Debates of Sept. 26th, 2017

Access to Information Act

[Joël Godin, Conservative, Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for her question.

If she had listened to my introduction, she would have heard me congratulate the government on having had the idea to bring in more effective measures to increase transparency and improve access to information.

In her intervention, my colleague mentioned the $5 fee, but the Liberals did not need a bill to bring that in. That was already done. What I am saying is that this is a hollow bill that has no teeth. We are wasting our time. We should have a clearly defined bill that allows us to proceed quickly.

Someone across the way mentioned a step-by-step approach earlier. I prefer to proceed quickly in the interest of all Canadians.

[François Choquette, NDP, Drummond, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his speech and for the excellent corn on the cob from Neuville.

I would like to talk about the fact that this is just another broken Liberal government promise. It promised to extend access to information to the Prime Minister's Office and to ministers' offices. Unfortunately, it is not doing that. Instead, it is actually creating a new loophole. This is making things worse, because requests for information will be rejected from now on if they are deemed too general, if they seriously hinder government operations, or if they are filed in bad faith.

Does my colleague agree that this makes no sense? This kind of vocabulary gives too much latitude and will result in too many access to information requests being arbitrarily rejected.

[Joël Godin, Conservative, Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague. I am delighted that he had a chance to taste Neuville's delicious sweet corn. This is not a competition, of course, because I know there are corn farmers in every riding. I am just happy to have the opportunity to let all the members of this House know that Neuville sweet corn has received a protected geographical indication, or PGI.

To answer my colleague's question, yes, this bill is hollow. What I find disappointing about this government is that it is wasting our time. It is introducing laws and saying it will roll them out gradually, but it is incapable of defining them clearly. From reading this bill, it is obvious that consumers and the various organizations that usually need to submit access to information requests will receive less information. That is troubling. Information needs to be shared.

I can understand that some information needs to remain confidential in certain situations, such as information about our military strategy. During the NAFTA negotiations, there may be some information we have to withhold as good negotiators. Not that I think the Liberals are good negotiators, but that is another story.

In short, this Liberal bill is deeply troubling.

[Todd Doherty, Conservative, Cariboo—Prince George, BC]

Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to stand in the House to speak to Bill C-58 for the first time.

Let us look back at how we got to where we are today. When the Liberals were campaigning in 2015, I believe it was on the tenth day that the member for Papineau, now the Prime Minister, stood before Canadians and said that a government under him would be the most open and transparent in Canadian history. Man, how far we have fallen from those comments. Canadians probably had some hope at that point, but shortly thereafter it was a case of the government saying, “We were just joking, do not take us seriously on things such as the debt perhaps and other areas.”

Early on we heard things in the opposition and Canadians found out through mechanisms such as access to information and others about things such as pay to play. I will refresh the House's memory that early in the government's mandate, in every mandate letter the Prime Minister directed his ministers to conduct themselves to the full extent of the law and to be able to take the most fine-grained public scrutiny. What we have seen to this point is some ministers operating as if they are above the law, and that includes the Prime Minister as well.

Early last year, the Minister of Justice perhaps forgot whether she was representing her riding at a pay-to-play event where a fee was charged for dinner with a a full house of solicitors and lawyers at a Toronto law firm. The House reminded her of the distinction and asked very cautiously whether she was acting as a member of Parliament for her area or the Minister of Justice at the time. I think we saw a bit of retraction there.

We have a Prime Minister who himself is under multiple investigations by the Ethics Commissioner. One thing that keeps coming up—and I am not going to minimize this—is his vacation with the Aga Khan. I do not judge anybody. We work very hard as members of Parliament and people should be able to take their vacations when they can, but our Prime Minister has probably shown disregard for the rules. The rules do not apply to him in terms of public expenditures and he has refused to this point to answer any questions on the huge cost that has been passed on to Canadians as a result. He has deferred the questions and, some might say, blamed the very public servants whom we trust, the public servants who put on their uniforms every day knowing full well that they are going to encounter danger. When we pick up the phone and dial 911, they come running regardless of any illness or stress they are facing, without exception. Instead of answering the question, our Prime Minister has deferred every question on the cost of his trip to the RCMP, perhaps even blaming them for the exorbitant costs associated with it. That is shameful.

This speaks to where we are today with the Liberals who have continually blamed the government and Parliaments of previous years and have asserted that they are “modernizing” the government and this House. They use that term all the time.

Time and again, Liberal ministers and perhaps the Prime Minister himself have stood with their hands on their hearts and used the words “open and transparent” when talking about about consultations on things such as electoral reform and carbon pricing. They were going from coast to coast to coast to talk to Canadians about, let us get this right, a campaign promise of theirs. They were going to reduce the small business tax. Where did that go? I guess we are probably going to be talking about the liberals' unfair tax plan in a mere 45 minutes. That is another broken promise, and it is not open or transparent at all. It is disappointing.

The Liberals campaigned on real change. The second page of their campaign document read:

Together, we can restore a sense of trust in our democracy. Greater openness and transparency are fundamental to accomplishing this.

Those are great words, but we have not seen action by the Liberals. As a matter of fact, the next paragraph stated:

...our objective is nothing less than making transparency a fundamental principle across the Government of Canada.

Where has that gone? It is gone. Everything they are doing absolutely flies in the face of their campaign promises.

Again, they are talking about modernization of the House, doing things better here and better for Canadians. I am going to bring us back to just before we rose in June, the six or eight weeks when the House leader, a mere 18 months into her tenure as a member of Parliament, tabled a document, a discussion paper. She wanted to have a discussion in the House on how we could make the House better and do things better. I have been a member of Parliament for the same time she has, and while we all have ideas on how we can make things efficient and smooth, I would not be as arrogant to think I can put a paper together, put it out in the media, and suggest that we are going to do things better when this House belongs to Canadians. It does not belong to me or the members who are present. It belongs to those in the gallery and those who elect us to be here and represent Canadians.

What the Liberals have done with Bill C-58 under the guise of being open and transparent is to stop what has brought us here. We have a Prime Minister who is under multiple investigations. We have had patronage appointments, as access to information requests have found out. What they want to do is to stop that. They do not want Canadians to know. They want the power to say what is frivolous and without merit. That is unacceptable.

We are smack in the middle of international Right to Know Week, which runs from September 25 to October 1. There are 10 principles of right to know, which I found on the government website. Number one is that “Access to information is a right of everyone.” Number two is “Access is the rule—secrecy is the exception!” We agree. There are certain things that we do not put into the hands of others. As my hon. colleague mentioned earlier, defence issues are one of them, or things that could tip off those with nefarious ideas.

However, simple everyday common information that the public, and indeed the opposition and those who represent the public, require to do their everyday jobs is fundamental. The things they are talking about in Bill C-58 are inherent principles and rights that the public and opposition already have. This does not need to be done.

[Filomena Tassi, Liberal, Hamilton West—Ancaster—Dundas, ON]

Mr. Speaker, a couple of the member's colleagues and he questioned the commissioner's ability to declare requests vexatious or made in bad faith. The suggestion by a couple of his colleagues was that a better way to deal with this would be to go back to charging people who want to make access to information requests.

Does the member agree that the way to deal with vexatious and bad-faith submissions is to charge people for the requests, because that would serve as a deterrent, as his fellow colleagues have suggested?

[Todd Doherty, Conservative, Cariboo—Prince George, BC]

Mr. Speaker, again, this is just a deflection tactic by the government. The reality is that we are here to talk about its open and transparent ways. The Liberals have proven time and again over the last 24-plus months that they have not been open and transparent.

I was reading the bill, and proposed section 6 deals specifically with the government's ability to say no to requests that might be vexatious or seen to be frivolous. The fact is that the government would be able to make that decision when it should instead be made by an independent source regardless of the mechanism. It should be decided by an independent source if we are truly going to be open and transparent.

If the Liberals truly want to live up to being open and transparent, they would change the bill and go through with the good points in it and scrap the ones that are controversial.

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

Mr. Speaker, does the member agree with the NDP and our concerns that the Liberals are breaking their promise to make the Prime Minister's Office and ministers' offices open to these access to information requests? This is not open and transparent government. This is closing the doors.

[Todd Doherty, Conservative, Cariboo—Prince George, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I have not seen the amendment that my hon. B.C. colleague has mentioned and so I cannot speak directly to that, but I reiterate my comments. We are here today as a result of access to information requests. We are here because we have a Prime Minister, a cabinet, and a government that have been under investigation for questionable actions and decisions. I think I will leave it at that.

We need to make sure that Canadians have the mechanism to be able to ask for the information they require so that we can be held to the highest account, and indeed live up to the mandate letters that the Prime Minister gave his ministers by his own penmanship, saying that they should be able to withstand the highest public scrutiny. However, to this point, the reason we are here today is that time and again they have proven that they cannot.

[Gérard Deltell, Conservative, Louis-Saint-Laurent, QC]

Mr. Speaker, we are all politicians. Most of us were elected two years ago, and some were elected during by-elections. However, when we live by politics, it is very important to keep our promises.

What kind of signal is the government sending to people when the Liberals say something during the election campaign but do the reverse when they are in office?

[Todd Doherty, Conservative, Cariboo—Prince George, BC]

Mr. Speaker, the selective memory of our current government is interesting. Indeed, the Prime Minister himself, when he was a member of Parliament in the last Parliament, tabled Bill C-613, which absolutely flies in the face of what his current government is tabling. It is like the debt. It is like the carbon tax. It is like the small business tax that the Liberals promised to lower.

Once they got into power, they kicked up their heels and brought all their friends in and paid them via high-priced patronage appointments. They kind of forgot what their promises to Canadians were. However, I will tell the member that we on this side and Canadians will not forget.

[Brigitte Sansoucy, NDP, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC]

Mr. Speaker, during their respective campaigns, the Liberal government and the Conservative government before them promised to amend the Access to Information Act, specifically by expanding the act to apply to the Prime Minister's Office and ministers' offices. After the Conservative government failed to take the necessary steps to modernize the act, the Liberal government is making an attempt with Bill C-58, which seeks to amend the Access to Information Act,1983.

This law is essential because it allows Canadians to apply to federal institutions to get access to information on the government and on government institutions. With Bill C-58, the government's goal is to amend access to information, the Privacy Act and other acts that deal with the same subject.

Canada was a pioneer in access to information. We were one of the first countries to pass legislation about information, in 1983. Today, with this bill, the government is seriously compromising access to information.

The bill has many problems. Many recommendations from the Information Commissioner and from the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics have not been considered.

We are asking that all these recommendations be incorporated into the bill, which currently contains so few as to prompt us to wonder whether the government even read their work. It feels like it was all for naught. What is the point in asking expert organizations to make recommendations if those are not taken into account in the government's bill?

Members of the NDP, including the former member for Winnipeg Centre, tried several times in 2006, 2008, 2011, and 2014, to introduce proper legislation modernizing the Access to Information Act. All those initiatives were rejected even though the former government and the current government claimed to want to amend the act.

The NDP tried very hard to propose concrete amendments to modernize the act and allow people to have better access to information. However, the Conservative government and the current Liberal government both refused to listen.

Except for the fact that the Information Commissioner has the power to order the disclosure of information, which is one of the important points that we have long been calling for, and that the bill provides for a legislative review every five years, the NDP believes the bill is inadequate and does not go far enough. That is why the NDP is totally opposed to the bill at second reading.

Despite its election promises, the government does not really want to be transparent and that is unacceptable. I think it goes without saying that Canadians ought to have the right to review the information that the government does not want to publish. Since it governs at their pleasure, it is accountable to them.

The Liberals do not want to extend the act to the Prime Minister's and ministers' offices. Do they have something to hide? The government must set an example and obey the law. It cannot ask Canadians to obey the law if its own members do not. The government is not above the law, nor is it above Canadians.

Why is the government reneging on its promise? I know that this is not the first time that the government has broken one of its promises. The people have every right to wonder how many other election promises the Liberals will break, how much more backpedalling they will do, as they are doing now. The Liberals are hiding behind this bill and that is not right.

I will remind members what the Prime Minister kept saying during the campaign, which is, “A country's information system is at the very heart of the principle of open government.” “Transparent government is good government.”

The Prime Minister himself seems to be saying that the Liberal government is neither open nor good. He also claimed to want to extend the act to the Prime Minister's Office, to other ministers' offices, and to administrative institutions supporting Parliament and the courts. However, once in power, the government had no qualms about breaking this campaign promise, even though it was so important to Canadians, who have been calling for the modernization of the Access to Information Act for a few years now.

Perhaps the government should reacquaint itself with its election promises to realize that it did exactly the opposite in this bill. Canadians are increasingly interested in the government's actions.

In fact, they made 81% more access to information requests in 2015-16 as compared to five years ago, which is their right. Canadians want to know how their money is being spent and how the government acts by having access to some confidential documents. Canadians must be able to have access to information to avoid all sorts of scandals, such as the sponsorship scandal, in which the government lied to the public by refusing to release the invoices from its suppliers.

Canada currently ranks 49th in terms of right to information legislation. The bill would enable it to move up from 49th to 46th place, but this small gain shows full well that this bill does not go far enough. It is just window dressing.

With this bill, the government is making information less available to people. For example, the bill does away with the government's obligation to publish information about government organization mandates. It even gives officials the right to decline access to information requests that they feel, for whatever reason, are made in bad faith.

The NDP cannot support this bill at second reading for two main reasons. First, despite the election promise, it does not expand the act to cover the Prime Minister's and ministers' offices. Second, it does not reflect crucial recommendations by the Information Commissioner and the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics.

The Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics produced a report with 32 recommendations, and the Information Commissioner's report contains 85. The government had plenty to draw on, but it included very few of those recommendations in its bill. The Liberals are so proud of their proactive disclosure idea, but it does not really give people better access to information. The government should also provide criteria for deciding whether a request is overly broad or cannot be processed. Departments will also not be required to publish their org charts, their powers, duties, and functions, or descriptions of all classes of documents they are responsible for.

The bill imposes no specific legal obligation to document cases of failure to comply or appropriate sanctions, which was a key issue for the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics. This bill also fails to shorten deadlines for access to information, which are currently much too long at up to 200 days, and to reduce the number of extensions.

For example, in April 2016, The Globe and Mail reported that it took more than a year for the RCMP to provide them with statistics for its series of investigative reports titled Unfounded, which revealed that police dismiss one in five sexual assault claims as baseless. What makes the government think it can take so long to provide citizens with this information? This clearly shows that access to information is vital and that it can bring to light certain things that organizations and citizens need to know about.

Naturally, we want the government to extend the act to cover Prime Minister's Office and the offices of other ministers as well, which is a priority for citizens and one of the main changes they have been calling for. We support the recommendations made by the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics and the Information Commissioner. We need to modernize the Access to Information Act, but we cannot allow the government to take an authoritarian approach and do away with some of the rights currently provided under the act in its present form.

Canadians do not want their rights taken away. They are simply asking for the act to be modernized, because it is now out of date. Canada was seen as a pioneer in the area of access to information. With this bill, the government is trying to take rights away from people rather than to give them more, as it promised during the election campaign. Canadians deserve answers from the government. It must explain to us all why it has decided to limit access to information from the Prime Minister's Office and the offices of the other ministers and, in its bill, to remove some rights that were, in fact, in the act.

The government must explain to us all why it is not keeping one of its main campaign promises. It is the government's duty to provide explanations to the Canadians who are demanding answers.

In conclusion, access to information is the basis of democracy. Sadly, the government is trying to obstruct democracy with this bill, even though it promised to expand the legislation for Canadians. There was never any question of a bill of this kind during their campaign.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, the legislation before us would make significant changes to the way information would be accessed. There is a wonderful component about proactive disclosure, something we believe Canadians want and deserve. We should support that. There is an interesting aspect that empowers the commissioner to order information to be released. This is one of the strongest aspects in the legislation. In so many ways, our system will be healthier as a direct result. There would be more accountability and transparency. The bill is all about that.

Would the member not acknowledge and support the principles of what our government has been able to achieve within the legislation, and perhaps share some of the ideas she talks about, possibly at the standing committee? We know we are not going to wait another 30 years before we have to modernize the act. The legislation calls for reviewing and updating the act on a more regular basis. Would she not agree that this is good for Canadians?

[Brigitte Sansoucy, NDP, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC]

Mr. Speaker, that is exactly the issue. I want to support more than just principles. I want to support concrete actions.

We can have proactive disclosure now. We do not need a bill for it; it is already possible. It is important not to confuse proactive disclosure with access to information. Canadians must understand that it is not the same thing and that access to information is not provided through proactive disclosure. They are two separate things.

I think it is unfortunate that this bill is now mixing up the two when there is a clear difference. A tangible action would be to follow the 32 recommendations of the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics, and the 85 recommendations of the Office of the Information Commissioner. Those are tangible actions that I am ready to support.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, my sincere thanks to my colleague, the member for Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, for her speech. I completely agree with her that this bill is weaker than what the Liberal Party had promised in the past election campaign.

Does my colleague think it is possible to propose changes to this bill in the committee in question? If the government were to support the amendments to strengthen this bill, would the NDP support them?

[Brigitte Sansoucy, NDP, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC]

Mr. Speaker, not only is it possible to improve this bill, it is vital that we do so.

Yesterday at an event, I noticed how popular my colleague is with young women.

I am the mother of teenagers and young adults. I have noticed among some of my constituents that younger people want and have access to information. I am always amazed to see how much more my children know than I did when I was their age. They want to know. They seek information. They will quickly realize that they have hit a wall when it comes to accessing information.

To meet current needs, it is vital that we have real legislation that provides access to information. Today, people want to know and it is their right; they need information. We have to give them the means to access it.

[François Choquette, NDP, Drummond, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak to Bill C-58, An Act to amend the Access to Information Act and the Privacy Act and to make consequential amendments to other Acts, because in my work as an MP I often have to obtain information beyond that provided by the government.

It is very important to me to speak to this bill. I have come to realize that Canadians across the country, including the constituents of Drummond, often seek information to which they do not necessarily have access. It should be known that the government decides to voluntarily disclose some information, but not all. I discovered this when I was elected in 2011. I was looking for a lot of information about shale gas and fracking, because that was a hot topic in the riding of Drummond and across Quebec at the time. I realized that the federal government at the time had conducted research and several studies and put together several review committees, but that not all these reports had been made public.

I ended up having to submit some access to information requests, which is when I realized the limitations of the Access to Information Act. Many passages in the documents I received had been blacked out and made unreadable. Other documents took months and months to reach me. Furthermore, I recently asked a series of questions about the appointment of Ms. Meilleur as official languages commissioner. She eventually took herself out of the running, which I thought was a wise decision. At the time, I asked the government some questions about contact between Ms. Meilleur and officials in the Prime Minister's office and contact between her and officials at Canadian Heritage. Since the answers I received were totally unsatisfactory, I submitted some access to information requests. Right now, I am told, the wait time to receive even a partial answer from Canadian Heritage is 105 days. For the Treasury Board, it is 90 days, and for the Department of Justice, it is 120 days.

I am not going receive my answers before the new commissioner is appointed. It is easy to see how important it is to have access to this information. I would like to congratulate all the members on the ethics committee for the work they did. They conducted a study and issued a number of recommendations. The ethics commissioner made the same recommendations. The time was ripe for this debate, seeing as this law has been on the books for more than 30 years and never been reviewed. It is worth noting that the sole reason we have this bill is to fulfill one of the Liberals' election promises. The Prime Minister promised during the campaign that he would review the Access to Information Act and extend this act to cover the Prime Minister's office and the ministers' offices.

Unfortunately, I do not see that anywhere in Bill C-58. I asked my Liberal colleagues about this, and they told me it had been extended to ministers' offices and the Prime Minister's office, but proactive disclosure does not mean extending the Access to Information Act to the Prime Minister's and ministers' offices. It is not the same thing. Proactive disclosure, as the word "proactive" implies, means that people choose what they want to disclose, but often, what people want is the information the government chooses not to disclose. That is the difference, and that is why the Access to Information Act is so important.

Earlier, I shared some examples to do with shale gas, fracking, and the appointment of an official languages commissioner who apparently had ties to the government. In cases like those, it is important for people to have access to information that the government chooses not to disclose for various reasons.

I have some other concerns about this bill. For example, it adds new loopholes. As I mentioned, for various reasons, information can be blacked out or entire reports can be nothing but blank pages. The pages exist, but all that is provided is blank pages. That is a problem we have already.

Now there will be a new loophole allowing departments to decline to process requests that they deem overly broad, that they feel would seriously interfere with government operations, or that they think are made in bad faith.

I will come back to those last two very important elements. Obviously, if the government deliberately decides, for example, not to disclose large quantities of research and studies conducted by Environment Canada and Natural Resources Canada on fracking and shale gas and I request it, a lot of work will need to be done to gather and process all of that information. I am not asking for it because I am acting in bad faith or because I want to interfere with the government's work. I am asking for it because residents of Drummond and Canadians paid for that information. It should already be available. However, I have to go through the Access to Information Act to give people access to that information. The government cannot start saying that this will create too much work. Of course if the government does not disclose information proactively, then it will create a lot of work for itself down the road.

The government could also determine that the request was made in bad faith. No definition, details, or explanation is provided in that regard. That means that anyone can decide that a request was made in bad faith. If I ask a question about the connection between the current government and Ms. Meilleur's appointment as official languages commissioner, my request could be deemed to have been made in bad faith, when in actual fact it is extremely important that Canadians have that information in order to make sure that the Liberals do not make the same mistake again.

This is completely unacceptable, and that is why we will be voting against this bill. For a government that claims to want to be transparent and to improve access to information, this bill is not going to work at all.

I would like to talk about the battle that the NDP has been waging since the mid-2000s to improve the Access to Information Act. My former colleague, MP Pat Martin, tried a number of times to improve the Access to Information Act. Unfortunately, the Conservative government at the time thwarted all of his attempts. It was really disappointing.

We have nothing against the government's much-vaunted proactive disclosure. It is good in principle. However, proactive disclosure is not the same thing as the Access to Information Act. Obviously, if we already had more proactive disclosure, we would not have to submit so many access to information requests. However, the fact remains that the government could still, at any time and for any reason, decide not to disclose certain information. That is why the Access to Information Act is so important. It needs to be revised and improved. This bill will not do the trick, and that is why we need to fix it.

[Dan Vandal, Liberal, Saint Boniface—Saint Vital, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I firmly believe that this bill will improve access to information for all Canadians. According to the specifics of the bill, proactive disclosure will apply to 240 government departments and agencies, including the Prime Minister's office, MPs' offices, and the institution of Parliament.

Why is the NDP siding with the Conservatives in refusing to give Canadians better access to information?

[François Choquette, NDP, Drummond, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague from Saint Boniface—Saint Vital, who does such excellent work on the Standing Committee on Official Languages, on which I also sit.

As the member well knows, proactive disclosure is not the same thing as direct access to information. He knows full well that Canadian Heritage refused to proactively disclose the connection between the department and the individual it had decided to appoint as official languages commissioner. He knows full well that the Prime Minister's Office refused to proactively disclose its connection to Ms. Meilleur when it decided to appoint her official languages commissioner.

That is why we need access to information legislation that is robust and that applies to the Prime Minister's Officer and all ministers' offices, but this bill does not provide for that.

[Todd Doherty, Conservative, Cariboo—Prince George, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my hon. colleague from Saint Boniface—Saint Vital for his assurances that this document will indeed provide Canadians with more access to information, but I want to ask my hon. colleague from Drummond if he feels some uneasiness.

Time and again, for the last 24 months, we have heard promises of openness and transparency from the government, but it has again failed us. It has failed Canadians. It has not lived up to those promises time and again. This is merely another opportunity for the government to pick and choose what it tells Canadians, to go about things its own way, to make the laws for itself, and to shut out Canadians and those who have been elected to represent them from the information that is critical to Canadians.

I wonder if he feels exactly the same way as those on this side of the House.

[François Choquette, NDP, Drummond, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague for his question and his comment.

He is quite right. This is another broken promise from this Liberal government. It made a clear, specific promise that it would extend the Access to Information Act to the Prime Minister's Office and ministers' offices.

Why did the government go back on its word? Why did it not keep its promise? I do not understand. We find it completely unacceptable to renege on such a clear and specific promise. This promise was even explicit in the mandate letter.

It is unacceptable to backtrack without a valid reason, and yet that is what the Liberals are doing. They are trying to play a shell game by saying that there will be proactive disclosure, but that is not the same thing. One must not confuse carrots and potatoes; they are two different things. They want us to believe their malarkey.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, as we gather today to debate Bill C-58, we should be mindful of the fact that this is international Right to Know Week. As we gather here, in another part of town the Information Commissioner is holding a full-day conference on declaring that access to information is a fundamental human right. In that case, I wonder if my colleague would agree that our human rights are violated when Bill C-58 falls so short of being true access to open government and access to information.

[François Choquette, NDP, Drummond, QC]

Mr. Speaker, not only does Bill C-58 not extend the Access to Information Act, but it goes even further by giving departments loopholes so they can refuse to process access to information requests on the grounds that, for example, they were made in bad faith or would create too much work for public servants. The government cannot do things like that.

I have submitted plenty of access to information requests about fracking and shale gas. Of course the departments got annoyed at me for pestering them, but why did they not disclose that information themselves? Because they did not want to.

It could easily happen again. The government will disclose the information that makes it look good, and any information that could be harmful or embarrassing to it will be tucked away where no one can get at it. This is utterly unacceptable. These are not the actions of a transparent government that respects the people. It needs to change its attitude.

[The Deputy Speaker, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Is the House ready for the question?

[Some hon. members]

Question.

[The Deputy Speaker, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

The question is on the motion. Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?