Mr. Speaker, over the last 10 years, I have always begun by saying what an honour it is to rise in this institution, and I am very honoured to represent the people of Timmins—James Bay.
However, I am not very proud of what I see in this Parliament, and I am not proud to see that the role of the Parliament of Canada is continually turned into an exercise in which we are the marionettes of some kind of dumbed-down political show. We see the use of time allocation again and again to limit debate, and we see the monkey-wrenching of committees, where reports are written by the government and basically brought forward, ignoring all manner of amendments. Traditionally, and when I was elected, the committees tended to work together as a general rule.
I see the relentless attack on the independent bodies whose job it is to give us the information we need, whether it is Statistics Canada or researchers. I see the vicious attack by the leaders in the Conservative government against the officers of Parliament whose job it is to maintain the integrity of the electoral system of Canada, and the absolutely shameful attack on Mr. Mayrand by the so-called minister for democratic deform.
The election fraud that is being perpetrated in the House with this act and the complete ignoring of every single expert makes everything that is happening in Parliament in 2014 a very unfunny joke. When the Prime Minister can stand up and not be able to name a single credible witness, yet he and his gang personally attack the witnesses who represent democratic integrity in this country, it is a shameful situation.
We have a piece of omnibus legislation that is being pushed through in this Potemkin Parliament. We will all stand up at the end of the day, and the Conservatives will say that democracy was heard.
However, what is not being heard is the analysis we need on the temporary foreign worker program, on hazardous materials, on railway safety, on the fact that people are going to have to pay at the Champlain Bridge in Montreal to go to work, and the fact that on page 99 of this bill, we learn that the government has signed a secret deal with the United States to share the personal data of tens of thousands of Canadians.
Canadians should look to Parliament to say that citizenship is something that is sacred, to say that the role of Parliamentarians is to stand up and defend the citizenship of Canadians. However, in this omnibus legislation that is being pushed through and this attempt to shut down debate, the Conservatives have decided to slip in the bill that will now make it possible and legal for the United States government to demand the personal financial information of Canadians who have lived their lives in this country, paid taxes in this country, and been excellent citizens in this country, all because they happen to have been born in the United States.
Is this the case for people who just came here a few years ago, moved here because they do not want to pay taxes? No, I will give a few examples.
In 1958, a family had to go to the hospital and their child was born in a hospital on the U.S. side of the border. Now, this person, in his or her 50s, finds that personal financial information is subject to whatever the United States government wants to do with it.
We see the case of a young woman who went to university in the United States almost half a century ago and had a baby. A year later, she returned to Canada and the baby grew up as a Canadian citizen. The baby paid taxes and is a proud Canadian citizen. She looks to the government and finds that it does not consider her to be a Canadian citizen. If the Americans want her personal and private information, they will get it.
An 80-year-old woman called me. She spent the last half a century raising her children in Canada. She is now being told that her life insurance, which she saved up and which is meant to be for her children, can be handed over.
What protection did the government bring forward when it negotiated the IGA, the intergovernmental agreement that allows this FATCA, or Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act? We do not know what it agreed to, because it is pushing it through. It is pushing it through without the scrutiny that belongs in Parliament.
What we are seeing is that the government is saying it will be compliant under the Privacy Act, but we see major problems with this. The United States government does not see itself as having any of the same commitments that the Privacy Act and PIPEDA are supposed to have to protect the personal information of Canadian citizens.
For example, under the Canadian Privacy Act, financial institutions that collect personal information must only collect it for the purposes it was collected. The United States has not made any of those commitments.
Under the Privacy Act, we have businesses that develop systems, including technology systems and protocols, including the use of encryption. They have to use it to protect the data against outside scrutiny. We have no idea how this data would be used when it is handed over to the United States.
Principle 1 of schedule 1 of PIPEDA encourages accountability by mandating data collection responsibility for the personal information of a data subject, and the person has to be responsible.
There are no such provisions, that we know of, that were negotiated when the United States decided that it would come knocking on this compliant little government here to say, “We want to be able to gather information on any Canadian we want and you're going to give it to us”, and the current government said, ”Okay. We will. We'll just run it through omnibus legislation”.
Finally, principle 10 of schedule 1 of PIPEDA declares that an individual may bring a challenge to the organization that has his or her financial information if it is being misused.
However, none of those provisions exist, as far as we know, under the agreement that was signed. The reason we do not know is that we are not allowed, as parliamentarians, to debate it, because the government is going to push it through.
I asked my hon. colleague from Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, earlier on, about this. She said we were making things up.
It is obvious that the Conservatives have not even read their omnibus legislation because they are happy to play the role of the marionette. They are happy to stand to read the dumbed-down talking points.
It is a disgrace what is happening in the Parliament of this country. In this Potemkin parliament, we still have features of parliamentary tradition. For example, it is perfectly okay for the government to come in and misrepresent, to be mendacious, to be malevolent with the facts. It is just unparliamentary to say it is doing do.
So, we are engaged in this little facade that we are all the honourable gentlemen and gentlewomen carrying on the business of this country, when time and again legislation is being forced through without scrutiny.
So, for the Canadian citizens who served this country, who raised their children, and who paid their taxes, they can look to the current government and ask, “Where were you to protect the basic notion of citizenship, to ensure that basic rules were in place?”
We do not know if there are any rules in place because these will not be debated in Parliament.
I think it is a very shameful day for our so-called democratic system that we have allowed Parliament to be so incredibly debased. However, we see that time and again in the way that time allocation is being used with omnibus legislation that has nothing to do with budget implementation.
We do remember, and Canadians remember, that it was omnibus legislation that stripped water and lake protection from 99.9% of the waters in this country, to help expedite pipeline expansion, without any overview of the potential impacts on the various lakes and river systems in this country.
The Conservatives just threw it out, just like they threw out the researchers and the scientists who stood in their way, and just like they attacked the Parliamentary Budget Officer. The Parliamentary Budget Officer's role in this House of Commons was to provide parliamentarians with credible knowledge. I am embarrassed to tell the Canadian people how few facts parliamentarians are given about the implementation of budgets. These are pushed through.
Go to committee and ask a minister come to committee to talk about the budget and how it would affect his department. It is not going to happen, because the government is protecting the frontbench marionettes, and they do their job
However, the role of Parliament is to ensure that basic issues, like the spending of taxpayer money, are given proper scrutiny, that international agreements that would affect the rights of Canadian citizens are debated in the House, and that we ensure that our Canadian citizens are given the rule of law.
Yet that is not happening here. What we are going to see for the rest of the day are the pompom acts and cheery faces of the Conservatives reading their dumbed-down notes while avoiding every key aspect of legislative change that would happen with this massive omnibus bill, just like the previous omnibus bill, just like with the omnibus bill before that, and we are supposed to stand here and pretend that this falsehood is somehow a real parliamentary process.
It is a Potemkin parliament. I think Canadian citizens need to know that the government is using the legislative process to ram through changes that would fundamentally affect their rights.
