Mr. Speaker, it is good to be able to enter into debate on an important subject. Let me make a couple of quick observations before I get into the substance of this debate.
I find it very concerning that, whether it be through the parliamentary secretary to the House leader from Winnipeg or the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Health, there seems to be a great disregard in the government's attitude toward the democratic will represented by parliamentary committees and ultimately the Canadians those committee members represent, which is very concerning, and the fact that the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Health refused to commit or acknowledge that this RFP, should it be passed by the House, should be stopped.
Time and again they have used clever wordsmithing to simply delay discussion of the current RFP here, for purposes related to either competition or various other things. They seem to be going out of their way to counter the democratic will of, in this case, a parliamentary committee made up of members of Parliament who have been tasked to do important work. The ethics committee does important work, and it seems that the government is obsessed with avoiding accountability. That digs at the very heart of why I hear on a daily basis, and would be shocked if members in the governing Liberal Party did not hear on a daily basis, the concerns Canadians have with respect to the erosion of trust. They will stand up and say that everything is great, that it is sunny ways, delivering the sort of rhetoric we have heard often from the Prime Minister across the way. It is incredibly concerning.
If you would indulge me for a quick moment, I want to share something that happened back in my constituency and is a bit unrelated to the subject at hand.
What we do in this place is incredibly important. I had the opportunity to judge 4‑H public speaking this past weekend. Generally, an MP probably should not enter into a judging position and ultimately have to pick winners and losers, but let me simply say this: It was incredible to see.
As a former 4‑H club member who was in 4‑H woodworking as kid and participated in public speaking with what at the time was a pretty serious stammer, it was an absolute honour to be able to share that event with these young men and women from the Camrose 4‑H Beef Club and to hear their speeches on a wide variety of subjects. In the coming years, it would not surprise me one bit if one of those who participated in the event the other day will one day be running for office as a result of the exceptional work that 4‑H does generally in preparing the leaders of tomorrow. I also salute the folks involved in the 4‑H public speaking event that I had the honour of attending and judging this past week, so let us give a great round of applause to all of those individuals.
I know that the chair of the committee, the member for Calgary Rocky Ridge, highlighted what I would suggest is a concerning disparity. Last week the committee heard some testimony from the Minister of Health on the subject we are discussing. This morning we heard testimony from the Privacy Commissioner. I would like to highlight a couple of those differences.
The Minister of Health, who was not actually the Minister of Health at the time when some of these decisions were made, certainly made it sound as though his department had been thoroughly engaged with the Privacy Commissioner over the course of the pandemic, and he specifically referred to it, yet we learned that this simply was not the case from the testimony we heard from the Privacy Commissioner this morning.
It is things like that which call into serious question the credibility and the trust that this place certainly needs to have in the ministers of the Crown. I would suggest that the erosion of trust is a big part of the reason, and this is related specifically to the motion at hand, that we are willing to press pause on this RFP to make sure that Canadians can in fact trust that their government is in this case protecting the privacy rights of Canadians. The fact that there are some pretty serious differences is incredibly significant and cannot be understated. This motion seems to have been over-complicated by Liberal members who have entered into the debate, which I would note does not include Liberal members of the committee who actually voted for the motion.
The motion is very simple. It says that we should simply press pause so that Canadians can trust their government.
I would note that one of the significant reasons for that, as I asked the Minister of Health and have brought up in the discussion related to the topic at hand, is that it is unclear exactly what the information that was provided to the Public Health Agency of Canada was. The Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Health, in quite an ironic twist, sent a letter to the ethics committee that outlined why it was not a big deal and should not be cause for concern. However, I would note that the company BlueDot of which a sample was provided along with the letter from the parliamentary secretary called into question whether or not the parliamentary secretary had even read the documentation that he had provided and, further, whether or not it was the extent of the information that was being provided.
The minister talked about anonymized, de-identified and segregated data, which is fair. There has been reference to cellphone use and mobility providers and all of the other aspects of the reality of living in the information age. Specifically, the Privacy Commissioner did note today, in addition to the specifics of this, that much of our privacy legislation is 40 years old and is way out of date, and I know that other members of the committee from different parties have also noted this.
What does that data look like? What information was provided to the government? Given the information and the sample report from BlueDot, there were striking inconsistencies. The information largely was incredibly general and, quite frankly, information that I would not have a problem with, but that information had to come from somewhere. It is unclear exactly what further was provided.
To simplify it specifically, does de-identified and anonymized mean that names, phone numbers and addresses were removed but maybe everything else was provided? The very evidence suggests that they tracked the specifics of whether or not somebody crossed a border. They talked about grouping together in one metric but not grouping together cellphones in another metric. In fact, if members can believe it, the members of the committee could not even verify the number of devices that were used in some of these questions.
As I come to the end of my speech, I would simply suggest that Canada is a democracy and a democracy can only function if its citizens trust their institutions in terms Parliament and their government, which in our parliamentary democracy Parliament gives authority to. This is a prudent and important step to ensure that we can help rebuild some of the trust that has been eroded, and it is incredibly important that this motion not only pass but that Canadians' privacy is respected.
