Mr. Speaker, I am still waiting for the sky to fall. The end of December came, then January and now February 28 and the sky had not fallen. It is so typical, both of the official opposition and the government to fall into that trap. Anytime when dealing with a bully, one pushes back and does not cave. That is what we see happening on this bill.
It is a fairly innocuous bill when looked at initially. It has two sections to it. However, the impact it has on Canadian citizens flying is quite severe. This is not an issue in which we are saying this is what is likely to happen. We know it has already happened. That last member sat at the transport committee, where he heard the evidence from witnesses before the committee who described incidents where the United States had acknowledged the errors on its no-fly list and had also acknowledged the number of times the list had been used improperly.
I will talk about the errors on that list. This is the point we have to understand. What will happen is that more Canadians will end up on that no-fly list. More Canadians will have their ability to fly as they have traditionally, denied. Given the inability of the U.S. to manage the list, I think more Canadians will be in the middle of flights that will end up being diverted. I can give assurance that the list is not any better since then. If anything, it is worse because more names have gone on it. This was done by the electronic privacy information centre. It challenged the integrity of the list. It said that known or suspected terrorists were on this list and that the list remained filled with errors. That was the absolute conclusion to which it came. This is a U.S. government agency making that determination.
If we pass the legislation, and it will be the shame of Parliament if we do it, there will be hundreds if not thousands of additional Canadians being faced with that problem.
It has been difficult for me. I have a file right now of a very well-known individual in the Windsor area, and I will be very careful not to disclose it because the impact on him and his business would be horrendous. However, he and I believe he is on the U.S. no-fly list because of malicious information from a business competitor. I have been working on this file for over a year now. There is absolutely no way of finding out who made the initial allegation, who gave the Americans the information that he was a terrorist. There is no way of finding out how to get more specifics so we know what we are dealing with. The U.S. will not give us any of that. There is no process to get him off the list.
We have heard repeatedly in the House, and in committee in particular, of the abuse that has gone on. There are estimates that there are as many as 500,000 to 1 million names on the list.
Let me use another example of the ineffectiveness of that list. At Christmas a year ago, we had the Detroit underwear bomber incident. He was on the list. The Americans had been advised twice, once by his father and once by another source, that he would take that flight. They do not have the ability to manage that list. It is just horrendous that we are faced with the Kafkaesque type of responses that we get from that government. Yet the Conservative government and both opposition parties in the form of the Bloc and the Liberals are prepared to vote to allow more Canadian names to end up on the list.
It is not as if there is no alternative. We understand the sovereignty issues facing the United states. However, my riding is surrounded by the United States on three sides, and I am being very blunt on this, and there is a level of paranoia that exists around security in that country. We understand where it comes from, but Canadian government officials and Canadians have to understand how overblown it has become since 9-11. I believe we have a moral responsibility country to country to say to our neighbours that they are wrong and that there are ways to deal with this.
I will go through three points that we should be saying to the Americans before we allow any of this to go forward.
First, they have to clean up their list. That is an absolute precondition.
Second, they have to build in a process to allow individuals whose names have ended up on that list to counter the information that put them on the list. It should be a simple, straightforward and rapid process.
Third, we have to be absolutely clear that this information cannot be shared with other governments. We have seen all too many cases. The Maher Arar case is probably the most notorious case in the world. His information was transferred to another country. We saw the whole rendition process that he was put through and how it ended up. That would happen again at some point in the future with regard to this legislation. The government ended up apologizing to him and paying him $10 million to $12 million. How many more times are we going to have to do that because of passing this kind of legislation?
We also heard repeatedly about the threat from the United States, that if we did not get this bill through by the end of December, that they were going to cut us off and we would not be able to fly through its airspace. That has not happened and there was never any expectation, in our minds anyway, but there was in the minds of the government and I guess the Liberals.
Again, the Americans were very clear that when they were negotiating with us, they would be looking after their interests. I am not saying anything that would insult them. I think they would probably see it as a compliment. They expect one of two things from us. If they are being honest, they expect us to give in all the time. Also, reluctantly, they would respect us if we stood up to them and did not give in because it was wrong.
We should be telling the Americans that requiring us to submit our sovereignty rights to protect our citizens is not going to happen unless those three conditions are met as an absolute minimum. Also, if they are going to go ahead with this, then we should have access to the same information, which we do in other areas.
Why is the government doing this? Other than simply succumbing to that pressure, it is not standing up for our country or its responsibility to protect our citizens. The government simply gives in. There is no other explanation. This bill does not make any sense, looking at it from the perspective of Canadian citizens.
To put ourselves in this proposed position would be a total abdication of our responsibility as parliamentarians. The basic fundamental responsibility we have is to protect the interests of our citizens, their security, privacy and civil liberties. If we pass this bill, we will abdicate our responsibility in all three of those areas.