Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Gaspésie—Îles-de-la-Madeleine.
We talked a few seconds ago about transparency and accountability. However, I think that the bill is yet another example of smoke and mirrors. It is intended to deflect Canadians from the things that are really important toward things that are not pressing or urgent. It is intended to scare and strike fear into the hearts of Canadians. Apparently, the Conservative government intends to govern this country through fear.
The bill would reintroduce measures that all parties agreed in 2007 should disappear, and they did. Those measures were severe incursions into civil liberties. As it turned out, the measures never were necessary to be used to combat any kind of terrorism that went on this country, and that is both for the terrorism we heard about and the threats I am sure the public did not hear about because the police were able to find it and stop it before it happened.
Why is this being reintroduced now? Why is the bill the single most important thing facing Canadians now and on the top of the agenda for the Conservative government to carry forward? I think the answer is because it would deflect Canadians from thinking about some of the more serious problems that are going on.
Apparently, the anti-terrorism bill turned out to be unnecessary in 2007, but the Conservatives are introducing it anyway. NDP members will not be supporting the bill, as we believe it is an unnecessary incursion into civil liberties.
I believe the government is perhaps being a little two-faced on the whole notion of civil liberties. Members will recall the rancour and rhetoric over the gun registry. During the past several months of the Conservative's term in office, the use of a gun registry was a huge incursion into a person's individual private right to own a firearm, which is, of course, an American right and not a Canadian one. Nevertheless, the Conservative government was saying we had to protect civil liberties. However, here it is saying that it wants to diminish civil liberties. I do not think it should go unnoticed that the government is two-faced about this.
As a union representative in my previous life, I often had to be on guard against employers and others who were attempting to create incursions into civil liberties under the guise of protecting their investments and public safety, and their profits ultimately. For example, although it was ruled by the Supreme Court to be in violation of Canadian law, employers often wanted to have the right to test the urine, saliva and blood of their employees. It was for no apparent reason but just because they wanted to. Unlike the United States, the courts in this country have determined that it is an unreasonable incursion into our civil liberties; yet, employers keep trying to do it. They keep trying to find ways to get around these laws.
One has to wonder what would happen if, as a result of these pressures by employers, insurance companies started to take these kinds of incursions into our civil liberties. I fear that if the insurance companies looking after our health and well-being were able to accomplish these civil liberty incursions, they would be able to refuse to insure people on the basis of something they discovered as a result of a saliva test or blood test that took place long before. We have to be ever vigilant against that.
On this side of the House, we are ever vigilant against incursions of our civil liberties. However, the Conservative government believes that it needs to rule through a climate of fear. It needs to create a sense of fear in the public of Canada so that Canadians will be cowed into being appreciative of the few good things the government might happen to do. If there is anything the government has proven over the past year and half, it is that it is single-mindedly using a law and order agenda as its entire raison d'être.
There is no reason that this particular piece of legislation should be top of mind. There are far more important things that we should be doing and that we should be afraid of. However, the government would rather distract us with threats that there are imminent terrorist attacks and we must therefore change the law to allow the forces of justice in this country to have access to things that it turns out they do not need.
We believe that as a result of the application of the original Anti-terrorism Act in 2001, that $92 billion has been spent, over and above what would normally have been spent, to combat terrorism in this country. Is that a just way of spending our money? I do not think anybody would be able to tell. However, if what we are doing is creating this climate of removal of civil liberties and spending money to do it, then we must be vigilant against that, and in turn perhaps save some taxpayer dollars.
The government wants us to be afraid of terrorism, economic turmoil in other countries and environmental groups, but it forgets that Canadians are afraid of more important things that are closer to home. We should be afraid of carbon dioxide emissions and what that is doing to the planet. The government has apparently turned a blind eye to that. It has decided that there will not be a reaction from the government to implement the Kyoto Accord, or any other method of restricting the use of CO2 emissions to change our climate.
The other thing that is alarming Canadians is the ever-escalating price of energy, particularly in the east part of the country, and the imbalance that is created between the government's determination to ship our energy supply to other countries while starving other parts of the country of energy. We do not have a national energy strategy from the government. We do not have a security of energy, and people are starting to feel it. The government is clearly reacting in a way that is not in keeping with what Canadians are fearing.
There is a twisting of democracy going on. Canadians should be afraid of that. With the implementation of time limits, of prorogation, and with these giant omnibus bills that are coming forward to Parliament, we have a twisting of the democratic process, in such a way that Canadians ought to be afraid. The government would rather distract them with talk of terrorism than to actually get at the real problems that face Canadians.
It is also an example of the weird priorities of the government. We are the only ones talking about this because the government has not put up any speakers on this particular act. The government appears to think this is the most important thing facing Canadians. However, in terms of public safety, there are more important things that are closer to home that we should be talking about.
In my riding, there are gun crimes almost every month. In Toronto, six Somali youth were killed by handguns. We are not doing anything to combat the proliferation of handguns into our cities in this country. We would do something to take away some civil liberties and combat terrorism, but that is not what is killing people in this country. Handguns are killing people in this country, and certainly in the city of Toronto.
We also have the spectre of tainted meat. People are more afraid of tainted meat right now than they are of terrorism. Yet, the government's response is to say Canadians should pay no attention to that man behind the curtain, that things will be fine and this company will resurrect itself.
We have the very real problem of jobs. There are not enough jobs to go around. There is only one job for every five people who are unemployed, and we have no indication from the government of any strategy to deal with that, other than to suggest that more temporary foreign workers are necessary. We now have something like 300,000 temporary foreign workers who have come into this country.
The people in my riding are more afraid of losing their jobs than they are of terrorism. Yet the government's approach has been to bring forward an anti-terrorist bill as the most important measure that needs to be faced by Canadians and the most important fear that Canadians should have.
Therefore, the NDP will be rejecting the bill on the basis of the lack of accountability, transparency and the incursion into civil liberties that is going on in the bill.