Yes, say the Liberals. Oh, my, what delusional sense of history do the Liberals have? That only came to light because Mr. Leblanc from The Globe and Mail dug and dug into government information. He used a part of the Access to Information Act and asked for the documents between this date to that date from a certain department. Under Bill C-58, that would not be allowed anymore. Who told us that? The Information Commissioner told us that. She said that if the same request had come in after this bill becomes law, we would have never learned about the whole sponsorship scandal. We would have never learned that Liberals in that part of the country were padding their pockets with public money. People went to jail over this, a government fell over this, as it should have, because it was stealing. It was stealing money under the guise of some sponsorship program, and it was only because of access to information that we found this out.
The residential school survivors have been fighting with government for decades for the simple acknowledgement that they or their parents attended a certain residential school at which they were abused horrifically, and for which the Government of Canada was dragged, finally, to apologize for. That only came to light because of access to information. Government does not disclose these things. The Liberals say that they are going to self-disclose and that should be good. We heard from the Information Commissioner's office that complaints have been rising since its new disclosure policy.
We have also heard from the Information Commissioner's office that with these terms, if a request is deemed vexatious by the government, it can deny the request. What does that mean? It is vexatious to whom, to some department that has been badly handling public funds? Yes, I bet that information would look vexatious. The government is going to tell Canadians it is sorry, they cannot have the information they requested because it thinks it is vexatious. It is going to hurt its feelings, and someone might get fired for doing bad. We want to be able to shine light on these things, not go in the opposite direction.
The Information Commissioner asked for order-making powers, and the Liberals promised this. The Information Commissioner would have the ability to demand documents from government and not have government delay and deny. With the amendments in this bill, the commissioner was asked how this would affect order-making power. She said it would not be a true order-making power, and may in fact delay the process for Canadians even longer because they will end up in the courts more often.
Lastly, we asked the Information Commissioner, the watchdog, an officer of Parliament who works on behalf of all of us, if the government consulted with her and if it offered more in the way of a budget, because enforcing this is going to cost a lot more money due to going to court a lot more often. The answer was no.
Again, the Liberals are talking about how they like to consult, how they like to include, how they like to be collaborative. With every proposal we made to change this bill, to try to save this bill from itself, to help Liberals keep a Liberal promise, one of the hardest things to do in politics, they rejected every single one. They allowed the technical amendments from their side and changed a comma here and moved a period there. Congratulations.
However, the fundamental DNA of this bill is designed to make access to information more difficult for Canadians. That is not me talking, that is the Information Commissioner, aboriginal groups, and advocates across the political spectrum who say that things will get worse under this law.
This is the sense of entitlement. This is a hypocritical approach to politics that discourages Canadians so fundamentally. If Liberals are sincere about working with the opposition, they would amend the bill based on the evidence we heard, rather than their own world view, which will make it so much more difficult for Canadians to hold truth to power.