Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise in the House today to debate this important issue.
Listening to the debate thus far today in the House and hearing the parliamentary secretary talk about the amendments that his government is bringing in at report stage and the amendments that it rejected at committee made me think of one of the great orators that the House has ever heard, the Right Hon. Arthur Meighen, one of this country's prime ministers, a relatively short-lived prime minister but a prime minister nonetheless, who was actually from my home area of Perth County.
Arthur Meighen once gave a speech and his words are valuable to the debate we have at hand. He was speaking of Edmund Burke, one of the great British thinkers, when he said:
...a ministry must yield to Parliament and not contrive that Parliament be new-modelled until it is fitted to their purposes. If the authority of Parliament...is to be upheld as long as it coincides in opinion with His Majesty's advisers, but to be set at nought the moment it differs from them, then the House of Commons will shrink into a mere appendage of administration and entirely lose its independent and effective character.
I get the impression from the structure and the makeup of this committee that is exactly what the government is trying to do.
Throughout the history of our great parliamentary democracies, the supremacy of Parliament has been well established. As a nation-state, there is no question our country owes a duty of care to the security and safety of our citizens.
Parliament has a duty to ensure that our laws are properly in place and that they protect our citizens. We must also be sure that we do not overstep the boundaries that are set out for us, which is why we are not entirely opposed as such to the creation of a parliamentary oversight committee, one that may be similar to that of the United Kingdom. The challenge though is that the government of this day has refused to listen to the important input of not only the committee but of members from this side of the House and from members down the way in the NDP as well. The government has refused to take the advice of our former public safety critic, the member for Durham, and the member for Victoria, both of whom have brought important contributions to this debate, but nonetheless, the government has refused to go about amending this bill and creating this bill in a way that would truly protect the rights of our citizens.
One specific element of the bill that I find troubling is subclause 4(3), which reads:
The committee is not a committee of either House of Parliament or of both Houses.
As such, the committee is called the security and intelligence committee of parliamentarians. It would be a misnomer to call it a parliamentary committee because it is not and the government has structured it as such, very deliberately, I would say.
I would suggest it has been done so to exempt the committee from some of the normal practices that parliamentary committees of the House operate under. The government in effect, I would argue, is creating the committee to be a branch of the executive branch rather than the legislative branch of Parliament, and the government has failed to truly justify this approach.
Upon further examining the details of Bill C-22 it becomes clear the Liberal cabinet is not looking to enhance parliamentary oversight but rather to expand its own power. In fact, clause 21 of the bill gives the Prime Minister and the Prime Minister alone, in consultation with the Prime Minister's appointed chair, the ability to revise sections of these reports. In other words, it would give the Prime Minister the opportunity to force a redaction of the reports before they are tabled in Parliament. This allows the Prime Minister to decide what Parliament can and cannot see. So much for a parliamentary committee.
I would remind the Liberal government of the words of one of our former Speakers who, on April 27, 2010, said, and I quote from the Speaker's ruling on that date:
The insinuation that Members of Parliament cannot be trusted with the very information that they may well require to act on behalf of Canadians runs contrary to the inherent trust that Canadians have placed in their elected officials and which Members require to act in their various parliamentary capacities.
In fact, it was members on that side, members of the now Liberal government, who argued vehemently at that time for the release of sensitive information. Now they have constructed a committee which would, in effect, give the Prime Minister, in consultation with his own appointed chair, the ability to redact and keep information from this chamber.
A committee of parliamentarians, or what should be a parliamentary committee, should be the master of its own domain. It should, in effect, be able to decide how to act within its own jurisdiction.
I am also concerned that Bill C-22 authorizes cabinet to not disclose certain information to the committee. According to the rules established by clause 15 of the bill, the committee does not receive information directly from the departments. The committee must instead submit a request to a minister.
Clause 15(3) states:
After the appropriate minister receives the request, he or she must provide or cause to be provided to the Committee, in a timely manner, the requested information to which it is entitled to have access.
The expression “in a timely manner” is difficult to interpret. The ministers can put off complying with the request. My experience with how ministers can delay responding to committees' requests indicates that this clause is highly problematic. The bill should establish strict deadlines for the departments' response.
What concerns me the most is the fact that after stating that it wants to strengthen the role of Parliament by enhancing the independence of committees, cabinet chose the chair of the committee. We learned from the media that the member for Ottawa South will chair the committee.
I have no particular opinion on the performance of the member for Ottawa South as a parliamentarian. I am certain he is an exceptionally adequate parliamentarian and representative of his riding, but the fact is that this chair was appointed by the Prime Minister. He was not elected by fellow committee members, who, in fact, have not even been appointed yet and may not be appointed for several months to come, but the Prime Minister has already appointed his preferred choice as chair of the committee, likely a year and a half before the committee is fully established.
I would remind the Prime Minister and the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness that they ran on a platform of being open, accountable, and transparent, but they appointed a member with really no particular experience in the field of public safety or national security organizations to provide oversight of Canada's covert security and intelligence activities. The Prime Minister chose such a member to serve as chair. Why? Could it perhaps be that the member for Ottawa South has a particular skill set, particular experience, in one very precise area, and that is being a long-time Liberal? He comes from one of the most famous Liberal families in Ontario.