Adam Vaughan

[Digital Privacy Act, June 2nd, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, there is an old saying that the pen is mightier than the sword. The government is sometimes more afraid of the pen than it is of the sword. We can see that in its approach to managing the firearms issue in this country.

When it comes to information, it is completely paranoid. It wants to track every computer, it wants to look into every set of data, it wants to use that data, and it wants to share that data as widely as possible.

I would suggest that there is a need for balance here. Just as there are legitimate reasons that someone might want to track data and just as there are legitimate ways in which someone might do that, with checks and balances in place to make sure that private individuals' rights are protected, the same care should be used when it comes to the sword as it is with the pen.

What I find funny about the government is that it does not care where the weapons are in this country, but it really wants to know what people's thoughts are. When it comes to that, what we are thinking as a group of libertarians is somehow more dangerous than what we are doing. I find that very strange in a government that claims to be on the side of the individual. It is not. It is tracking them. It is not taking care of that information, and when it comes to checks and balances, it is missing in action.

[Digital Privacy Act, June 2nd, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, before I begin my remarks on the bill, I would like to pay my respects to the members of the House who rose today and shared personal experiences regarding the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which reported today. Many of their words were heartfelt and were received that way. The House has work to do and I commit on behalf of my constituents to share in that journey and in that work. It is important work that lies in front of us. Not all of us will get a chance to speak to it today, so I wanted to be on the record with those comments.

Regarding the legislation that sits in front of us, this is yet another piece of legislation that toys with privacy and the impact of changing privacy rules. There have been several in this session of Parliament. Taken in isolation, they all creep toward something that is making more and more Canadians worried about their privacy and the security of their private data, wondering what the true motive of the government is when we take all of the items in concert.

There are ways of rationalizing and accepting, and even valid criteria to act upon in changing the privacy rules around data, but what seems to define the legislation and much of the actions of the government is that each and every one of those pieces of legislation is rushed through. Careful consideration of the impacts that are proposed are almost never part of the consideration, never reflected in amendments, and never reflected in the refinement of rules.

This latest legislation was presented to the House, then presented and pushed through committee and re-presented to the House as perfect from the get-go. I have covered politics most of my life. I have been around legislative processes in all three levels of government in our country and I have never seen such arrogance around the notion of presenting perfect legislation. The record of the government having its rules and regulations tested by the Supreme Court ought to give it pause for consideration, that when wise individuals and learned groups appear before committee and point out glaring mistakes, omissions or concerns there never seems to be a capacity to listen, only to soldier on.

While perhaps I respect the tenacity of the government on these files, errors are being made that put people at risk. However, what it really does, and I think this has been seen in the last part of the session, is that Canadians do not trust the government with their privacy anymore. It leads to speculation, worries and even paranoia, to the point where the faith in the government has disappeared. That is a concern.

In many of the omnibus bills is the kernel of a good idea, of a legitimate process, but it gets obscured by the omnibus nature of some of these bills, by the vagaries of some of the language, and by the intransigence and stubbornness of committee members and members of the opposite party to sit there, to listen, to take input, to make amendments, and to make a good idea a better idea, which is the role of Parliament. It astounds me that the government seems to think it gets it right the first time, every time. I have never seen that in any government. Any government that has that much self-assurance really ought to stop and consider whether it is acting in the best interest even of itself.

One of the dynamics here is that there seems to be this belief that the private sector is acting in the interests of the private sector, that it has the best interests of private individuals at heart. If the government truly believed that surveillance, the sharing of information, and the distribution of that information to third parties was such a wise way to go and was part of the argument toward stronger public safety rules and regulations, imagine if we were not talking about metadata right now and talking about rifles instead. The government would never tolerate, in fact has never tolerated, this kind of tracking, intrusion and data banking of people's information about something which is really dangerous, such as a gun. Yet when it comes to private information, it lets it go this way, that way and every way. It clamps down on the very same individual rights and privileges of people with their data. It will release that information and share it willingly, but will not do it when it comes to guns. There is a contradiction there that does not make sense.

There is a balance that needs to be struck. We hear about that balance all the time around various other debates, but when it comes to sharing information, it seems to go out the window. We have a party that on the one hand says we cannot share any information about who owns weapons in this country, but on the other hand says that we can go into anybody's computer and distribute that information as widely as we want in the name of public safety.

If the party opposite could reconcile that contradiction for me, I would be happy to listen to the arguments. However, from my perspective, we need a balance in both of those issues, and that balance has not been achieved in either one of them. In large part, that is because the paranoia with which the government pursues one file is coupled with a complete lack of trust on another file. As I said, it is contradictory and does not make any sense to me.

The other issue that crops up again and again is the government's inability to orchestrate proper civilian oversight of the changes it is making. Just as it has no doubt about the legislation that it introduces and believes it to be perfect from the word go, the government never seems to think that there is a need to review and be perpetually vigilant about where the legislation may be going off track or delivering results that were not intended or expected. There is no oversight about how this information is being shared or how the agencies that are pursuing, sharing, or developing it are conducting themselves.

The absence of this oversight on so many files tells me another thing. It tells me that the government does not trust civilians as much as it trusts itself. That, at the heart of the legislation, has to raise concerns on the opposite side. Either we trust people or we do not. The government does not trust the opposition. It does not trust ordinary Canadians. Half of the time it does not even trust the courts to provide this oversight and review and to check the government against its own mistakes.

Parliamentarians are human, and they make mistakes. We all have to correct each other, and if we do not build that into legislation, particularly into privacy legislation, we fail each other. That is one of the reasons that, despite there being some good in this bill, on balance it fails.

The bill fails in two regards. In fails in that it would not create a consistent approach or a collaborative effort to create better legislation, which worries us. It also fails because it would once again fail to bring in a mandatory and processional review of how this legislation is performing. Without those checks and balances, the legislation leads to Canadians worrying that their government is not protecting them. Those worries take Parliament, the respect for Parliament, and the respect for the rule of law into places that they just should not go in a modern democracy.

For those reasons, my party and I will not be supporting this bill.

New powers require new responsibilities, and the best way to make sure that they serve both the public and private interests of individual Canadians is to make sure that Canadians have oversight of these rules and regulations. Once again, that is absent from this legislation, even though experts who appeared before the government in committee urged that it be there. That is a failing, and it is a failing that has ramifications far beyond this bill.

[Petitions, June 1st, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to present a petition signed by citizens of the city of Toronto, in particular along the waterfront, who are urging the federal government to honour the tripartite agreement which governs the island airport. The tripartite agreement guarantees to residents of the city that no jets will be used on the island airport.

The petitioners ask the federal government to respect the agreement that has been signed by the City, the port authority, and the federal government to not allow commercial jets to land on the airport, to not reconfigure the waterfront, and to respect the wishes of the City of Toronto in this regard.

[Common Sense Firearms Licensing Act, May 29th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, the member attributed comments to me that I have no recollection of ever having made about terrorism and gun owners, which I find odd. If he would care to table the comments with me, I would love to review them. However, I think his aim is a little off, and he may want to go back to the gun range and practise a bit. One thing that is clear is that extremists in the Conservative Party are radicalizing some of the older members.

The situation on what has changed in the ATT is that people would no longer have to go directly from their house to the gun range. They would now be allowed to make several stops in between. The concern that the police and people in urban areas have is that stopping in between, especially when leaving a gun range, is an opportunity for someone to break into the car and steal guns. That is a problem that has been persistent in Toronto.

Will the member acknowledge that this is a change? If that is a change, will he explain why it is good for urban areas to present that possibility of guns getting into the hands of the wrong people?

[Common Sense Firearms Licensing Act, May 29th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, what I find fascinating about the debate so far, and which the member for York South—Weston has highlighted once again, is this sort of cultural divide.

We can stand here and say we get it. Rural Canada, parts of our nation where hunting is a way of sustaining life, not just a question of privilege, is a different culture.

However, there is an urban reality to the debate that is constantly being ignored. Making it easier to transport guns in urban settings is dangerous in the same way that riding a bicycle on a highway is easier in a rural community than it is in an urban community. In North York, one does not ride a bicycle on the highway. In South River, one can. There is a difference. It is like snowmobiling. One does not snowmobile down downtown Toronto streets, no matter how much snow there is. One might do it in a rural community.

We get it.

Could the member explain why relaxing gun controls in urban centres and making it easier to transport weapons in urban centres scares people in urban centres, because of the danger guns present to communities there?

[Infrastructure, May 29th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, I was asking for an infrastructure program. This is a joke.

Canada's celebration and Confederation do not belong to the Conservative Party. The funds that were announced a few days ago have a deadline to apply in just a few days from now. I could not find that in the budget, nor could I find a dollar amount.

What is worse is that the member for Chatham-Kent—Essex says to apply to his office for help, not to the government's offices and not to city hall. That is disgraceful. What sort of an inside track is being discussed here? Why is this pork barrelling not described as such?

The Conservative government is playing politics with Confederation, hurting cities in this country, and this fund is a disgrace.

[Infrastructure, May 29th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, the celebration of the 150th anniversary of Confederation is supposed to bring Canadians together in a happy way. Instead, the government has confused provinces and angered municipalities. An infrastructure fund that was announced has different rules for different regions, different criteria for different provinces, different rules for different municipalities, and there is no funding formula.

The Province of Ontario is furious. It was never consulted. The provincial minister in charge of infrastructure has said that this is just a public relations exercise, a glorified gazebo fund.

Will the government finally admit that is actually a slush fund for Conservative MPs who are facing defeat in this fall's election?

[Housing in Manitoba, May 29th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, nowhere has the current government's failure in housing become more obvious than in the province of Manitoba. While this is bad enough, it is even worse because the junior minister responsible for housing comes from Manitoba. One would think she would pay attention to the problems in her own province. She does not.

In Manitoba, housing for first nations is critical, yet a $300-million fund to produce housing has created just 99 houses. If all the government can show is $3 million per home, it is not indifference that is the problem; it is incompetence.

As the minister and her government fail to build housing in communities across Canada, particularly in rural Canada, pressures build in big cities. In Winnipeg, shabby hotels are now being used to house homeless young people. These places are as dangerous as they are dismal. The minister's response: nothing.

The only real thing the Conservative government is doing on housing is pulling subsidies, and on this file the government is hurting seniors in Manitoba. As mortgages expire, so too do low-income subsidies for Manitobans on fixed incomes.

No wonder the junior minister and her senior minister missed a major housing conference in Winnipeg in her own province. They are missing in action and—

[Free Votes, May 28th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to address this issue, which lies at the heart of parliamentary democracy. We are elected by constituents and have choices every time we stand to cast a vote in the House of Commons: whether to represent our constituents' views, as we see them, configured to the majority; or to represent our party's views, as we may have campaigned on them; or to vote according to our consciences. I am unaware, having read the rules as I entered this place just about a year ago, of any prescription that tells us when we must represent the majority that we perceive to be in our constituencies, any rules that say when we must vote the party line, or any set of rules that talks about when we must vote according to our consciences. I do not know how to define the choice we have to make legalistically among those three different positions.

There are times, which I have seen in my own caucus meetings and hope others have seen it in theirs, where the caucus will debate an issue before it lands on a final position; and when members leave the caucus room, they leave agreeing to vote together to represent what they perceive as the position their party has taken. There are times when members have the right—and in my party it is a very clearly defined set of rights, around private members' bills in particular—where members have a defined right to vote as they see fit. When they do that, they have a choice. They can represent what they perceive to be the majority position in their ridings or what is in the best interest of their ridings, or they can choose to act individually based on their consciences.

What constitutes an issue of conscience differs from person to person in the House. What may be an act of conscience for one person may be perceived in a totally different light by somebody else. It is framed in this debate today—abortion and capital punishment being two examples—that yes, in the history of the House, those have been examples where people have been freed by all party leaders to vote according to their consciences. However, there are also conventions in the House—budget bills being one of them, and in my party protecting charter rights being another—whereby we try to invoke some discipline, and that discipline is held to account at election time, as it should be.

The explanations that individual members give as to how they cast their votes will be tested democratically, as they should be. Did their vote represent the majority interest of a riding, was it faithful to a party position, or was it, in fact, an expression of the members' consciences? All three of those are in play at every single vote. To pretend otherwise and introduce a private member's bill that suggests otherwise—that there are other conventions and other rules that override individuals' behaviour—I think does a grave disserve and dishonour to the bravery that individuals have shown in the history of the House.

What really bothers me about this bill is that it would seek to legalize something that is already legal. It would seek to allow something that is already allowed. It is not unlike the previous bill, which tried to make illegal something that was already illegal, as though somehow making it illegal twice would make it even more illegal. It is a redundant position and a redundant bill. I would say it is not an act of conscience in this case; it is an act of rhetoric.

While I appreciate that sometimes politics plays into that, it does not actually clarify or accurately describe the freedoms we have as individual members of the House of Commons, who freely choose to associate with parties and freely choose, each and every time we stand up, to cast our ballots and show our support for particular pieces of legislation. Sometimes the way we express it is the same, but the motivations are different. We also need to respect that as well.

[Business of Supply, May 26th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, I just heard there is a concern about public servants being partisan. What we are talking about here are scientists who are a subsection of the public service, but nonetheless research is not ideological. Scientists work with facts, and those facts are peer-reviewed and tested against other facts. It is not about opinions or ideas; it is about scientific fact and research.

The motion calls on the House to unmuzzle that practice, to respect intellectual freedom, but also to respect academic freedom and to allow scientists to present their facts in an objective way.

What evidence do the government members have that the scientists in the employ of the government are not pursuing true scientific testing? What facts do they have to support this notion that the science may be partisan and therefore should be filtered by a minister? What facts do they have that Canadian scientists in the employ of the government are not in fact objective? Do they have any facts, or is it just anecdotal evidence they are presenting to us?