moved:
That, in the opinion of this House, political parties should in their advertising or promotion refrain from using the name or the likeness of any individual without having first obtained the written consent of that individual.
Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure for me to be here in the last hour of the last day of what will certainly end the spring session. Probably, as most people assume, there will be a prorogation and a new speech from the throne in the fall.
There is a certain closing of the circle on this motion. I presented it for consideration on the first day I had the privilege of sitting here as a member which was September 23, 1997. I want to take the House through what the developments have been since then.
To get into what has transpired and what led to this motion, one has to go back to December 1998 when the Prime Minister of Canada participated in a town hall debate on CBC television. People from various parts of the country were flown in to put questions to the Prime Minister.
One of those questioners turned out to be someone who is a resident of the city of Regina and the federal constituency of Palliser who asked a question on unemployment. The answer from the Prime Minister triggered a lot of interest and controversy for several weeks. As a result, a clip of that was seen on national and regional television. There were pictures in the paper and so on for several weeks thereafter.
Then we move forward to the election campaign that was called on April 27, 1998. About two-thirds of the way through that campaign, the individual was astonished to be told that her image and a voice-over of the question she had asked of the Prime Minister was being used in television ads by a particular political party. She immediately went to the party and was told that the ad would be withdrawn in a couple of days. She wanted to know how they had managed to run her likeness in their advertising without first obtaining any consent from the individual in question. Her name is Lori Foster.
Without putting too fine a point on it, it is fair to say she felt that she was given the runaround. There were commitments made that the ad was going to be withdrawn in a couple of days, that it was only running in western Canada and some other places, all of which proved to be untrue.
The ad ran right up until the end of the campaign, the last day of advertising prior to the June 2 election. It was certainly running nationwide because Ms. Foster was getting phone calls from her friends and acquaintances who live in Atlantic Canada. They said that they had seen her on television and had seen her picture in newspaper ads.
She had contacted the party in question. It was the Reform Party that ran that ad. She thought she had received assurances that the ad was going to be withdrawn immediately or very quickly. It was not true.
After the election on June 2, Lori Foster was one of the first individuals to contact me in my new role as member of parliament for Palliser. She said that she did not want what happened to her to happen to anyone else ever again. She thought it was a terrible invasion of her privacy. She had not been consulted in advance by the party in question before her likeness and her words were used in a television ad. She came to her new member of parliament and I took the matter to the House of Commons on September 23.
I want to quickly go over the technicalities. It is true that Ms. Foster did not sign a release at the time of the news broadcast on CBC television. She was advised by the corporation that segments of the program might be rebroadcast for news purposes as they subsequently were.
In her letter to me following the June 2 election, she wrote “By using my likeness and identifying me by name and city, the implication was that I was a supporter of the Reform Party. I do not want what happened to me to happen to others”.
I agree entirely with the sentiments expressed by Ms. Foster in her letter. But I also want to say very clearly to the House that I do not want this to be interpreted as an embarrassment of one political party at the expense of all the others.
In my lifetime I have worked in the backrooms of my political party, the New Democratic Party. I know that in the life of an election campaign things happen extremely quickly. One party presents an attack ad. The focus on the party that was attacked in that ad is to get out a counter message as quickly as possible. Shortcuts are taken. I do not think we can take shortcuts when it comes to the privacy of ordinary Canadians. I would make a differentiation between what Ed Broadbent called ordinary Canadians and people who choose to run for elected office, once they have entered the theatre, have put on the greasepaint or whatever.
This motion is not to suggest that if a political party wishes to run a picture of a rival and show him or her in a poor light that that is a judgment that should not be accorded to them. That is a right that they should have and this motion therefore should not apply.
For example, if somebody wanted to run an attack ad against the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Official Opposition or the leader of our party, that comes with the territory. It does not come with the territory to single out or give the impression that someone who is in a clip on a news broadcast is identified in an ad, in this case a female whose likeness was identified in an ad, and singled out for fame or infamy as the case may be, at least not without the consent of the individual.
One of my purposes in addition to bringing this to the attention of the House today is to appeal to all of us as practising politicians. We have an obligation to work with our political parties and with the folks in our backrooms, all five parties in this instance, to ensure that certain rules and procedures are followed. Lord knows that political parties and politicians are not exactly at the top of the social scale these days. We need all the help we can get in terms of doing our job to the best of our ability without infringing on individual people's rights and privacy.
I am pleased that the chair responsible for House procedure is here and I believe will be participating in the debate. Following Ms. Foster's notice to me and advice on this matter, I did manage to have a hearing with that committee in January 1998. This is the committee that oversees Elections Canada and would be, I suppose, the committee that would be charged with making any changes to our electoral laws.
I stand to be corrected, but I do not believe that committee has reported on its deliberations since the 1997 election and in anticipation of the future general election. I hope the debate today will focus attention on this particular issue. If the committee has not seen fit in its draft report to do something, that it would take this under serious advice and bring it forward at the earliest opportunity.
As far as I am aware, this is the only time that this particular issue has been raised in this parliament. It has certainly not been discussed in any way, shape or form here.
As I have tried to explain, I believe the matter is of significant public interest because the privacy of all Canadian citizens could well be at risk during election campaigns if we do not do something about this and do it quickly.
It is certainly true that electronic media are becoming more and more prevalent, some would say invasive, in covering election campaigns. The media, in the course of a day's work, approach thousands of ordinary citizens seeking opinions on electronic town hall meetings, news clips, streeters, full interviews and participation in documentaries. For the most part, citizens agreed, as Ms. Foster did in this instance, to participate in news programming, but would be surprised, as deeply surprised as Ms. Foster was, to learn subsequently that their image and likeness appeared on an advertisement for partisan purposes.
What is involved is indeed the question of privacy of citizens, the faith in the impartiality of the media and trust in the political process itself.
The issue is of importance in Regina. It received a lot of publicity just days before the June 2, 1997 election. Obviously what happened in Palliser could happen anywhere in the country.
I was pleased that when I appeared before a committee that looks at motions and considers whether they are deemed to be votable or not, I did receive a good hearing. I am very pleased that this motion has been deemed votable. It is my understanding that since this is the last day of this session that we will be bringing the motion back in the fall and there will be other members of parliament who will participate in the debate.
I want to report on what Canada's privacy commissioner had to say last year with regard to privacy matters. He said:
Yet we so take our privacy for granted in a democracy; it is so self-evident it has almost ceased to be evident. Respecting one another's privacy is an integral ingredient in the glue of mutual respect which helps hold a free society together.
I agree entirely with the privacy commissioner's remarks in this instance. I believe that we as politicians should apply his description and dicta to our own behaviour and that of our political parties.
I am appealing to the House and to the sense of honour and fair play that exists among members, to send the signal that they believe the privacy of our fellow citizens is something worth protecting especially during election campaigns.
My intention, which is embedded in the motion, is to protect individual citizens, ordinary Canadians, against the invasion of their privacy, in particular during campaigns.
I am aware that no one or no political party is forced to act on a private member's motion, and of course we accept that reality. However, I would ask members from all sides of the House in all five parties to admit that surely a citizen's right to privacy should not be invaded in the way in which it occurred with Ms. Foster in the spring of 1997.
I have, to the best of my ability, deliberately refrained from attempting to turn the debate into a controversial and partisan political issue, aside from stating the obvious facts. I have had an e-mail or two from the party in question asking why I was picking on them. That is not my intent. I think we do have to state the historical facts. We cannot rewrite history. That is what happened in May 1997 and that is what we are dealing with here today.
In February, I appeared before the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs, which was looking at whether to make this a votable item or not, and I did feel that I received a sympathetic hearing at that time. I am anxiously waiting for the committee's report on this issue.
The report from the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs stated:
While concerns were expressed by some members of the Committee about the enforceability and limits of such a provision, other members supported this proposal.
I have accepted that trying to get changes to the act may be a rather long and perhaps futile process. It is for that reason that, rather than attempting a legislative change, I have prepared the motion.
Privacy to me is not political correctness. It is not a flavour of the month. It is a bedrock human value, which a former Canadian supreme court justice described as “at the heart of liberty in the modern state”. It is also not an individual right enjoyed at the expense of society as a whole. “Respecting one another's privacy is an integral ingredient”, said Commissioner Phillips, “in the glue of mutual respect which helps hold a free society together”.
Whether to reveal or conceal the details of our lives are decisions for us to make, not for others, and certainly not for the state, except in the most limited and exceptional circumstances.
Never has the matter of privacy been more vital to an individual's free existence, nor more threatened, than in the technologically advanced societies in which we live.
Political parties can respond to attack ads in a matter of hours. They often take shortcuts that do not include obtaining a waiver from the individual to use his or her photograph, likeness or voice in a particular ad. People will say that there is nothing in the rules so it can be done and the devil take the hindmost. I do not think that is good for political parties, politicians or for democracy in general.
I would appeal to the House to support this resolution which I firmly believe is as non-partisan as it can be.
