Madam Speaker, I am pleased to join this debate on Bill C-22, the national security and intelligence committee of parliamentarians act.
Above all else, governments must be able to ensure the safety and security of the citizens they serve. All of us here in this place share in this duty.
Our public safety institutions take many forms and have different resources to fulfill their different mandates. Day in and day out, the people who keep us safe work to balance national security concerns with the privacy rights that Canadians expect and deserve. They do an excellent job. They work diligently under challenging circumstances and deserve our gratitude.
The bill being considered here today would create a statutory committee of parliamentarians appointed by the executive branch and housed within it. In Canada, the executive branch is the Prime Minister's Office and the Privy Council Office that supports it. This would be a committee of parliamentarians and not a parliamentary committee. The difference is important because one is able to decide its mandate while the other cannot. A parliamentary committee is the master of its own affairs and has standing orders and practices. The members of a parliamentary committee are named by each member's whip and not by the Prime Minister. The chair of a parliamentary committee is elected by its members.
This new national security and intelligence committee would have none of that. According to the government's press release, the committee would have a mandate to scrutinize any matter related to the national security of Canada. Unfortunately, the fine print is not as generous concerning the responsibilities that the committee and its members will have.
Under the bill, the Prime Minister and his ministers will be allowed to withhold information requested by the committee if they consider that the disclosure of the requested information would negatively impact national security. However, while the responsible minister would be expected to provide the committee with the rationale on his or her decision to hold back information, in practice this will not work. We cannot ask for something if we do not know it exists. If we are told that something exists but we cannot see it because of national security concerns, the entire point of having a committee to reinforce the oversight of Canada's security apparatus disappears. A member, or anyone for that matter, cannot be expected to work with only partial information.
As prescribed in the bill, the committee would be a creation of the executive branch and its dealings would be kept secret. Therefore, it is difficult to identify what resources the members of the committee would have at their disposal if they were dissatisfied or frustrated in their role.
Furthermore, if members of the committee have a major concern with the information they receive in testimony or through a brief, they can only report their concerns to the Prime Minister or the minister responsible. Presuming that the Prime Minister does not share the same security concern, he does not have to act on it, and members cannot bring their trepidation to the elected House of Commons, or to anyone for that matter, because they have been sworn to secrecy.
The way that this committee would be set up makes me think of the philosophical thought experiment of “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” If members cannot speak about what they have been briefed on, does it even matter that they have been briefed?
While it may be premature to speculate on what the committee will actually do, it is no stretch to imagine that the committee will meet semi-regularly and be given access to documents and testimony that an already existing parliamentary committee would receive and members could access via access to information requests. Assuming that the committee finds itself in agreement on recommendations, the government will review the committee's report before it can be tabled in Parliament.
If the purpose of the committee is indeed to provide elected members of Parliament with a greater role in overseeing Canada's national security institutions, then I do not understand why the inputs and the outputs of the committee will be screened by the Prime Minister.
Given how the government is proposing to structure this committee, I am unsure of whether the Prime Minister believes that elected members of Parliament can be trusted to steward the information they receive with care and discretion.
If the Minister of Public Safety is truly intent on creating a national security oversight committee, then the committee should have real oversight over our national security agencies. Unfortunately, as it is being set up, the national security agencies would have oversight over the work of the committee.
The Prime Minister or minister would also have the responsibility to name the chair of the committee. This is problematic, as we have already heard during this debate. It reinforces the impression that the committee is just a PMO working group. It is understood that a chair of a committee plays a critical role as the spokesperson for the matters that are directed to the committee, and committee reports are published through the chair. In order for the committee to be successful and have legitimacy, I believe that the chair must be chosen by members of the committee.
I understand that in a majority government situation, as we find ourselves in right now, the members of the governing party will never select an opposition member as their chair. Interestingly, while we are debating the bill, the Prime Minister has already appointed the member for Ottawa South to chair the committee. That is a clear sign that the government is unwilling to compromise on this specific aspect of the legislation.
Taking this into consideration, together with the bill before us, more than anything the committee appears to be a make-work project for members of Parliament and a way for the Prime Minister to deflect any criticism on his action, or inaction for that matter, on national security matters.
I would like to conclude by making a few remarks about the role of members of Parliament and how the legislation fits into a disturbing trend that I have observed over the past 11 months.
Members, even if they were elected as members of the governing party, have not been elected to serve the government. The legislation serves to reverse this relationship by making members work for the government. While members of the governing party argue that the government is giving parliamentarians access to more information, Bill C-22, in its current form, makes it difficult to believe. The real test of whether the committee would have any teeth and impact on policy would be on whether it can freely report its findings with the weight of Parliament behind it. Again, the bill ensures that this simply would not happen because the prime minister and his ministers would be able to read any report from the committee before it is made public, if it is made public at all.
Ultimately, the bill's stated purpose is to empower members of Parliament. Therefore, I sincerely hope that the government will take the advice and concerns of members from all parties, which have been seriously raised, into consideration as we move forward.