Mr. Speaker, I move that the first report of the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics, presented to the House on Wednesday, February 5, 2014, be concurred in.
I always say what an honour it is to rise in this institution, but as I reflect on the government's response to the report on the Conflict of Interest Act, I have to say that I am not proud of what has been taking place in this Parliament.
We have what is being presented to the Canadian people as a Potemkin democracy. It is a false democracy. Democracy does not really happen here anymore. It is a sideshow that Canadians are being exposed to on a daily basis in a House that has become a circus, an ugly circus, a vicious circus.
What we see here is an overall attack by the government against the institutions that are supposed to maintain the credibility of the Westminster tradition, a continued unmitigated attack on the various institutions that are supposed to bring accountability to this place. As Canadians watch the daily circus show and the silliness and the way the government has dumbed down important issues into little buttons that it can press at a given moment, what we see is the bigger issue that is being deflected that the Canadian public is not seeing, which is the attack on the credibility of the institutions that would hold some level of accountability.
Let us go through the standards that are supposed to be there to ensure a functioning democracy.
We hear of MPs who go back to their ridings and when people ask about the circus that they watch on TV, they will say, “Oh, yes, but committees are where the good work is done.” When I was elected 10 years ago I used to think that. I used to think that maybe on a given day it may be fairly mediocre in the House, but in committees, by and large we were there to do relatively good work, even if it was sometimes very partisan. Sometimes it was not the brightest. This is a democratic system after all, and it is what it is, depending on who is elected. However, the notion of the committee had a place. That is not true anymore. Committees have become circuses. They have become kangaroo courts. It is all done in camera or it is done to use the notion of majority to undermine even legislative positions that have existed since the Westminster tradition.
In England, in the U.K. Parliament, it is considered a failure of the committee if there is not unanimity, if one has to bring forward a minority report. Unfortunately, we are having to bring forward minority reports all the time.
Nowhere is that clearer than in the circus of what happened at the ethics committee with the review of the conflict of interest guidelines. We heard from witnesses from across the political spectrum about the need to develop a coherent set of conflict of interest guidelines to hold government and the public office holders to account. What was delivered to the Canadian people in this report was an absolute democratic fraud.
The recommendations that were brought supposedly through the committee were never even raised by a single witness. I will get to the key recommendation, the number one recommendation that the government found in dealing with issues of conflict of interest. The conflict of interest review had raised all manner of issues, such as the need for administrative monetary penalties of a substantive nature, to ensure compliance with basic due diligence so that people were not just doing things for their friends or their pals, that there were clear rules to ensure that insiders did not have access, and that public office holders were acting in the public interest.
The number one recommendation that came out of this committee, and I want to say again it appeared in the report when we were examining it without a single witness having brought it forward, was that the definition of “public office holder” be changed. The government's notion of who will now be under the Conflict of Interest Act are the members who collectively bargain with the Government of Canada. They will now be public office holders.
What is a public office holder? A public office holder, according to the act, is a minister of the crown, a minister of state, or a parliamentary secretary. They will now have the same provisions around their conflict of interest as someone who does the vacuuming in a public office building for the federal government. Someone in Scarborough who works in a call centre for the federal government answering the phones is now going to have the same legal obligations as a minister of the crown.
Members of ministerial staff, all the little boys in short pants who write all those notes so the marionettes in the front row do not look so slow on a given day, and someone working in a secretarial function in an office in Calgary for the federal government will be treated as having to have the same responsibility for reporting their behaviour as the men in the little short pants who work for the Prime Minister's Office. A ministerial appointee under the Governor in Council will be treated the same as someone working at a Service Canada outlet in Moose Jaw, Kenora, or Timmins. That means there would now be between 240,000 and 300,000 people who are under the Conflict of Interest Act, whom the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner has to oversee.
The government approved this. Members of the government thought this was a good recommendation. They are laughing at us. They are laughing at the Canadian people. This is an absolute fraud of democracy when they decide that a minister of the crown, who can be bought and sold if there are not clear rules for lobbying and for conflict of interest, would be held to the same code as a person who goes into a government office in Winnipeg in the evenings and sweeps and cleans.
The Conflict of Interest Act was one of the key provisions of the Conservatives' commitment to have themselves elected in 2006. It is notable that the Conservatives made this promise that they were going to clean up the corruption of the Liberals in 2006. Their electoral platform was to give the ethics commissioner the power to fine violators—wrong; to enshrine the conflict of interest code into law—wrong; to allow members of the public, not just politicians, to make complaints to the ethics commissioner, which did not happen; to make part-time or non-remunerated ministerial advisers subject to the ethics code. It does not say anything about making 250,000 Canadians apply under the same code, a code that has no provisions for holding these ministers to account.
There is another fascinating recommendation that the government has brought in. If one of its ministers is under investigation, it has to be kept secret. It has to be kept secret to protect their reputation. It is a government that believes in maximum secrecy for its members while insisting on maximum transparency for average Canadians. That is a fundamental failure of accountability.
We had a Conservative member from London the other day who said that if people go to a public demonstration, why should the government not be able to keep tabs on them? The Conservatives believe that being able to spy on Canadians is their right, but if their ministers are under investigation, good luck investigating them because the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner would be absolutely swamped with the 250,000 civil servants she would have to deal with. We asked the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner what she thinks of this report and she said she is extremely disappointed. Of course she is, because it is making a mockery of her position.
The conflict of interest office is just one of the attacks the Conservatives have been making. Let us look at a few others.
We saw what they did with Marc Mayrand and Elections Canada and the attack on him personally. The insinuation was that Marc Mayrand in doing his job was doing it for partisan reasons. They wanted to make it illegal in Canada for Elections Canada to be able to tell Canadians about their rights to vote. International observers said that if Canada went down this route, it would fundamentally undermine the basic notion of democratic accountability.
We saw how they attacked the Parliamentary Budget Officer. Kevin Page, one of the most respected civil servants I have met in my career, was regularly ridiculed and undermined and attacked. His job, which was to provide members of Parliament with basic financial data, was interfered with every step of the way. I have to tell people back home that the House of Commons does not oversee the spending that is going on. It is a shell game that happens here. Billions of dollars are spent in all manner of categories, and yet the government makes sure that they keep members in the House of Commons in the dark. It's as though they were raising mushrooms on what they are feeding the House of Commons when it comes to actual information.
The one office to provide basic financial accountability, the Parliamentary Budget Office, was considered a threat and Mr. Page had to go. That is another one of the officers of Parliament that has been undermined.
There was the latest appointment of the Privacy Commissioner. The Prime Minister ignored the recommendations of all the experts and picked Mr. Therrien, a lifelong civil servant, but one with no expertise in the privacy field. He was appointed over all the qualified people. Mr. Therrien was given a poison chalice with this appointment. As soon as Mr. Therrien was approved, the government attacked his credibility, because even Mr. Therrien, without the necessary expertise, recognized that the government's bills, Bills C-13 and S-4, on warrantless access and snooping on Canadians, were very problematic and probably were not legal.
The Privacy Commissioner was undermined. The Parliamentary Budget Officer was undermined. The Elections Canada office was undermined. Now with this report, the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner's office is being turned basically into a farce. She said that she has no ability to keep track of the 244,000 civil servants across this country when her job is supposed to be keeping an eye on a government that is mired in corruption.
These are respected institutions that provide accountability to Canadians when government does not want to be accountable. There is another key element, and that is the access to information office. The government now routinely tells the access to information officer that it will not comply with requests. It will give delays of 300, 600, 900 and 1,000 days on basic rights to access to information. Canada was a world leader on access to information 15 years ago. Now it is behind tin-pot dictatorships and third world countries in terms of providing information to citizens. The President of the Treasury Board runs around like some two-bit flim-flam artist talking about data sets and open government on his Twitter account. It is a farce. The Conservatives are making sure that the real key information that Canadians need is not being made available to them.
The Department of National Defence, the CRA, the justice department, and Indian affairs routinely stonewall and shut down the attempts of citizens and journalists to find out why decisions are made. If we do not know who was in the room when a decision was made or what source provided the information, we have no idea whether or not we are getting accountable government.
The government undermined the other institutions. We can talk about Rights and Democracy. We can talk about the round table on the environment. We can talk about Census Canada. I do not know what he is the minister of now, but he was the minister of immigration, and he is now running around trying to explain why he blew it so badly on the foreign worker program and saying he did not really have any data to go on and is having to look it up on Facebook and Kijiji. It is the same party that ridiculed and laughed at the Census Canada information that was considered the gold standard for information around the world.
There is another institution that the Conservatives attacked and undermined, and it is the one institution that so far has stood up to them. That is the Supreme Court.
I will not mention the Senate. We were taught in school that legislation goes from the House to the so-called chamber of sober second thought, but it is full of hacks, partisans, and friends of the party who rubber stamp bills again and again. They are not doing their legislative oversight. What ends up happening is the Supreme Court has to address bills.
Before I get to the issue of the Supreme Court, let us talk about the justice department. The justice department has a job to review legislation to ensure that it is charter compliant, that it meets the overall legal framework of this country. We see time and time again the advice that is given is ignored, or perhaps the Conservatives decide to favour their political masters, because this is a government that runs and butts its head again and again on the basic issues of the Constitution and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. They are beginning to look increasingly ridiculous. Rather than the Conservatives stepping back and saying that they have to respect the Supreme Court, even though they will respect no other institution in this country, the Prime Minister personally led an attack on the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
The Conservatives attempted to bring in a judge who was not able to sit on the Supreme Court. They had legal advice on this. They ignored it. They created an unnecessary crisis.
We saw the Conservatives' prostitution law thrown out by the Supreme Court. The Conservatives have gone right back at the Supreme Court, banging their heads against it with a bill that will also be found unconstitutional, because it ignored the fundamental issues in the Bedford decision.
Nowhere is this more obvious than on the Spencer decision last Friday that talked about the fundamental legal obligation to get a warrant to get access to IP information and cellphone information. I heard one of the parliamentary secretaries the other day saying, “Oh my God, this is going to mean a four- to six-week delay in police investigations.” Nonsense. It is a one-day turnaround.
We also have, within the legal system in Canada, the right the police have, if they believe a crime is being committed, to get that information without a warrant. The proviso is that they have to be able to show to a judge later on that there was the urgency. There is still judicial oversight.
The government believes that there is no need for judicial oversight. We have a situation now where 1.2 million times a year, government agencies are grabbing information on private citizens without any apparent warrant. The government says that it is only being done in cases of extreme threat, terrorism, or violence. Obviously that is not true, given that there are 1.2 million requests a year.
All that being said, we had Vic Toews, who tried to bring in his warrantless snooping bill, who stood up in this House and told ordinary Canadians that they were on the side of child pornographers if they wanted to defend privacy rights. They put the run on Vic Toews pretty quickly.
The Conservatives then came back with Bill C-13, which would create the provisions to give legal cover for the telecoms to hand over this information, and Bill S-4, which would allow corporate interests to get at Canadians' information without warrant or disclosure to people.
The other provision, the absolutely bizarre one, is that the Conservatives are now going to allow personal tax information to be transferred without warrant or oversight. They somehow think this is going to get past the Supreme Court. Since Friday's ruling, it is clear that it is not.
Rather than use this institution for the benefit of all Canadians to ensure that we have clear, definable rules in this country, we are going to see the government running and butting its head against the Supreme Court and then howling like a victim when the Supreme Court does what its job is to do, which is to maintain legislative and constitutional obligations.
This brings me back to the Conflict of Interest Act. The government's response and its recommendations, which will protect its ministers, will dilute the act and turn the office of accountability into an unmanageable and unenforceable branch. It has completely broken the commitment it made in 2006 to Canadians.
It was very interesting when we heard from Ms. Dawson, the commissioner, the other day. We asked her about one of the most serious cases we have had in memory in terms of a breach of the act, which was the secret payment made out of the Prime Minister's Office to a sitting senator.
I am not a lawyer, but when I read section 16 of the Parliament of Canada Act, it says to make a payment to a sitting senator to make a political problem go away is an indictable offence. The RCMP chose not to follow through. The RCMP said that there was nothing to see here, ladies and gentlemen, move on, yet when we looked at Corporal Horton's ITO, there were serious questions about who was involved in that $90,000, and it was clearly an issue of quid pro quo.
If the RCMP is not going to follow through, and the RCMP said that it had received all the legal advice necessary but did not appear to have talked to the Department of Public Prosecutions, which has oversight in this, then the issue goes back to Mary Dawson. Mary Dawson has no ability to go after the senators. The senators are in a closed world unto themselves. However, Mary Dawson does have the authority to investigate Nigel Wright. She says that she is not investigating Nigel Wright, because she is under the impression that the $90,000 was still under investigation by the RCMP. I find that surprising, because I do not know how it could be illegal to receive the money but not illegal to pay the money. I am not exactly sure. I think Ms. Dawson would do us all a favour if she could explain.
This is the kind of work Ms. Dawson is intended to do. It is to ensure that secret payments are not made to insiders, that backroom pals do not have access that ordinary Canadians do not have. This is why we were supposed to have the Federal Accountability Act. Unfortunately, with the motion and the report, the government has signalled that it has no intention of following through on those commitments.
