House of Commons Hansard #204 of the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament's site.) The word of the day was commissioner.
Address at Installation of Governor GeneralRoutine Proceedings
September 22nd, 2017 / 12:10 p.m.
Winnipeg North Manitoba
Liberal
Kevin Lamoureux LiberalParliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons
moved:
That the speech of Her Excellency the Governor General, together with the address of welcome made by the Prime Minister in the Senate Chamber on Monday, October 2, 2017, be printed as an appendix to the official report of the Debates of the House of Commons and form part of the permanent record of this Parliament.
The Speaker Liberal Geoff Regan
Does the hon. member have the unanimous consent of the House to move the motion?
The Speaker Liberal Geoff Regan
The House has heard the terms of the motion. Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?
Larry Miller Conservative Bruce—Grey—Owen Sound, ON
Mr. Speaker, I rise in the House today to present e-petition 1073, which calls on the government not to sign the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty and to halt the passage of Bill C-47.
The more than 4,500 signatories from my riding and across the country express their concerns regarding the impact that Bill C-47 and Canada's accession to the Arms Trade Treaty would have on lawful civilian ownership of firearms in Canada. This petition has signatories from every province and territory expressing their concerns about Bill C-47.
Michael McLeod Liberal Northwest Territories, NT
Mr. Speaker, I am presenting an e-petition that expresses concerns surrounding the construction of the Site C dam.
Kevin Lamoureux LiberalParliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons
Mr. Speaker, I ask that all questions be allowed to stand at this time, please.
The House resumed consideration of the motion that Bill C-58, An Act to amend the Access to Information Act and the Privacy Act and to make consequential amendments to other Acts, be read the second time and referred to a committee.
The Speaker Liberal Geoff Regan
There are four minutes remaining for questions and comments following the speech of the hon. member for Calgary Shepard.
The hon. member for Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis.
Steven Blaney Conservative Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, QC
Mr. Speaker, the eloquent speech that the young member for Calgary Shepard gave before question period on the access to information reform showed the Conservative spirit. Unfortunately, it also showed that there are flaws in the Liberals' bill.
I would like the member to explain to me how the Liberals are breaking their promise to be transparent with this bill. Former information commissioner Robert Marleau said that this is one step forward and two steps back. The Liberals promised us transparency but now they are plunging us into darkness.
I would like my colleague to explain this bill's shortcomings and how the Liberals are breaking the promise they made to Canadians.
Tom Kmiec Conservative Calgary Shepard, AB
Mr. Speaker, I have the Liberal Party platform right here in front of me, so we can quickly go through it.
The Liberals said they would eliminate all of the fees, but portions of the legislation they would be amending indicate that eligible fees will still be applied in certain situations.
They said that they would update access to information to meet the standard. As I said, this is a Potemkin amendment act. It would not do anything. It would fix things on the outside, but the meat and potatoes, the guts of the bill, are in the exemptions. If how the exemptions are applied is not changed, the government can still refuse to reveal information to the general public.
The Liberals said that they would ensure that access to information applies to ministerial offices, to the Prime Minister, to administrative institutions that support Parliament, and to the courts. They did not do that.
They also said that they would review it every five years. As I mentioned in my intervention, if the sunset provisions are not added to this, and the way that we have been dealing with mandatary reviews every five years, it could very well happen that we will not get a review of this legislation for within maybe five to eight years. With the glacial speed that legislation makes it through the House, because of the government's lack of understanding and how the procedures work, we may not see it happen.
Murray Rankin NDP Victoria, BC
Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak to Bill C-58, the access to information reform legislation. It is with considerable disappointment that I must, on behalf of the NDP, be opposed to the initiative. However, I am also pleased to hear the President of the Treasury Board acknowledge that at committee, there might be a possibility for improving the legislation to give it some credibility.
If I may be permitted at the outset to make a personal statement, access to information, freedom of information, has been one of my passions. I did graduate work on this topic. In law, I worked with the Government of British Columbia in drafting the legislation there, as well as in Yukon. Back in the early eighties, I worked on behalf of the Canadian Bar Association to try to get the first access to information act through in a credible way. The former member of Parliament for Peace River, Conservative member Jed Baldwin, gave me an award of merit from the House for my work on freedom of information. Therefore, I come to this with a passion for the topic.
Three things are necessary for any credible law and, after 34 years, we all agree that this law needs modernizing. I salute the government for finally doing something in that regard. First, it has to have a clear statement that information is a right. Second, there have to be exceptions to the rule of openness that are narrow and have to demonstrate some harm from the disclosure. Third, there has to be an umpire, someone neutral, who can order a government that does not wish to provide the information to make it public. Those are the three things by which any reform must be evaluated. Sadly, this bill comes up short.
People sometimes have their eyes glaze over when we talk about access to information. That is usually the end of a conversation. People go back to doing something else. I want to tell Canadians who may be watching this why it is important. How many times have we read an article that starts with “Information released today under the Access to Information Act” reported thus and so? The answer is frequently.
The Globe and Mail used the Access to Information Act for its April 2016 investigative series “Unfounded”, which revealed that police had been dismissing one out of every five sexual assault claims as baseless. It took a year to get the information. The delays were ridiculous, and I will come back to that. That was the tool that was necessary for Canadians to understand what their police were and were not doing about sexual assault.
Just last week, the CBC reported that the Prime Minister's controversial Bahamas vacation cost Canadians over $215,000, far more than was initially disclosed to Parliament. That came about through a document released under this act.
Yesterday morning, I woke up to hear that after a year, reporters finally obtained the original contract from the Phoenix pay fiasco, once again thanks to this act.
Transparency is important. It was a major theme for the Liberal Party during the 2015 election. In fact, before that, the Prime Minister introduced Bill C-613, an act to amend the Access to Information Act. I would invite all Canadians to look at what the Prime Minister wanted to do with that bill while in opposition compared to what is being proposed today. I think they will see a yawning divide. What he said, though, in introducing that legislation, was that “a country's access to information system is at the heart of open government”. He is right.
Our Supreme Court also said that what we are talking about today is in fact quasi-constitutional in nature. This is not an ordinary act. It is something that the courts have recognized as essential to an open, modern democracy.
The New Democratic Party has introduced private members' bills to modernize the act so many times I do not want to list them all, but in 2006, 2008, 2011, 2014, this is something we tried to fix. Every time, the Conservatives and then the Liberals voted them down.
In March of 2015, the Information Commissioner released 85 recommendations to modernize the act. I invite Canadians to look at that list of recommendations and what we are left with today.
The point is that this is essential to fix, as the President of Treasury Board properly pointed out.
When we introduced this bill in the early eighties, computers were hardly a fact of life, email did not really exist in the public service, and record-keeping was very different than it is today. Clearly this is long overdue. It is too bad that the government has not taken the opportunity to do the job properly. Almost all civil society groups that have studied this have been outspoken in their opposition, some angry, but most simply sad and disappointed that this is what we are left with.
Let me talk about what the government did not do. That is how we have to assess this exercise. The exemptions to the rule of disclosure, the list of the things that the government can properly withhold, are very badly drafted, very discretionary, do not even have to show a harm. However, there is one that is different from all the others.
Back when this bill was introduced under the former Prime Minister Trudeau regime, it decided to cut out a category of records called “cabinet confidences”. It does not even apply to cabinet confidences. Everyone who has ever studied this has said that this is the Mack truck clause. In fact, some of the more humorous commentary describes this as “cabinet laundering”. All the government has to do if it does not want something disclosed is to slip it into a cabinet briefing book, and voila, the black hole. It never gets to be seen. It is not even subject to the act. One would have thought that after 34 years, job one would have been to maybe talk about that. It is not even mentioned. The black hole remains. Cabinet laundering can continue.
Information delayed is information denied. Every journalist in the land understands that. I had a journalist stop me on the street the other day, and she said that when she is asking for information, she usually gets something on the very last day of the 30-day period. Day 29 she is told that there is going to be a delay, and then the government asks for another delay. If she complains to the Information Commissioner, she is told that the office is swamped and it might take several months to get the story out. Even then, if the government does not want to do it, the Information Commissioner would recommend that it can say no.
Information delayed is information denied. That will not be fixed by this bill in any meaningful way.
The other thing is that we live in an oral culture. In fact, one of my colleagues refers to it as “the Post-it culture”. I will explain. If a government member has a record that they know is going to be subject to disclosure, maybe they put a little Post-it note on the document that says what the juicy bits are. That happens. I know that the Speaker will be surprised to hear that.
The duty to document decisions is not even part of this bill. I talked earlier about computers where we can delete transitory records and the like. However, the fact is that an oral culture is alive and well and living in Ottawa.
Let me get to the bill. What does Bill C-58 do, and why can we not support it? I would first like to quote from the Centre for Law and Democracy which said:
the Bill is far more conspicuous for what it fails to do....
It fails to expand the scope of the Act. It does place a number of proactive publication obligations on various actors – including the Prime Minister’s and Ministers’ Offices...but this falls far short of bringing these bodies within the ambit of the Act.
Certain types of information have always been available, at least in recent years, such as travel expenses, contracts over $10,000. By policy, these have been available for years. Now it is put in the bill, and the government thinks it should get a gold star for doing that. I am not sure why.
Again, quoting from the Centre for Law and Democracy:
While more proactive disclosure is always welcome, as anyone who has used the Act knows, it is absolutely not a substitute for the right to be able to request the information one is interested in from public authorities.
I think that is clear.
Today the minister made a lot of the notion that there is to be order-making powers under this bill. It is true that if we look closely, we can see that it is, in the words of a colleague, a chimera. It does not really do that.
Let me talk about how it works in the provinces. Let us take British Columbia, for example. The Information Commissioner makes an order: “Disclose that record, government. I know you do not want to do it, but it is not able to be withheld legitimately under the exceptions.” That is it. If the government wants to seek judicial review of that decision, it does so.
Let us compare that to the convoluted order-making power that the minister was so proud of in this bill. It seems to say that if the government agrees with a decision of the commissioner to release the document, it will be released. So what? If the government disagrees with the commissioner's recommendation, then the government could take him or her to Federal Court. Imagine how expensive and litigious this would all be. The government has created, in my submission, an unwieldy, unnecessary, and unaffordable system.
I wish I had time to go into the section that deals with this. It talks of the ability to make an order, but in the interest of time, suffice it to say that it is beyond complicated and likely unworkable. It would not really do what the minister has said it would do. I wish the Liberals had followed the simple route that most provinces have followed.
Though it is true that there would be proactive disclosure of a number of kinds of information from ministers' offices, the point is that Canadians would still not be able to request the information they want from those offices, appeal to the commissioner, and get an order to release it. It is just not there. The promise made in the election that we would have open offices and that people would get the information is not what is happening. That is very disappointing.
The Liberals also talked about the five-year review that is a feature of this act, and thank goodness it is there. That is nothing new. However, it is not like the Bank Act, for example, under which the legislation would sunset if that review did not take place by that time, so who knows how long it will actually take before we get to the review that is promised? That is very different from what the platform promised.
The Liberals talked today about something new, which is the ability to go after bad-faith, long, frivolous, and vexatious requests. That is a new restriction, not a change for the positive. I can appreciate why it is necessary, and, yes, it exists at the provincial level, but here is the punchline: this bill would give the final decision to the government to decide whether the request is too big, too long, or frivolous. Everywhere else, of course, it is the commissioner who gets to decide. Do members remember what I said about an umpire in the game who is neutral? I do not think the minister who does not want the information to be disclosed is in the best position to do that. I cannot believe they think that is a significant reform that we should be proud of.
The government is probably going to pat itself on the back for this bill. It is probably going to say, “We promised openness and transparency, and openness by default, and that is what we delivered.” The truth is far from that. I want to be optimistic—I always try to be—and give the government the benefit of the doubt. The minister stood in this place and said, “We will be open to amendments at committee”, and we are certainly going to be there to try to give him the opportunity to make this credible, because it is not credible now. It is kind of like the promise the Liberals made in 2015, when they said that 2015 would be the last election that would be fought under the first-past-the-post rules. That was a different promise. That was a different time and place.
The Prime Minister came to my riding when he was running in the election and said that he would have a full review of the Kinder Morgan pipeline proposal. Do members remember that promise? That kind of did not happen either. There was one about mail delivery. We were going to be open to mail delivery, I think. That was another promise.
Canadians deserve better than this bill. It is a start, to the extent that it adds exemptions; it does not go after the big changes and exemptions. Members heard me talk about cabinet confidences; the other nice one is the policy advice to the minister. They did not touch it. All they have to do is put all these documents into something that they give to the minister, and that is policy advice to the government. That massive loophole remains.
Once again, what they did not do is how we judge their reform initiative. It actually adds a loophole that would allow the department to refuse to process a request if it deems it to be overly broad, deems it would unreasonably interfere with the operations of government, or deems it to be made in bad faith. It is quite remarkable that the Liberals are patting themselves on the back. By simple comparison to the other legislation in the country, it is obvious that this bill does not pass muster.
The bill also ignores so many of the recommendations made by the Information Commissioner, as I pointed out, and by the ethics committee that also studied this legislation. It appears the government did not even read those. Much like the Harper government, the Liberals continue to disregard the recommendations made by the non-partisan watchdog. One sympathizes with the Herculean efforts made by Ms. Legault over the years to try to get both sides of this place, Conservative and Liberal alike, to take seriously the citizens' right to know. I salute for her efforts, futile though they have been to date.
I want to say by way of conclusion that the New Democrats have long advocated for giving the Information Commissioner real oversight and order-making powers. We believe that proactive disclosure is important and offer congratulations for putting into legislation what has been the practice to date so far, but I point out that the commissioner does not have oversight powers with respect to that proactive disclosure, so I guess we have to take the government's word for it.
Even if the Liberals were well intentioned, let us remember that we are making legislation that applies for future Canadians, for future generations of Canadians. How long did it take to get to this place with a new bill? It has taken 34 years. We have to get it right. We cannot say, “Don't worry; we are going to have a review in five years, or maybe another year or two after that”, because they do not have to do that if they do not want to. That has been our history, excepting the Bank Act.
We have to do it better. We can do it better, and I am not the only one saying this. The Centre for Law and Democracy, which has been cited already, has made the same point. Democracy Watch has explained it. Professor Mark Weiler, the web and user experience librarian who testified, wrote to our critic, the hon. member for Skeena—Bulkley Valley, on this file, as follows: “I am greatly concerned that Bill C-58 will actually diminish the capacity of Canadians to access unpublished materials held by the government. The Access to Information Act should enhance the ability of Canadians to access information the government chooses not to publish.... Bill C-58 would actually make the Access to Information Act more difficult to use.”
What are we going to do about this? To go back to the basics, there has to be a strong statement of the right to know, and there is some verbiage to that effect in the new law. The exemptions have to be narrow, and they have to be about injury, not just in a box, a particular category of records, such as policy advice. It has to be shown that disclosure would harm some government interest. The Liberals did not do that; they didn't touch any of them. They only added one.
The third thing is that there has to be real order-making power when the umpire says the government has got it wrong. That did not cause a revolution in British Columbia when we did it, and that order-making power led to something like 90% of cases being mediated without the need to have a formal order-making hearing. Very, very rarely do we go to court; it is statistically insignificant.
There are ample precedents for doing this right. The order-making power that is in the bill is beyond comprehension. It will be expensive and it is totally unnecessary. Why do we have to make it so complicated when the principle is so obvious and when there are so many examples across the land?
I want to end on a positive note. We hope the government was serious when the President of the Treasury Board stood in the House earlier today and talked about the need to modernize this law and said that this is only the first phase and it is only a work in progress. He said he welcomes reports at committee, including amendments.
Trust me, we will have many of those amendments. We can do better. We must do better for Canadians.
Joyce Murray LiberalParliamentary Secretary to the President of the Treasury Board
Mr. Speaker, I want to acknowledge the deep experience my colleague, the member for Victoria, has on these matters, and I thank him for his comments.
I have to say that I was very disappointed with his strong focus on what he perceives as being absent from this important next step in our access to information system here in Canada. There was very little true reflection of the major step forward that this legislation would take for Canada after 34 years of no change. I will give one example of what I think was sometimes inaccurate and many times very exaggerated discourse on the perceived flaws in the legislation, which the member acknowledges the President of the Treasury Board sees as a work in progress that will still receive quite a bit of input.
The member opposite said that it will be five years before the work that we are doing today is reviewed. In fact, it will not be. The first review would happen within one year of this bill's receiving royal assent. It would happen within one year, so this really is a step on a pathway, a very important and complex pathway. I would like the member to respond to that inaccuracy in his comments earlier.
Murray Rankin NDP Victoria, BC
Mr. Speaker, as I hope I said both at the beginning and the end of my remarks, I too remain hopeful that the government—finally, a government that has grasped the nettle in trying to modernize this legislation—will, in the spirit of it being a first step and in the spirit of it being a work in progress, take seriously these changes.
As for what is missing in the act, I hope the member understood that it was not me saying that. It was the experts at the Centre for Law and Democracy who said, once again:
...the Bill is far more conspicuous for what it fails to do, putting in place only one or at best one and one-half of the reforms called for by Canadians....
It does nothing to address the broad regime of exceptions (if anything, expanding its scope slightly). And it does not put in place a duty to document.
As for the five-year review, that is true. We hope we can get some action on that. Vince Gogolek, the president of the B.C. Freedom of Information and Privacy Association, said:
This is not the last word on [access] reform, but it might be the last opportunity to weigh in for some time. [Bill] C-58 includes a five-year review, but the first review will take place only a year after the legislation comes into force. Given the glacial pace at which legislation is going through Parliament these days, that could mean the review won’t take place until after the next election in 2019.
Sheila Malcolmson NDP Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC
Mr. Speaker, two megaprojects approved by the Liberal government that were of great concern in British Columbia, the Site C dam and the Kinder Morgan pipeline, were both thought by activists and New Democrats to have disproportionate negative impacts on women, and indigenous women in particular. The government, having not taken the all-party committee's advice to legislate gender-based analysis, essentially said, “Trust us, we're doing it at the cabinet level. We have a gender lens.”
At the Standing Committee on Status of Women, when we asked the Minister of Status of Women at that time to tell us what the gender considerations were when the Site C dam and the Kinder Morgan pipeline were approved, she said that was a cabinet confidence and we should know better than even asking that.
I ask my colleague to tell me what this bill would do or fail to do in bringing the transparency that we had expected from the government as it approves significantly worrying and damaging projects in our region.
Murray Rankin NDP Victoria, BC
Mr. Speaker, I very much appreciate the question and the passion of the hon. member for Nanaimo—Ladysmith and her work on the status of women committee.
When the words “cabinet confidence” are uttered, we hear this giant sound, a sucking sound, of a black hole into which all record requests must go immediately. To say those two words is like a mantra for the Government of Canada. It was Prime Minister Trudeau, with Michael Pitfield at his side, who insisted that if they were going to have this foreign thing called access to information, they had to do one thing quickly: carve out a whole category of cabinet confidences.
The act does not even apply. It is not an exception; it is called an exclusion. If the minister says there cannot be gender-based analysis vis-à-vis Kinder Morgan or Site C, she is right. One can say whatever one wants, but as soon as it is cabinet confidence, it is like an incantation, and that is the end of the day.
That is not what it is in Ontario, that is not what it is in Quebec, and that is not what it is in British Columbia. Why does it have to live in Ottawa?
Anne Minh-Thu Quach NDP Salaberry—Suroît, QC
Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Victoria for his very enlightened speech, which helped us understand why Bill C-58 does not really address ethics issues.
This only adds to the cynicism that already exists around politics, when the government says it want to modernize legislation to give Canadians access to information, when in fact, transparency is not enhanced at all, since ministers' offices, including the PMO, are not obliged to report to the commissioner.
Right now, it can take up to 200 days to get crucial information. For instance, according to the Globe and Mail, in April 2016, the RCMP took over a year to forward some statistics it had requested for an investigative report called Unfounded.
When the police declare one in five sexual assault complaints unfounded, this creates further hardships for the people already going through a very difficult situation following a sexual assault. One in five complaints is dismissed as unfounded, and it took a year to provide that information. I find that completely unacceptable, and this bill does absolutely nothing to address this problem.
What are my colleague's thoughts on that?
Murray Rankin NDP Victoria, BC
Mr. Speaker, the shocking truth of the report The Globe and Mail last year about the fact that only one in five sexual assaults were taken seriously by the police has led to changes.
The member talked about the public's cynicism in this area. I find journalists to be the most cynical. It does not have to be this way.
Journalists south of the border phone the government and they get the information. When the same information is sought in Ottawa, I am told it takes years or it is denied, and years is an accurate statement. As the member pointed out, it took one year to put together the file that led to this investigative journalism report. This matters because information is the raw material of which decisions are made. If we cannot assess that information and investigative journalists cannot find out the truth of what happens, then Canada obviously as a country is much worse off.
Access to information matters. We can do better. This legislation is quasi-constitutional in nature. We must do better and make it work at committee. I am looking forward to working with the government in order to do so.
Kevin Lamoureux LiberalParliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons
Mr. Speaker, would the member at the very least recognize that the legislation would improve our system significantly? It would appear that he does somewhat indirectly. The government has been fairly clear. When we go into the committee process, we look forward to hearing potential amendments from NDP members. They might want to share some of those amendments sooner as opposed to later if they are so confident in them. Let us wait and see what happens at committee.
This legislation would make a significant improvement to transparency and open government. We should all be supporting it.
Murray Rankin NDP Victoria, BC
Mr. Speaker, I will have to disagree with my hon. friend from Winnipeg North. We cannot support something that will do so little to deal with the fundamental problems that, after 34 years, governments on both sides of the aisle have created.
The amendments from the NDP that the government can anticipate will be very much like the amendments from the committee that studied this. They will be very much like the amendments from the Information Commissioner. They will be very much like the amendments that were proposed over years. They may even be like the amendments the Prime Minister sought to make to the legislation when he was in opposition, which I would suggest are very different than what we see before us today in the legislation.
Andy Fillmore LiberalParliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Democratic Institutions
Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Vancouver Quadra.
I am proud to rise in the House to speak to Bill C-58, an act to amend the Access to Information Act and the Privacy Act.
Our government was elected on a promise to reinforce public trust in our democracy, and over the course of our time in office, we have put action behind our words. For example, we are reforming campaign finance laws to make one of the world's most respected democracies even more transparent. We have introduced legislation to make Canada's democracy more accessible to all Canadians. The debate today is about another of the fundamental concepts of any modern democracy.
We know Canadians cannot meaningfully participate in democracy when they are in an information vacuum. Access to government data is vital. Without it, neither the public nor the media are able to hold governments to account. That is why our government promised to firm up one of the key pillars of our democracy: access to information.
We told Canadians we would make information open by default, and in formats that would be modern and simple to use. Canadians pay for the information that is assembled in the Government of Canada, so why should they not have access to this data? This greater openness in turn will lead to greater confidence in our democracy, which is why this government has put such a great emphasis on amending the Access to Information Act with Bill C-58.
This is the first major overhaul since our predecessors in this very institution voted in favour of the current act 35 years ago, so it is long overdue.
The act, which was enacted in Parliament in 1982, and took effect the following year, came long before anyone had ever heard of the Internet. Governments in those days had far more administrators and clerks, because there was so much paperwork to file and record. One could not just flip a written message to a colleague by email. If one wanted to send an interesting news article to a counterpart in another department, one could not just forward a link. One's options were limited to things like a fax machine or an inter-office courier.
Today, technology has dramatically changed how governments operate, and we need to align our laws to take into account this new reality. We have a responsibility to make it easier to obtain information and once Canadians get it, that information should be in easy-to-use formats. We can think of the graduate students, like those at Dalhousie University or Saint Mary's University in my riding of Halifax, who are out there doing groundbreaking research but operating on tight timelines. We want them to be able to, when possible, obtain an electronic version of government records so they can more easily navigate and analyze the documents. Think of the time that will be saved if they do not have to go through hundreds of pages to find what they are looking for.
Now Bill C-58 has many components, but for now I would like to focus on how it impacts parliamentary institutions. I am talking about the Library of Parliament, the parliamentary budget officer, the Parliamentary Protective Service, the Office of the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner, the Office of the Senate Ethics Officer, and the administration of the Senate and of the House of Commons. These institutions are foundational components of our democracy, and Bill C-58 proposes to bring them under the Access to Information Act to make them more accountable. The proposed legislation will require these institutions to publish each quarter their travel and hospitality expenses as well as disclose over the same timeline any contracts with a value above $10,000.
Another important component of Bill C-58 is the new powers it would give to our Information Commissioner. This is of particular interest to me, both in my role as a Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Democratic Institutions as well as the member of Parliament for Halifax.
Not too long ago, I met with representatives from a group based in Halifax called the Centre for Law and Democracy, whose mission is to:
...promote, protect and develop those human rights which serve as the foundation for or underpin democracy, including the rights to freedom of expression, to vote and participate in governance, to access information and to freedom of assembly and association.
Some members may be familiar with the centre's work on the right to information rating, or RTI, which is developed along with Access Info Europe to calculate and rate the overall strength of countries' right to information laws.
The topic of the Information Commissioner was one I discussed with representatives of this group in my office during a meeting in the spring. They believe, as I do, and so too does our government believe, that the Information Commissioner ought to have the ability to order the release of records, or so-called “order making”. I am proud to say that Bill C-58 would give the Information Commissioner that power. I would like to congratulate and thank the Centre for Law and Democracy on its strong advocacy on this point, and for its ongoing work in Canada and across the world to strengthen democratic institutions.
It is important to note that the legislation would also give government institutions the ability to decline requests that are excessively broad or requests of information already in the public domain.
The government has limited resources, and this will free up government institutions to respond to other requesters. Of course the applicant subjected to a decision like this would be able to make a complaint to the Information Commissioner.
Bill C-58 would also oblige members of Parliament and senators to publish all travel and hospitality expenses, and all service contract amounts. In both cases, this information would have to be made public on a quarterly basis.
We know senators and members of Parliament already publish travel and hospitality expenses pursuant to their own internal rules, and senators disclose service contract information, while MPs publish the total costs of awarded service contracts.
Importantly, Bill C-58 would enshrine the current practice of also requiring additional details on the service contracts and travel costs of MPs.
This legislation will require a review of the act every five years, starting in 2019. This will give Canadians an opportunity to look for further improvements.
We believe Canada deserves a vibrant democracy that is transparent, open, and accountable, but our efforts do not begin and end with changes to the Access to Information Act.
We have been relentless since taking office to look for other ways to improve our democratic system. For instance, Bill C-33 would amend the Canada Elections Act to increase voter participation and improve the integrity of our electoral system. Bill C-50, meanwhile, if passed, will make important changes to the same act to make political fundraising more open and transparent. We are also taking action against cyber threats and the danger they pose to our electoral system.
We live in one of the most respected democracies in the world, but our government will remain relentless in ensuring that any weaknesses are dealt with. Bill C-58 is a major part of this effort, and I am proud to work with the Minister of Democratic Institutions to advance it. With that, I welcome any questions from my colleagues.