Dennis Bevington

[Northwest Territories Act, February 10th, 2011]

Madam Speaker, I will comment briefly about my participation with the Government of the Northwest Territories prior to my mission with respect to this bill. This bill was given to the Government of the Northwest Territories. I attended meetings with the premier of the Northwest Territories and the finance minister.

When we talk about what is going on here in terms of the dialogue over this bill, we must remember that the Government of the Northwest Territories has a gun to its head with respect to an improved borrowing limit. The NWT legislative assembly has talked about this issue. If the Northwest Territories does not get its borrowing limit approved because all of its borrowing powers are taken up with self-liquidating loans. Most of it is self-liquidating, but it still counts against its borrowing limits. This is a problem.

Under my bill, the Northwest Territories would be able to borrow up to 70% of its estimated annual revenue. This would give it an ongoing increase as the government increases in size.

My bill proposes a process that is a common practice in other jurisdictions that exist under legal statutes in Canada, like municipalities exist in provinces. That is where the Government of the Northwest Territories is at. All of its authority comes out of the NWT Act.

Discussions are underway with the territorial government concerning the borrowing provisions in the Northwest Territories Act. Unless these discussions lead to an amendment to the act, they are nothing more than a continuation of the current colonial process. The federal government does not have the authority to give the Northwest Territories more autonomy with the process it has entered into. The NWT Act needs to be amended. My bill, taken in a non-partisan fashion, would provide that authority to the federal government if it wants to participate in it.

The parliamentary secretary argued in the first hour of debate that my bill could not be supported as the government prefers to treat the three territories the same. That is not a defensible position considering that in the last two weeks the Minister of Indian Affairs signed a devolution agreement in principle with the Government of the Northwest Territories while refusing to talk with Nunavut about a similar devolution agreement. Yukon has not expressed the need for a change to its borrowing limit. We all have different requirements. We are three different territories, three completely different jurisdictions.

It has never been clear to me why the federal government must approve territorial borrowing. The letter from the Parliamentary Budget Officer indicated quite clearly:

With respect to Bill C-530, our review indicates there will be no incremental costs arising from adoption of these legislative amendments.

This is not an issue of cost to the federal government. This is a political issue about the nature of the type of control that the federal government holds over the territories.

With a gun to his head, what can our premier say to the government if we do not go ahead with this? The NWT is in a very difficult position. If we can come to grips with what the real issues are, what the real needs are for our three territories, then we could come to better solutions for the people of the north.

There is no solution for the people of the north other than amendments to existing legislation. Without this bill, the Conservative government does not have the legs to do what it needs to do for the Northwest Territories.

I plead with all members to send the bill to committee where officials of the Government of the Northwest Territories could tell us about its borrowing limit problems. The NWT government can tell parliamentarians where it stands. By approving this bill at second reading we would accomplish that. We would give a voice to the Government of the Northwest Territories here in Parliament.

I plead with all members to support this bill and get it to committee.

[Strengthening Aviation Security Act, February 9th, 2011]

Madam Speaker, I want to thank my colleague for what he said today. I do agree with him that the proposed amendment may well have been a good bargaining chip in this whole deal. Quite clearly, if we look at the incidents of airline terrorism in the last two years, what we see is the one rather dubious individual with the underwear bomb who flew from Amsterdam over Canada to the United States. In reality, there has been no incident of a Canadian plane carrying a bomb flying over the United States.

What we have is a situation where there is probably a higher degree of risk of an American plane carrying a bomb to an American destination overflying Canada than there is of a Canadian plane flying to Barbados carrying a bomb with a bunch of Canadians on it. That is pretty clear.

I agree with my colleague that his amendment was a good idea but it should have been part of the government's negotiation package to get out of this deal. Does the member agree?

[Strengthening Aviation Security Act, February 9th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, I feel honoured that my colleague has asked me that question. However, I would like him to know as well that through forum that we organized during the prorogation on aviation security and through the work the transport committee has done, we did make some changes this year, and I referred to those. What we heard from the witnesses who presented to us, and people from places that have gold-plated security like Israel, was that we were not necessarily doing all the things we should be doing and we may be doing many things that we did not need to do. That is the purpose of review and of anything we do.

I know after 9/11 there was an incredible angst in North America about the nature of security. It is funny that did not come after the Air India tragedy, but it did not. There were some things that happened after it, but 9/11 was an enormous personal affront to almost every North American. We have to recover from that and we have to look at our lives rationally because Canadians are the true north strong and free. We want our Canadian citizens to have the kind of lives that we all envisioned when we were younger, when we had freedom, the ability to travel and to work in many locations. Canadians were respected around the world for our openness. We do not want to lose that. Canadians are not about that.

I am willing to work with anyone to reduce the impact of world events on Canadians when it comes to their personal liberties and freedoms because I believe in those so strongly.

[Strengthening Aviation Security Act, February 9th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, I cannot disagree with my colleague in any way. Whenever we, as a country, as a government, provide information to another country where there is no security to that information, where there are no treaties that have been signed that say quite specifically how that information is to be used, then we put the information of our citizens at risk. If the agreement is in a letter, in a form that the government cannot even share with the committee, what is it?

When we saw the letter from the U.S. ambassador, it was hardly comforting when he said, ”This information will not be widely used for other purposes”. What does that mean? Does that mean that 90% of the information will not be used for any other purpose, but 10%, or 99.9% or 0.1% will? This is hardly a thing that confidence is built on.

[Strengthening Aviation Security Act, February 9th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, I defer to the perceived logic of my hon. colleague on this issue. I think that the logic may not be particularly well expressed by the member.

At committee, the minister said quite clearly that the government went into this saying this was not a security issue. It did not see the need for the U.S. to have this and that it obviously did not need the information for itself. Its determination, as Canadians, through Canada's security services, said this was not required. However, the U.S, it was required and the government submitted to the demands and that was what happened in the negotiations.

This was the evidence presented to us in committee. If the parliamentary secretary wants to change that evidence, he can come up with something else, but that is what we heard and I will leave it at that.

[Strengthening Aviation Security Act, February 9th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, I am glad to have a chance to speak to this bill again because I am deeply concerned about this whole issue.

Clearly, the history of aviation security since 9/11 is one of continual movement toward more authoritarian structures and continual movement toward less privacy for Canadians. This is the movement that took place and we are all part of it. This Parliament has been part of it over the last decade.

I have seen a break in that, though, in the last week where we finally saw some rationality applied to one particular segment of our aviation security. It is not a rationality that is popular with everyone. People are concerned about it. Of course they are.

However, we do see that the dam is starting to break on the whole issue of aviation security and what is actually required by Canadians, by international travellers, what is useful to do, and what is something that makes sense in this age rather than simply a knee-jerk reaction to perceived incidents that may occur.

Why do we not want to support this bill? It is because we do not think the government has done enough to deal with the issue of sharing information with the United States. That is quite clear. We feel that what has happened here is invading Canadians' privacy, invading their rights in a way that we cannot completely understand. We do not know what the impact of this information is. We have not been given assurances. There are no provisions within the bill that outline how this information is to be shared. None of that was part of this bill.

This bill was very simple, a few lines changing the Aeronautics Act. It is a few lines. It is really very limited. With the negotiations that took place and what we heard in committee about the negotiations, there certainly were a number of issues that came to light. One of them was that the U.S. could provide a complete exemption for Canadian flights. If we matched equivalent security, the U.S. would provide that exemption.

Another one was the issue of reciprocity, which we have talked about quite a bit. That was not brought to the table. That was not used as a lever in the negotiations, quite clearly.

Then we talked about the famous exemption that was given. This exemption, domestic to domestic flights, that was provided by the United States for Canadian flights leaving one destination in Canada and going to another was given by the U.S. That raised even more questions about security. Of course, with any flight that goes domestic to domestic, the security requirement for the information is simply a photo id, something that could be forged by the simplest of techniques and which really does not provide the same layer of sophistication in terms of the information that a passport on an international flight provides to any airline that is dealing with a particular passenger.

We saw the U.S. give an exemption for flights that would pass over the United States that had less security on them than international flights. This did not make sense. The exemption did not stand up to rationality. That always brings something into question. When rationality does not apply, what are the reasons?

Did we understand the reason last week when the Prime Minister went down to Washington to work on a perimeter security deal? Was the reason for an exemption on domestic to domestic that we are going to see traveller information shared completely within our countries, between intelligence agencies for the two countries? Is that what is going to happen? How are we going to determine the nature of that information? How are we going to determine how that information is going to be used?

We can see quite clearly that there is no control over the information we are giving out right now. There is none at all. It is simply give the information and let it be.

That information does include the passenger name record. When it includes the passenger name record number, the U.S. government has access to the information on the computers, the Sabre and Galileo servers that are held in the United States. That is information that was also given at committee.

Whatever information airlines have on passengers would be instantaneously accessible to the United States intelligence service through the beauty of computers. The seven day requirement that the information will be taken out after seven days really is quite meaningless in our computer age. There is plenty of time to do whatever we want with that information, the data mining that the European Union was so against, the data profiling was the real harmful thing that could go on with that type of information.

So, we have no recourse and no limitations on the information that we are giving. For Canadians falsely accused of something in the United States, there is no recourse. One of my colleagues talked about that with the existing system. It is not going to get any better. Many witnesses spoke in front of the committee. Many witnesses indicated their disquiet with what was going on here, with the impacts on the invasion of privacy.

We proposed some amendments. I put forward an amendment for a drop dead clause, as we did in the early part of this decade, where with contentious invasions of privacy through things like the Terrorism Act, we put in drop dead clauses. We said if there is a perceived need for information that goes beyond what is normal, if there are considerations that we put on the Canadian population that go beyond what we expect as our basic rights, then let us put a time limit on it.

I put forward that amendment. The support for that amendment was not there from the two opposition parties and that amendment died. That actually has brought us to the point we are here in debating this bill.

In the last days since the Prime Minister's trip to Washington, the Liberal Party adopted two positions on information. One position was that it was going to vote to support the bill. The other being when, publicly in question period, the Liberal leader says things like: “Why is the Prime Minister even contemplating the surrender of Canadian privacy rights to U.S. Homeland Security?”, “What biometric information on Canadians will the Conservatives surrender to the Americans?”, and “When will the Prime Minister tell Canadians and Parliament the truth?”

Yes, we are after those answers, as well, on this particular bill. We wanted to see the agreements. We wanted to understand the safeguards that should be in place for any Canadian information shared with another country.

Did we get it? No.

What do Canadians think? There was an interesting online poll in the Globe and Mail, which is not terribly reliable, but 67,000 responded to that online poll. The question was: “Should Canada and the U.S. collaborate more deeply on surveillance and data-sharing in the name of a so-called North American perimeter? Ninety-two per cent of those respondents said no; 92% of the 67,000 Canadians who had the opportunity to see the poll and to respond to it said no. That is a fairly significant margin of Canadians who are concerned about their personal privacy rights vis-à-vis information.

This is why the Liberal Party right now is quite conflicted on this issue. It is voting for a bill that is not tolerable to Canadian values, for whatever reason, perhaps the perceived threat to the Canadian aviation industry.

Members were told there was a great need to bring the bill forward and get it completed by December 31 of last year so the U.S. would not stop the overflights of Canadian planes. That has not happened yet, and we are still a ways away from completing this bill. The NDP will continue to work on trying to get opposition members to come onside and recognize that the bill does not provide for a safe and secure use of Canadian information.

There are many other issues that tie to the bill. My colleague spoke of one that was really never mentioned, which is the inconvenience of the bill and the information shared according to the 24-hour requirement of the U.S. government for any of these overflights. If, for instance, Mrs. Jones is in Cuba enjoying the sunshine, her husband dies at home or becomes very ill and she has to return very quickly on a flight that day, what will happen to her? Will she be blocked from taking that flight?

This is a very important point. If the government had talked about putting in some reciprocity on the U.S. 2000 flights through Canadian airspace and the U.S. understood it would have to give 24 hours notice for any passenger on that plane, we would quickly be in a much more advantageous negotiation position with the United States.

Quite clearly, the government did not think this information was required when it went into the negotiations because it did not want to do this. It said in committee that it did not want to do this. The Minister of Public Safety said, “I didn't want to do this”. If he did not want to do this, then he must understand this is not required for security.

What is it required for? Is this simply more of a knee-jerk reaction to the events of a decade ago and we cannot get our heads out of the sand and recognize that we are in a different time when we can look at security rationally and work with our neighbours to ensure the security we provide is useful, functional and it does not take away the rights of Canadians or Americans?

The NDP wants that. We want security that works for Canadians, not security that takes away the rights of Canadians.

[Strengthening Aviation Security Act, February 9th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague did bring up the issue of the regulations that the U.S. has for the information it wants to collect. That is correct.

However, what we are talking about is the agreement between Canada and the U.S. regarding the use of that information, the sharing of that information, the keeping of that information and all of those things. We have had no indication from the government of what those agreements are, how they are held in place, and what kind of surety Canadians have that their information will be used in a correct fashion. In fact, the only information we received at committee was that once this information were given to the United States, it would have the ability under its laws, under the Homeland Security Act, to use the information from foreigners as it saw fit. In fact, its privacy law does not apply to foreigners, so the information collected by foreigners does not apply.

When we talk about handing over the passenger name record, the U.S. government also has the ability, through the Homeland Security Act, to use that number to get all the information held on file and collected in computers in the United States.

Where is the agreement that limits the use of the information that Canadians are passing to the United States?

[Strengthening Aviation Security Act, February 9th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, the bill has gone through a long process. One might ask why that is. The privacy and rights of Canadians are probably the most important issues we deal with in the House.

The parliamentary secretary said there was a lot of confusion created at the committee by various people.

I would like to point out that when the Minister of Public Safety spoke to us about the bill, he emphasized that this particular information would not be used in the United States for any other purpose. Since then we have had countless amounts of information including from the ambassador, as my hon. colleague pointed out. In his letter he said that this information would not be “shared widely for law enforcement or for immigration purposes”. Certainly that is not a denial of the use of it for those purposes. It says they would not use everyone's name and information for those purposes. Quite clearly, the minister himself created that confusion.

The parliamentary secretary said that in negotiations if we could have convinced the U.S. we had proper security in Canada it has the ability within its laws to provide a full exemption for Canadian information on overflights. The parliamentary secretary said it would cost billions of dollars to accomplish the extra security required to get up to the standards of the U.S.

Where did the parliamentary secretary get the information to say that the costs to create a security system that would match up to the United States would be immense?

[Seeds Regulation Act, February 8th, 2011]

Madam Speaker, I want to express my thanks to all my colleagues who spoke before me to the bill, because this is the only opportunity we have had for a meaningful discussion on such an important topic in the House of Commons and I am very pleased to be part of it.

I sit next to the member for British Columbia Southern Interior. His passion for the issues that surround agriculture infects me as well. It is like a GMO. It just comes over me from him because he has done his homework. In his years as agriculture critic, he has talked to Canadians over and over again on issues ranging from food security, human health issues surrounding food, to protection for farmers. His focus as a member of the agriculture committee and his time in Parliament have been most valuable to the House.

Everyone in the House has to recognize that, whether they vote for or against the bill. We have to recognize the nature of the work that my colleague has done on this to bring it to the attention of the House and many of his colleagues in our caucus who, understanding the issue a year or two ago, may not have been aware of where it is today. His work to persuade members who have bought the corporate line on GMO products is valuable. It may take a little longer, but I am sure it will eventually get through to people.

What is up with the other parties? Why have manipulations taken place over the bill brought forward by my colleague? Why do we have the situation we have today where the bill did not have the full use of the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food in terms of witnesses, in terms of getting evidence before it? Why did we end up in the situation where only through the use of an obscure bit of parliamentary procedure were we allowed to have the debate we are having tonight.

It is clear that the Liberal Party is conflicted on this. We have good support from the Bloc on this issue and everyone in the NDP is thankful for the support that party has given us, but the Liberal Party has equivocated on this throughout. We appreciate the support the Liberals gave at second reading. I quote the Liberal agriculture critic on December 1:

There is a serious concern that I think Parliament or Agriculture Canada or someone, certainly, has to address; that is, as the member for British Columbia Southern Interior indicated earlier, that there is potential risk in the alfalfa industry by the introduction of GMO, genetically engineered seeds. It would be the same in terms of the wheat industry, over a slightly longer term.

He understands it. Why will we end up in a situation tomorrow where this vote is so uncertain? Why is that happening? Agriculture is so important to this country. It is so important to all of us.

The other person in my life who has given me a great deal of guidance on this is my son-in-law. He is a man who has lived all his life in the Northwest Territories but who has seen the importance of this issue and at every opportunity has brought it to my attention. I want to thank him for that. It has been valuable to me and I understand why he is doing it. He is doing it for his children. He is concerned about their health and welfare going forward, as I am as a grandparent.

We have seen GMO products in our environment for the last 15 years. We do not know the impacts they will have on the health of Canadians going forward. We do not understand it. That is not something that is there yet.

In fact, there is a body of knowledge that says there are issues and that whenever scientists work on these issues they find themselves under attack from large corporations. This was certainly the case when a group of scientists, led by Monsieur Séralini in France, found through analysis there were definite unintended direct or indirect metabolic consequences of genetic modification. It could not be excluded from what was going on with the introduction of these products. There is a body of scientific knowledge, even though GMO has not been around that long, which says there is a problem here.

In my personal experience over the last year, there have been a couple of events that I thought were significant. In January of this year we had the opportunity to hold bilateral talks with Japanese MPs. In those talks one of the subjects was agriculture. I had the opportunity to ask the Japanese MPs their position on GMO and it was quite clear that they did not want any part of it. They are people who are conscious of their country's position and it was quite clear that this position is not going to change very easily. They are not going to move quickly to introduce GMO into their country. They do not want it. The Japanese are a highly developed, sophisticated, technological society with great and pressing food needs. Their rejection of these products says that their understanding of the issue is such that they can recognize where this is going.

The second interaction I had was with a Canadian Wheat Board lawyer at a parliamentary function. She informed me that her job was to go around the world and try to establish protocols with a variety of countries that were not allowing Canadian products to enter because of the potential contamination from GMO. She had to work with the countries to design specific protocols that would ensure there would be no contamination in the system. This was a very large and difficult task.

Right at the beginning of this industry, with only a certain number of these products in our agriculture, we are experiencing these kinds of problems. Why would we not want to look at this and address it very seriously?

When we enter Canada and go through Canada customs, the agents want to know if we have been on a farm. They want to know if we have seeds. They want to know everything about our relationship to the country we have just come from and what it means to Canada. Other countries are doing the same thing, only they are doing it about GMO. We need to understand that. We need to express that in our agricultural development.

I spent years involved in environmental assessment. To say that we are not taking the concerns of the public forward on these new products that actually influence huge sections of our land and our agricultural production is simply wrong. There is tremendous support for the bill across the country. Tomorrow, we need a positive vote on Bill C-474. I ask people listening tonight to call their MP and plead with him or her to support the bill. The bill is not going to hurt Canada; it is going to help Canada be a better country.

[Petitions, February 7th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, I rise to present a petition signed by many Canadians. This petition requests that the House inform the Canadian public of the number of civilian casualties inflicted by Canadian troops in Afghanistan, that the House report the number of the military casualties of the Canadian public and that the House keep the Canadian public informed of the cost of the war to Canadian taxpayers.