason.
The bill would be an excellent bill, were it to include in the legislation, now debated in the House for all parliamentarians to see, the criteria Canadian workers would have to satisfy in order to get security clearance. Unfortunately, once again, the bill does not have that measure, and therefore, we are unable to support the bill because of that one aspect.
I would encourage and implore the members opposite who have done fine work on the bill, in many aspects, to look at this section. I am sure it is not their intent to violate the privacy and civil rights of Canadian workers, but they should be vigilant to ensure that the bill does not have that effect, even inadvertently.
I want to congratulate the fine work of my colleague from Western Arctic who has been such a strong supporter and protector of Canadian workers, and vigilant in making sure that their rights are taken into account, so that we can ensure not only the safety of dangerous goods in this country, and the transportation and storing of same, but also the civil and privacy rights of Canadian workers.