Mr. Speaker, I am glad to have a chance to speak to this bill again because I am deeply concerned about this whole issue.
Clearly, the history of aviation security since 9/11 is one of continual movement toward more authoritarian structures and continual movement toward less privacy for Canadians. This is the movement that took place and we are all part of it. This Parliament has been part of it over the last decade.
I have seen a break in that, though, in the last week where we finally saw some rationality applied to one particular segment of our aviation security. It is not a rationality that is popular with everyone. People are concerned about it. Of course they are.
However, we do see that the dam is starting to break on the whole issue of aviation security and what is actually required by Canadians, by international travellers, what is useful to do, and what is something that makes sense in this age rather than simply a knee-jerk reaction to perceived incidents that may occur.
Why do we not want to support this bill? It is because we do not think the government has done enough to deal with the issue of sharing information with the United States. That is quite clear. We feel that what has happened here is invading Canadians' privacy, invading their rights in a way that we cannot completely understand. We do not know what the impact of this information is. We have not been given assurances. There are no provisions within the bill that outline how this information is to be shared. None of that was part of this bill.
This bill was very simple, a few lines changing the Aeronautics Act. It is a few lines. It is really very limited. With the negotiations that took place and what we heard in committee about the negotiations, there certainly were a number of issues that came to light. One of them was that the U.S. could provide a complete exemption for Canadian flights. If we matched equivalent security, the U.S. would provide that exemption.
Another one was the issue of reciprocity, which we have talked about quite a bit. That was not brought to the table. That was not used as a lever in the negotiations, quite clearly.
Then we talked about the famous exemption that was given. This exemption, domestic to domestic flights, that was provided by the United States for Canadian flights leaving one destination in Canada and going to another was given by the U.S. That raised even more questions about security. Of course, with any flight that goes domestic to domestic, the security requirement for the information is simply a photo id, something that could be forged by the simplest of techniques and which really does not provide the same layer of sophistication in terms of the information that a passport on an international flight provides to any airline that is dealing with a particular passenger.
We saw the U.S. give an exemption for flights that would pass over the United States that had less security on them than international flights. This did not make sense. The exemption did not stand up to rationality. That always brings something into question. When rationality does not apply, what are the reasons?
Did we understand the reason last week when the Prime Minister went down to Washington to work on a perimeter security deal? Was the reason for an exemption on domestic to domestic that we are going to see traveller information shared completely within our countries, between intelligence agencies for the two countries? Is that what is going to happen? How are we going to determine the nature of that information? How are we going to determine how that information is going to be used?
We can see quite clearly that there is no control over the information we are giving out right now. There is none at all. It is simply give the information and let it be.
That information does include the passenger name record. When it includes the passenger name record number, the U.S. government has access to the information on the computers, the Sabre and Galileo servers that are held in the United States. That is information that was also given at committee.
Whatever information airlines have on passengers would be instantaneously accessible to the United States intelligence service through the beauty of computers. The seven day requirement that the information will be taken out after seven days really is quite meaningless in our computer age. There is plenty of time to do whatever we want with that information, the data mining that the European Union was so against, the data profiling was the real harmful thing that could go on with that type of information.
So, we have no recourse and no limitations on the information that we are giving. For Canadians falsely accused of something in the United States, there is no recourse. One of my colleagues talked about that with the existing system. It is not going to get any better. Many witnesses spoke in front of the committee. Many witnesses indicated their disquiet with what was going on here, with the impacts on the invasion of privacy.
We proposed some amendments. I put forward an amendment for a drop dead clause, as we did in the early part of this decade, where with contentious invasions of privacy through things like the Terrorism Act, we put in drop dead clauses. We said if there is a perceived need for information that goes beyond what is normal, if there are considerations that we put on the Canadian population that go beyond what we expect as our basic rights, then let us put a time limit on it.
I put forward that amendment. The support for that amendment was not there from the two opposition parties and that amendment died. That actually has brought us to the point we are here in debating this bill.
In the last days since the Prime Minister's trip to Washington, the Liberal Party adopted two positions on information. One position was that it was going to vote to support the bill. The other being when, publicly in question period, the Liberal leader says things like: “Why is the Prime Minister even contemplating the surrender of Canadian privacy rights to U.S. Homeland Security?”, “What biometric information on Canadians will the Conservatives surrender to the Americans?”, and “When will the Prime Minister tell Canadians and Parliament the truth?”
Yes, we are after those answers, as well, on this particular bill. We wanted to see the agreements. We wanted to understand the safeguards that should be in place for any Canadian information shared with another country.
Did we get it? No.
What do Canadians think? There was an interesting online poll in the Globe and Mail, which is not terribly reliable, but 67,000 responded to that online poll. The question was: “Should Canada and the U.S. collaborate more deeply on surveillance and data-sharing in the name of a so-called North American perimeter? Ninety-two per cent of those respondents said no; 92% of the 67,000 Canadians who had the opportunity to see the poll and to respond to it said no. That is a fairly significant margin of Canadians who are concerned about their personal privacy rights vis-à-vis information.
This is why the Liberal Party right now is quite conflicted on this issue. It is voting for a bill that is not tolerable to Canadian values, for whatever reason, perhaps the perceived threat to the Canadian aviation industry.
Members were told there was a great need to bring the bill forward and get it completed by December 31 of last year so the U.S. would not stop the overflights of Canadian planes. That has not happened yet, and we are still a ways away from completing this bill. The NDP will continue to work on trying to get opposition members to come onside and recognize that the bill does not provide for a safe and secure use of Canadian information.
There are many other issues that tie to the bill. My colleague spoke of one that was really never mentioned, which is the inconvenience of the bill and the information shared according to the 24-hour requirement of the U.S. government for any of these overflights. If, for instance, Mrs. Jones is in Cuba enjoying the sunshine, her husband dies at home or becomes very ill and she has to return very quickly on a flight that day, what will happen to her? Will she be blocked from taking that flight?
This is a very important point. If the government had talked about putting in some reciprocity on the U.S. 2000 flights through Canadian airspace and the U.S. understood it would have to give 24 hours notice for any passenger on that plane, we would quickly be in a much more advantageous negotiation position with the United States.
Quite clearly, the government did not think this information was required when it went into the negotiations because it did not want to do this. It said in committee that it did not want to do this. The Minister of Public Safety said, “I didn't want to do this”. If he did not want to do this, then he must understand this is not required for security.
What is it required for? Is this simply more of a knee-jerk reaction to the events of a decade ago and we cannot get our heads out of the sand and recognize that we are in a different time when we can look at security rationally and work with our neighbours to ensure the security we provide is useful, functional and it does not take away the rights of Canadians or Americans?
The NDP wants that. We want security that works for Canadians, not security that takes away the rights of Canadians.