Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak in the debate with a great deal of interest and excitement. Excitement may be too strong a word given the nature of the debate that has taken place this morning.
I want to comment on a statement which was made in the questions and comments. The issue of how one deals with this information and the importance of this information in the growth and functioning of our economy over the next decade or so is vitally important.
I support some of the statements that were behind some of the questions and the response I just heard. I applaud the members for actually discussing the bill. When I sat in the House this morning I was quite disturbed that we were not talking about the bill. We were using it to play the kinds of games that are played in the House.
This is a critically important issue. I have spent an enormous amount of time working on and thinking about this issue. I want to walk through some of that. I want to suggest to members including the member for Souris—Moose Mountain who in his intent in his questions is absolutely right, that this is an issue which, in all of its forms and this privacy bill slices through one small aspect of it, will come before the House many times over the next decade. It is an issue that will, it is my belief, cause some fundamental restructuring in how democracy functions in this country.
I have argued as recently as a couple of weeks ago in a speech I gave here in Ottawa that unless government begins to get its policy mind around what is happening with its use of information technologies, we will simply continue to fail in the introduction of information technology to government. I want to preface those remarks by saying one thing. This is not to say that this government and this government alone will fail. This issue affects democracies all around the world.
I have spent 20 years working in this area, 13 years as part of a research group that studies these issues on an ongoing basis. One of the things we discovered back in the late 1980s was that despite the fact that government was introducing information technologies, was investing in computers and connectivity and the high speed networks and all of those things, government was not demonstrating any of the structural changes that we were witnessing in the private sector.
It is interesting that if we look at what has occurred in the private sector over the last couple of decades, we can certainly see the precursors of this in very large organizations. Back in the 1960s they began to adopt mainframes and started to automate some aspects of their operations. The real explosion began in the 1980s with the introduction of personal computers. Their low cost gave companies the ability to adopt the technology and spread it widely among their employees.
One of the things that is observed after some period of time with the technology is that the organization begins to change. It does not just change in terms of its cost structure or the way it delivers services; it begins to fundamentally reorganize physically. It was an interesting phenomena.
People who are interested in this have heard about how organizations become flatter, they de-layer, they push some decisions out to the point of contact with customers. They take other information back to the centre. Senior management is involved in decisions that otherwise would have been delegated to middle managers and fewer managers are intermediating. We see that.
We turn to government and we have seen in the same period that government spent hundreds of millions of dollars on information technology. However we have not witnessed any of these changes that are so common in private sector organizations.
That is not to say government has not made use of technology. We can send out 10 million cheques with ease. We can do very large transaction based operations. The departments shuffle around a bit, but essentially the structure of departments is pretty much what it has been for the last 20 or 30 years. The way this place operates is not that radically different from the way it has operated historically. But the outside world has changed enormously.
Bill Gates in his latest book posits in the opening chapter that the 1980s was the decade of quality and the 1990s was the decade of restructuring and the decade we are currently in will be the decade of velocity. What he is really saying is that change is taking place so rapidly in the private sector that the challenge for any organization functioning in the economy is to deal with the issue of constant evolution and change. We need to be able to manage that as part of our ongoing environment in order to be successful.
I like his framework for that. We heard a lot about quality in the 1980s. Dr. Denning was all around the world and there was lots of work on quality movements in government.
The fundamental issue with quality movement was the ability to have low cost networks that were powerful enough to collect information and feed it back to the point of decision in real time. If in a supply chain or a production chain defects were seen in the output, the process could be modified while operating in order to improve the quality. We saw the rise of ISO-9000, 9001 and 9002 as organizations became better at heading toward defect free operations.
It also brought a lot of information back to the decision point. Information in and of itself has some unique characteristics worth thinking about. This takes us into the decade of restructuring. The big difference was that in the mid to late 1980s as they began to develop networks, they were not just bringing back the information from one production chain but from a whole lot. All of a sudden the information could be accumulated if they had the strength, the power and the tools and they could see their organization differently. For the first time they could actually visualize their organization. That allowed them to make changes and receive feedback and see what happened. In the same way we would change the production system in some ways we would be able to actually look at and change the structure of the organization.
A very good study was done on this in a book published by MIT in 1990. It talked about the issue of networking and the building of tools that allowed us to see the organization in a way which allowed one to affect it.
What happened in government? What is the nature of the quality movement in government? What is the system that looks at interaction with a client, be it a tax filer, an EI recipient or someone who has a complaint? What is the feedback on how that is processed? What is done to improve the quality of that interaction so that the client gets better service? Some attempts have been made to do that but they have not been terribly successful to date and there is a body of thought on that.
I have already mentioned the lack of any appearance of physical restructuring. Re-engineering in government tended to become privatization. A number of members in the House were active on the transport committee which I chaired when we dealt with the privatization of the ports. There were arguments that I supported at the time although I now have come to think about them.
The argument was that we had to separate the port from the government because it needed to innovate more rapidly. It needed to make changes in real time. It needed to be more responsive to local conditions in order to deal with the issue of increasing demand for change. It was the velocity issue coming at us.
We ended up taking the ports away from government. We said we would privatize the airlines, the ports, anything that could be justifiably privatized. If we turn that argument around, we really said that government was too slow and incapable of functioning in today's world. We lose something by not challenging ourselves to look at how these information tools can assist us.
As we accumulate information, we have an ability to view the organization in more holistic ways. I want to lay out one other argument before I try to pull them together.
There is a Canadian economist by the name of Harold Innis who wrote extensively during the thirties and forties. He started by doing standard economic studies, but as he got into one area, the study of the forest industry, that led him into the study of one of the great consumers of forest products, newsprint, which led him to look at communications. I think he is one of the most brilliant thinkers that Canada has ever produced. The work which he produced actually underpinned the work which Marshall McLuhan did later. Marshall became much more famous for it, but I think it was Mr. Innis who really pointed the way.
What he noted was that throughout history the dominant groups and cultures have been able to monopolize the knowledge and the information. They maintained their control by monopolizing that information until another group came along with a new technology which knocked them off the pedestal. Historically those were fought through wars, conquests and all of those other things.
He also noted that with the arrival of systems that started to break down those monopolies, the classic one being the printing press, all of a sudden, at a low cost, people could get information. More people could have it, which would educate people. It was no longer simply the priests handwriting books in a few back rooms. All of a sudden books could be distributed to a lot of people. A lot of people could become educated.
It is interesting. There are those, and I count myself among them, who draw a line between the availability of the information and the ability to educate ourselves and the rise of modern democracies as we see them.
For those who go back as far as I do, they will recall that during the late sixties and early seventies there was a lot of talk about the problems with dictatorships in South America. One fellow wrote a book, which I still have and quite like. He said that if we want to solve the problem of dictators and oppressive regimes, we should not send the population guns, we should send them books. If we educate them they will sort out all of the other problems. When a lot of people have access to the information, and when a lot of people have a common base of understanding, they will take charge of their own lives.
Think about that for a second. There is a modern example of that. There is a man by the name of Peter O'Toole from the University of California who wrote an article about how the Berlin wall fell as a result of the existence of fax machines. The East German government could no longer control the flow of information, hence the people could organize and communicate in ways they never could before. After a while a population which does that cannot be controlled. They cannot be oppressed in the same way.
The same thing is happening in China. I have spent a lot of time in China in the last few years and I am always a bit bemused, which is a polite word, at how every now and again they shut down the Internet. There is a huge struggle going on in China between those who would modernize and those who would keep the old system. Just recently there was an article about how they want to build a fire wall on the Internet to prevent the Chinese people from getting access to disturbing information.
In a funny way, as I was reading that article, I had one of those enlightening moments. In many ways we are not different. I want to be very careful and say that by “we” I mean modern democracies; Europe, the U.S. and Canada. We tend to hold too much information about the operation of the government and the exercise of power in the country in one central little group.
I argue strongly, and I believe strongly, that one of the reasons we have not been able to introduce information tools to government successfully is because we have not confronted one of the underlying issues, which is the democratizing effects they have.
I would be prepared at another time to debate direct democracy because I think there is a huge argument there. I am one who believes that it is inevitable in some form. But even now I think that some of the resistance is no different.
If we think about it historically, when the nobles took hold of King John and said he had to pay attention to them, they had a comfortable system for a few centuries until the landed began to get a little more knowledge, more education and better organized. They said they wanted in too, and the Commons came into existence.
As people in the middle class developed and became wealthy, women became educated. All of a sudden they said “Wait a second. What is this nonsense?” and the Suffragette movement arose. The same thing happened with aboriginals, and it happened just recently with apartheid. It is this issue of education and access which I think is a very, very powerful force.
I do not want to suggest that what is happening in Canada or in the U.S. is akin to something as severe and grotesque as apartheid, but there are elements of the sense of trying to control everything and own everything.
I argue that is why we cannot introduce information technology to government, because it is too disturbing. It will always be disturbing until we turn the paradigm around.
I will tell the House where the issue of privacy arose. When we looked at the issue of how we could introduce this, we kept hearing that privacy was the reason we could not do it. Privacy was the thing that would stop it. I always thought that was simply security. I have no fear of the hackers. We can keep the information secure, in large part. That to me is a false issue.
We organized a bunch of individuals from departments that were thoughtful about this and had big client service loads. We brought in some of the experts, the privacy commissioner, Mr. Phillips, whom I think is an extremely important thinker on this subject, along with others from this Chamber and the other Chamber, and we workshopped this.
What emerged from the privacy issue that I thought was so important was that it was not a concern about security. People accept that we can do that. It was a concern about rights. It was a human rights argument. It was: “What are my rights relative to the government? Until we satisfy that question I will not be a co-operator in this”. Once more it has that democratizing effect. “I will give you information, but I want information back”. That is what poses the challenge to us, and I believe it is a challenge which the House will have to confront and which the government will have to confront.
I was recently invited by members of the Dutch government to speak to them on the subject, because they are having exactly the same problem in the European community.
What is interesting about the bill is that it is not a public sector bill but the same issue arises. When the Department of Industry started going down this road, I argued with the minister. I said that we needed privacy legislation. He said “We want the regulation to be light. We want to do like the U.S. We want to have a voluntary system”.
There is all this pro-government, anti-government, government is a bad thing nonsense that goes on in some of the ideological debates that take place here, so the department was headed down the road of having no regulation, following the voluntary model, until the people who were at the front edge of the e-commerce world said that if we did not have a decent privacy regime people would not play. It is a powerful force when it comes to government, but it is the same force in business. “I will not go to your business unless I have some guarantees about how I will be treated”. It was the community which came back and told us to forget about not having regulations. We need regulations because it is a customer driven business and the customers want protection.
This is an important piece of legislation. It does not go all the way, but I think it is fundamentally important to getting Canada further down the road in terms of not just e-commerce, but understanding and using these very powerful information tools and understanding the relationship between individuals and large powerful organizations, because I think all of us in the House want the control to remain with the citizens.
Mr. Speaker, I think that is as far as I will go. There might be a question or two and I am prepared to go down any of the roads I have opened.
