Mr. Speaker, I rise tonight to pursue a question that I first asked in the House of Commons a few weeks ago, dealing with the legality of the current administration's decision to shut down libraries and dispense with materials.
The stories in the media were deeply disturbing. We heard about the Freshwater Institute in Winnipeg, for example. These were Department of Fisheries and Oceans libraries in particular that attracted a certain amount of media attention, and certainly public outrage and scientists expressing concern.
The shutting down of these libraries was explained on government websites as having to do with the digitalization of material so that we could enter a modern age and not have to rely on papers and books and documents and so on, but could instead go online and look things up. That did not excite a lot of protest.
It was not until the actual physical dismantling of these libraries occurred that the libraries of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans were shrunk across Canada and, essentially, according to eyewitness reports, materials from collections were taken to dumpsters and people who had books out on loan were not asked to return them but just held onto them. People who were concerned with the loss of Department of Fisheries and Oceans materials showed up at, say, the Freshwater Institute and helped themselves either to salvage the materials or to benefit from the fact these were available for free.
Someone I know quite well who works with a Manitoba NGO called Manitoba Wildlands saw a private contractor, who does a lot of work for Manitoba Hydro, help himself to large volumes of material that had been put together on behalf of the people of Canada, paid for by the taxpayers of Canada, and then taken into private hands as the libraries were essentially looted before being dismantled.
Those stories prompted my interest. I had certainly been concerned. I knew that the libraries for the Canadian Forest Service had been dismantled. I knew from a retired forester at the time who was concerned that books were disappearing from a library in Victoria. People were very worried about this.
It occurred to me, as I heard of these accumulated stories of libraries being dismantled that this could not be legal. This was material put together for the people of Canada and paid for by the people of Canada.
So I did some research, and the question I asked in the House dealt with the fact that under the Library and Archives of Canada Act there is a specific set of procedures that must be followed. If the materials count as public records, which could certainly have applied to the material in DFO libraries, for instance raw data and things that are not published in multiple copies, those cannot be destroyed without the written consent of the Librarian and Archivist of Canada. Regarding documents that are called “publications”, with multiple copies, the act is very clear: even if the material is surplus to need, the Library and Archivist must take care and control of that material and dispense with it carefully.
As a matter of fact, the more I looked into it I saw that not only was the Library and Archives Act of Canada being violated in the way these materials were being dealt with, so was the Surplus Crown Assets Act.
I called the current acting Librarian and Archivist of Canada and he let me know by phone that he had not provided a single written consent to the destruction of records. So if there were any records destroyed, that was illegal. And in terms of the care and control of materials, the eyewitness reports suggest that the care and control of materials was simply ignored on the assumption that the government of the day had the power to do away with the documentary heritage of this country. That is what the act calls it, “the documentary heritage”.
I maintain it is illegal. I would like a straight answer from the government.
