Mr. Speaker, I too am pleased to join the debate on Bill C-17. As has been mentioned by other members this morning, we have gone through numerous processes on pretty much the same bill for over a year now. Here we are once again discussing what is now Bill C-17.
The Minister of Transport calls it the public safety act. Without question, in my view that is somewhat of a misleading name. The bill has very little to do with enhancing public safety and has everything to do with grandstanding by the Liberal government, a kind of grandstanding that is very dangerous to the freedom of Canadians. The government's approach to public security has more to do with public relations and trying to look like it is doing something about security than what it actually should be doing, the things that are necessary to counter terrorism.
The bill gives sweeping powers to government ministers to do whatever they want, whenever they want, supposedly in the name of security. The only precedent for something like this in the history of our great democracy was the War Measures Act.
The last time the War Measures Act was used was in October 1970. Hundreds of innocent Canadians were dragged from their houses, arrested and held without charge while the government tried to find a tiny group of terrorists who had assassinated Quebec cabinet minister Pierre Laporte and kidnapped a British trade envoy.
History came to show that using the War Measures Act to crush the FLQ was like using a wrecking ball to squash a fly. A fly swatter would have worked just fine and would not have knocked the wall down. All the unjustified arrests of innocent people who had nothing to do with FLQ terrorists shook Canadians' faith in their government and showed us just how fragile our freedom really is, even in Canada.
I say this as someone who was just a teenager in western Canada at the time. I remember very vividly the whole issue related to the War Measures Act. It was something that at that point was quite far away from southwestern Saskatchewan. I had great feelings for the people of Quebec having to go through all that they were going through during that period of time.
At least the War Measures Act was repealed after the FLQ was crushed, but this bill is like a permanent war measures act. It allows government ministers, any time they want to, to issue executive orders covering a huge range of areas. These orders have the force of law the minute the minister signs them. This kind of power in the hands of one individual is unheard of in a democracy like Canada.
Normally when a minister wants to change a regulation, it goes through a process that involves public consultation and a regulatory impact study. Then the change has to be approved by cabinet. With this bill the Liberal government is saying it wants to bypass the democratic process and issue decrees whenever it wants. That means no public input and no impact study.
The government says it will only use these new powers in an emergency, but here is the kicker: there is absolutely no accountability to the public when a minister uses this power. When a minister makes one of these decrees that the bill allows him or her to make, the minister never has to explain to the public why he or she did it. Ministers can just do it and they never have to explain themselves.
Most people out there think, “What the heck. This is never going to affect me. I am a law-abiding Canadian citizen. I don't have to worry about this”. That just is not the reality. In the course of even the last five or six years in Canada, whether it was the APEC summit in B.C. or the Quebec summit, there have been numerous cases where civil liberties were infringed upon, where actions taken by our own government and in some cases our own Prime Minister were really extremely questionable. That has led a number of Canadians to believe that this is an issue, and just what will happen?
Along with that we have a situation where we went through the events of September 11. We responded as a nation to September 11. We responded on security issues. The security of Canadians was protected on September 11 without the bill. In all the rush to come out with a new bill, that we had to get on it right away, that we had to get something in place or Canadians would be threatened and the whole country would be up in smoke, it is over a year later and we are still here. The security of Canadians is still in place; it is still intact without the bill, without jeopardizing their freedoms.
One of the great legislators and statesmen of the 20th century, Senator William Proxmire, who represented the people of Wisconsin in the United States senate for over three decades, once said:
Power always has to be kept in check; power exercised in secret, especially under the cloak of national security, is doubly dangerous.
These words were especially meaningful coming from Senator Proxmire because he was elected to the U.S. Senate in the seat vacated by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy in 1957.
Senator McCarthy of course is known for McCarthyism, the time in the 1950s when America tore itself apart looking for communists. Like the Canadian government did to hundreds of suspected FLQ terrorists under the War Measures Act, McCarthyism wrongly persecuted thousands of innocent Americans who had absolutely nothing to do with communism.
When Senator Proxmire, McCarthy's successor, spoke those words about the need to keep power in check and about how power exercised in secret under the cloak of national security is doubly dangerous, America was just coming to grips with the mistakes and excesses of the McCarthy era.
Senator Proxmire did not want Americans to forget the hard lesson they learned in the McCarthy era about how fragile freedom is. Canadians learned that lesson in October 1970. It is a real tragedy that the Liberal government has forgotten that lesson.
It is hard for me to understand how in our country's history we can forget some of those very strong lessons. We have discussed numerous times in the House an apology asked for by Japanese Canadians who were interned during the war with Japan, and by Ukrainian Canadians who were interned because of wars and conflicts somewhere else.
I am of Ukrainian descent and I never knew that Ukrainians were interned at any point in Canadian history until I became a member of Parliament. Within the context of Canadian history taught in our schools, the tendency was to leave out all those nasty little things the Canadian government did. I knew about McCarthyism in the United States. I knew about a number of other things that were going on, but somehow the nasty things the Canadian government did never got into our texts.
I know it now and I am happy to say that in our schools the true history is now coming out. We were not always this wonderful, equality driven society with a great democracy and opportunities for free speech and opportunities to do the things we need to do in our lives. We were not always like that.
We have some sour times in our history and we should not be ashamed to admit to them. By not acknowledging and talking about them, we end up in situations like what we are in today where we are discussing something like a war measures act and somehow making it okay to attack certain groups of our population, of our own citizens because we are afraid of terrorism and afraid for our security.
There is no need to do that. We do not have to lose our democracy in order to do that. I really thought we had learned that lesson. Until we become the group targeted, we somehow always think it will never be us.
I was at the Quebec summit and saw some of the things that were going on. I saw the media's revelation of the Quebec summit and how it portrayed everything as being violent. I was part of some 60,000 protestors who were very much peaceful protestors.
As one of the peaceful protestors, this type of a bill bothers me as well. I saw things that were misleading to the rest of the public who were not there, through the media and through some of the government's actions. I am concerned.
The Liberal government wants members to believe that the powers the ministers will have are limited. It even went as far as withdrawing the original version of the bill and reintroducing it in a slightly watered down form from last session. This publicity stunt, which is all it is, is supposed to make us all think that everything is fine. Canadians are supposed to be reassured because these executive orders have to be reviewed by cabinet within six weeks instead of the three months under the original bill.
The fact remains that individual cabinet ministers can exercise these powers in secret. There is no public accountability for their actions. There is no obligation to show the public that a decree issued under the authority of the bill is justified. Cabinet ministers can do what they want and never have to explain why.
The ability of the public to challenge an action taken under this legislation in the courts is also extremely limited, which removes the courts from their constitutional role as a check on executive power.
The other check on executive power, namely Parliament, is reduced to an afterthought. Decrees issued under this legislation only have to be tabled in Parliament 15 sitting days after they are issued and there is no authority for Parliament to overrule them.
There is no doubt in my mind that as a Parliament we can come together in a matter of hours, but certainly within a matter of days. There is absolutely no reason for there to be a delay of even 14 or 15 days before issues come to Parliament. Times have changed. We have access to air services from all over our country. I would be surprised if someone here said that they could not get here within a period of three days. I have seen us do it in the past. Our parties have contacted us and we have all made a point of getting here in a very timely manner.
By sidelining Parliament and the courts, the Liberal government has done the other thing that Proxmire warned against. It has removed the checks and balances on power.
I cannot help but ask myself why the Liberal government thinks a bill as draconian as this one is necessary. Bringing in a permanent war measures act like this is not a rational approach to dealing with terrorism. Terrorists like Osama bin Laden are out to destroy western democracy. If our reaction to the threat of terrorism is to undermine freedom and democracy in the name of national security as the bill does, then we are just giving the terrorists what they want. The government clearly has not thought through the consequences of what it is proposing.
In my role as the NDP transport critic, I spent the last few months fighting against another one of the Liberal government's knee-jerk reactions, the new $24 government security tax on air travel. This is another case where the government acted without thinking. It imposed this huge tax on an industry that was already in trouble without doing any impact analysis whatsoever. Indeed, it based the amount of the tax on a poll done by the ministry of finance, not a sober economic analysis, but a poll taken shortly after September 11 to see how much it could squeeze out of Canadians.
According to an analysis released recently by the Air Transport Association of Canada, the air industry passenger loads dropped by over 18% this summer after the Liberal government implemented the tax. The economy is taking a huge hit because of this tax and it is putting all kinds of jobs at risk.
The worst part of all about this new $24 tax on air travel is that most of the money is not even going to airport security. The tax is only a smokescreen the government dreamed up to try and give the impression that it is improving airport security and covers for the fact that it really has no plan whatsoever.
In that sense Bill C-17 is exactly like the airport security tax. It is obvious that the Liberal government has no idea what to do about the threat of international terrorism. If it had any kind of a plan for dealing with terrorism, it would have a bill full of specifics. Instead it has written itself a blank cheque. It has as much admitted that it does not know what to do about terrorism, so with the bill it is saying to just give it a bunch of sweeping powers to bypass the entire democratic decision making process and do whatever it wants when it thinks there might be a security risk.
That is not how to protect the public. The public is protected by being proactive, by identifying risks and threats and doing something about them before they threaten the public.
To be fair, there are some specifics in the bill that the NDP supports. We support provisions to fight money laundering by terrorist groups, we support the new criminal offences for bomb threats, and we support the implementation of international conventions to fight the proliferation of biological weapons, explosives and people smuggling by organized crime. Unfortunately, these are just tangents of the main thrust of the bill, the blank cheque for government ministers to do what they want.
There are plenty of practical things the government could do to make us safer from terrorism rather than this reactive blank cheque approach. People are not made safer by attacking democracy and invading the privacy of citizens like this bill does. Safety is improved by identifying specific risks and addressing them with specific targeted measures. The New Democratic Party has been saying that our police and military, the frontline forces Canadians depend on for security, are woefully under-resourced. Yet the Liberal government refuses to increase their funding.
I am concerned about the lack of attention in this bill to modes of transport other than air. Let me give one example of what I am talking about. Shortly after September 11 the U.S. government identified passenger rail as a potential terrorist target. In response, a bill was initiated by the U.S. Senate to fund specific measures to improve rail security like modernizing rail bridges and tunnels, and stationing more emergency personnel in railway stations. The Liberal government's failure to take any proactive steps to stop terrorism betrays its lack of a plan.
As a member of Parliament sent here by my constituents to watch out for their interests, I cannot in good conscience support a bill that lets the government exercise so much power in secret. What the government should do is take the bill back to the drawing board and come back when it is ready to propose some specific steps to solve specific problems.
Before I conclude I want to leave the House with a final piece of food for thought. A few months ago the American documentary news program 60 Minutes accused Canada of being a haven for terrorists. It alleged that there were about 50 terrorist groups using Canada as a base to target the United States. When that report came out, the Liberal government aggressively denied it. It said that the RCMP and CSIS were on top of things and everything was fine. They knew exactly what was going on.
If that is the case, then why do we need this bill? Something does not add up here. If the government is on top of things as it says it is, why is it in such a rush to pass this bill? What is the big emergency? This inconsistency goes to show how reactionary the government has become since September 11, jumping back and forth from one extreme to another with no plan, and no vision for dealing with the changes and horrible events that September 11 brought to the world.
The bill may satisfy the Liberal government's pollsters and spin doctors who say the government must be seen as doing something, anything, just so it can say it has done something about security. However, it will not satisfy the real need to take a proactive approach in eliminating terrorism. The cost of this bill to our democratic freedom is much too high.
