Dennis Bevington

[Arctic Waters Pollution Prevention Act, February 23rd, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague talked about the establishment of northern airports and the role of the federal government. He is correct but they were devolved to the territories a number of years ago and have struggled since. The conditions of climate change have changed the nature of our ability to provide air services throughout the north. At the same time, the federal government under the Chrétien Liberals cut back on many of the weather services that were essential to keeping these airports safe and reliable for the transport of goods and people.

Does my hon. colleague not agree that the situation with Arctic airports is changing and they need attention as they are part of the overall development of a reliable transportation system in the north? They need to adjust to the changing conditions that we have in the north.

[Transportation of Dangerous Goods Act, 1992, February 13th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I am not going to speak to the relevancy of the hon. member's remarks in his speech, because in a way I can see where he is going with it: the burden to be put on Canadians in terms of their rights and freedoms depends upon the problems in the world that are going to create the situation for terrorism.

He is correct in that the debate is around our setting up a law to put burdens on Canadians to prove their ability not to be involved in terrorism and not to be a security risk to the general population. The security risk is measured against the security situation in the whole world. I see his point.

I would like to have a debate about the bill as well. That is important here too, because we are talking about the rights of Canadians. If the hon. member has made his point about the world situation, perhaps he could give me an idea of what he feels this bill does to an ordinary Canadian, to a trucker who is trying to make a living in this country and now has to face this security clearance that might actually prevent him from doing his work.

[Transportation of Dangerous Goods Act, 1992, February 13th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I could not have said that better myself.

[Transportation of Dangerous Goods Act, 1992, February 13th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, we are in a situation where the government has introduced legislation that is open-ended. We need to understand, very well, what security measures would be enacted with this bill and we need to talk about them.

We do not need to show the terrorists where all our planning is but we do need to talk about what the parameters of the security are, and that needs to be done in committee. We need to understand, perhaps from the Privacy Commissioner or from human rights lawyers, where this fits in a spectrum. We need to know the kind of security clearance the U.S. is demanding of our people right now and how that information is being used.

Many of those questions need to be answered and they can only be answered through consultation. As parliamentarians, that is how we get the information and expert opinion on these bills that can actually guide us in making good decisions.

[Transportation of Dangerous Goods Act, 1992, February 13th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague, not only in the House but on the standing committee because we will be working together very closely on all these matters and I look forward to that as a parliamentarian.

The principle of secrecy is important with security, and I am not going to say that it is not and that there are no grounds to continue to look at ways to make things more secure for Canadians, but we need to put it in legislation. We need it in front of us so we know what we are talking about.

It is not to enable some minister, maybe not the current minister nor the government, to do things to Canadians that are not appropriate and do not match up to what Canadians stand for, not only in this country but everywhere else in the world. We need to ensure we do things right. I do not like enabling legislation because to me it shows that the thinking has not been done and that the process has not been completed.

[Transportation of Dangerous Goods Act, 1992, February 13th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague's question is an important one. He wants to know whether the bill would change the way we deal with dangerous goods and propane on our highways? No, it does not because we have a very good system in place, one that is copied worldwide, for the movement and for the response to problems we can have with all measure of dangerous goods. It is written in a handbook that is reprinted over and over again and sent to people all over the world.

This is not about what we are doing with the product. The bill is about what we are doing with the people who are involved in the system. What we are doing is not going to change the way we deal with dangerous goods. The bill deals with what we are doing with the people who move those dangerous goods and who work in the industries, real Canadians. The bill is about Canadians. It is not really about dangerous goods. We need to keep on what the bill is about, not say that somehow we are standing in the way of a good, safe system of dangerous goods.

[Transportation of Dangerous Goods Act, 1992, February 13th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak to Bill C-9, a bill to amend the Transportation of Dangerous Goods Act. This is a bill that was introduced into Parliament yesterday by the government and which is a very important piece of legislation in many respects. I am very glad to see the legislation coming forward.

Yesterday we had a chance to start debate on a number of issues. I want to take the time right now to comment a little bit on one of the things that I found very pleasing yesterday.

As a New Democratic Party member of Parliament in my second term, I was pleased during the debate to have the counsel of two new NDP MPs, both skilled lawyers in their fields. I speak of course of the new member for Vancouver Kingsway, a person who has had decades of work, although he appears very young, in the labour legislation field and will be a great addition to the House of Commons in identifying issues that surround the rights of working people and the rights of all of us. I was very pleased to see that. That provided an element that perhaps I did not have as much of in the previous Parliament.

To my left I have another lawyer, a very skilled environmental lawyer, our new member for Edmonton—Strathcona, a person I have worked with personally on environmental issues for over 25 years, going back to the days when we worked on issues like the Slave River hydro project in northern Alberta.

These people are a great addition to the House of Commons. When we have new members in Parliament, I think it is incumbent on all of us to understand what they bring to Parliament, what they bring to this place to provide that additional knowledge and understanding that can do so much in making good legislation, ensuring that what we are doing is correct and will serve Canadians over a long period of time, as legislation should.

As to the background on the bill, the public consultation began almost five years ago. There have been meetings on a continuing basis with provincial and territorial governments. I am sure that there will be some continuing consultation after the bill has passed.

The bill is the result of a process that has gone on for quite a long time. The safe transport of dangerous goods will remain a shared responsibility between the Government of Canada, provincial and territorial governments and the industry. It will be based on agreements and understandings, and working together to enforce requirements for protecting the movement of dangerous goods on highways in Canada.

Transport Canada would remain responsible for enforcing regulations that govern transport by rail, ship and air. The federal government still has a very large role to play, not simply in making legislation but ongoing enforcement, ongoing consideration of how best to ensure that dangerous goods are handled and identified in a manner that Canadians can remain protected.

Identification is important as well. I refer to a previous experience I had with the illegal movement of dangerous goods when I was mayor of my small town in the Northwest Territories. We had a case once that came out of a practice in Alberta where there is a black market for the sale of hazardous products.

Individuals could take a 45-gallon drum of hazardous products away and have $1,000 given to them on the black market. If the hazardous waste is taken away, they do not have to send it to the disposal site. We found someone in our community who was doing that and mixing it with home heating oil, burning it in buildings and spraying it all over the community. The movement, identification and understanding of where dangerous goods are is very important. It makes a difference and can make a huge difference to the health and well-being of Canadians if it is not handled correctly or taken care of in a proper fashion. Of course, we are very interested in making sure that this bill does the job it is supposed to do.

However, much of the bill does not talk about safety. Much of the bill deals with security, which is another matter of great importance to people. The government has said that it wants this bill moving ahead for security, the Olympics and a variety of other reasons. Within the bill, it would set up a transportation security clearance system where Canadians would be reviewed for security clearance by the Canadian government. The process would include appeals and disclosure of reasons for denial of clearance, but at the same time the bill is very open on this issue. It is enabling legislation. It does not lay out the conditions for the security clearances. It simply provides that the government can do this.

According to the proposed bill, under transportation security clearances, we see:

5.2 (1) No prescribed person shall import, offer for transport, handle or transport dangerous goods in a quantity or concentration that is specified by regulation — or that is within a range of quantities or concentrations that is specified by regulation — unless the person has a transportation security clearance granted under subsection (2).

(2) The Minister may, for the purposes of this Act, grant or refuse to grant a transportation security clearance to any person or suspend or revoke such a clearance.

It is pretty open-ended. The bill has been presented to us in a fashion that says that, while we currently have inter-country transport between ourselves and the United States, the U.S. has very onerous provisions for security clearance. This would take the responsibility of performing clearances from the United States and put it in the hands of the Canadian government so that shippers who are working in the transportation of dangerous goods across borders would find that their clearance is established within Canada. That is, ostensibly, its purpose.

However, none of this was laid out in the bill. The bill enables the development of transportation security clearances for virtually any part of our transportation net that handles dangerous goods. Of course, that is pretty well the entire transportation net because every carrier, airline, train and ship carries dangerous goods at one time or another. We have an act that enables the minister to make some fairly large and unknown security decisions about Canadians. That, to us, is a bit of a problem within this act, because we have a Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Our sense of privacy here is much different than in the United States. It is much more held in trust by Canadians and by their governments.

This act creates a framework that enables the creation of regulations but gives the Minister of Transport enormous powers to control Canadians and the transport industry. The minister will also be able to enable the use of security measures, in secret, for any perceived situation where dangerous goods may be part of any particular criminal occurrence.

In other words, under this legislation the minister would be able to decide not to move something, not to allow a company to operate, many different things, without any recourse and without anyone understanding the reasons. Some strong powers would be given to the minister, powers that the minister would be able to wield in secret. We do not know how those powers would be defined.

The bill is not a prescriptive bill. It is an enabling bill. In some ways the law would allow the minister to create a secret national security system that would demand of people whatever the minister, through regulation, would set as a security clearance.

Do we know what those restrictions are? The government says it is not interested in doing anything except catching up to our U.S. obligations. This has been reported to me through the department.

The government is not interested in providing security clearance for somebody hauling dynamite from Ontario to Quebec. That is not what the government is doing here. That may not be what the government is planning to do, but the bill would enable the minister, through regulations, to set conditions on security clearances for every aspect of our transportation system that deals with dangerous goods. This is a pretty strong piece of legislation.

The argument against secret laws dates back thousands of years. In 449 B.C. the Romans published the Law of the Twelve Tables creating an official public legal code that had to be published so that ordinary people would know the law. The principle that laws must be public has been the foundation of our law system since then.

The government says we need flexibility to protect Canadians, and this really concerns me. What we need are laws that protect Canadians, that are laid out so that Canadians understand the limitation of the law. Giving ministers this kind of overwhelming control over a situation, I find difficult.

When things are done by regulation, the vital process of public review and debate is short-circuited. Parliament is removed from making the laws. As a democrat, as a person who believes in the rule of Parliament, I find this difficult. I do not believe in enabling legislation. I believe in prescriptive legislation that lays out what we want to accomplish.

Just yesterday Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart delivered a stern warning to the federal government saying she is strongly opposed to any legislation that would allow the mass surveillance of private emails and phone calls. That is part of the government's plan to update Canada's wiretapping laws with new police powers to monitor criminal suspects in the digital era of cell phones and chat lines.

What did the Minister of Public Safety have to say about this? He said:

The concerns of the Privacy Commissioner are quite legitimate. We don't want to have legislation that intrudes on privacy rights and I can assure you we wouldn't come forward with that kind of legislation.

Let me get back to Bill C-9. This legislation would create a situation where the minister would be able to impose, through regulation, conditions on Canadians that may interfere with their privacy rights. It is a difficult situation for any of us who believe in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, civil liberties, the protection of the rights of an individual, and the right to privacy. These are all things that are important to us.

If the security clearance that is required by the United States is put into place by Canada for our people who are involved in cross-border trade and movement of goods, I think we would all understand that. We all understand that we would rather have our Canadians being judged by Canadians rather than by Americans. That is a fair thing and it is good. When it is presented in that fashion and the scope of what can be accomplished by the bill is clear that that is what is at stake here, I do not think we have a problem with that.

I do not think we have a problem with giving those kinds of conditions within a bill, but when we do not have that clearly outlined, when we have a bill that would allow much more than that to happen without the will of Parliament behind it, that is not a correct situation.

There are things that we really need within the bill. This bill is important but it is not important enough to give up the concept of civil liberties, privacy rights and the concern of Canadians to work and live in an environment where their rights as individuals are not threatened. We need to work on the legislation.

To that end, I can see us going along with this legislation moving to committee, but at the same time we do have some serious concerns with the legislation. We do not see that this is a direction in which we want to go, giving a minister of the Crown the kinds of powers without prescription, which the bill represents.

As we move along with this bill, we will see what kind of willingness the government has to support amendments, to support clearly defining what it wants to accomplish. If the government wants to define what it wants to accomplish in this bill, it would make the bill much better and more complete. It would not simply be a way for the government or future governments to intrude into the important aspects of Canadian rights and freedoms.

[Transportation of Dangerous Goods Act, 1992, February 12th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I want to congratulate my colleague on his excellent speech. He is a member of the transportation committee and of course is very concerned with these issues around hazardous goods, as am I.

In Canada and in this bill, we are not really looking at any changes to the very well-developed and world-recognized Canadian standards for the handling of hazardous or dangerous goods. The issues we are really looking at here are security clearances and the need for security plans around the movement of goods.

The nub of the question comes down to whether the bill will carry forward security clearances that are required for international truckers across the border, versus security clearances that would apply to Canadians and Quebeckers who may be travelling between Sherbrooke and Montreal.

In this bill, the level and the dividing point for the security clearance requirement that the minister would be able to enact with this legislation are not clear. It may be that this legislation would cause problems for Quebec if it affected local carriers, with the rather onerous requirements for security clearance that the Americans are asking for.

Has my hon. colleague considered these issues?

[Transportation of Dangerous Goods Act, 1992, February 12th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I am hardly able to deal with some of the complexities, but the question of security cameras is somewhat different.

Would my hon. colleague not agree that the question of providing information to a foreign country where that information can be shared with other countries around the world is simply not the same level of comparison? When he uses that comparison, he is really not talking about what is at stake within the bill.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2009, February 11th, 2009]

Madam Speaker, as I pointed out in my speech, the ability of foreign interest to take over companies like Air Canada could mean a significant amount to the workforce that works within the aviation industry. It could mean that we will be seeing offshore maintenance supplied to the aircraft. That could be accelerated through ownership by companies that come from other places.

The only hold that we have over the aviation industry right now is that we insist that the majority ownership is Canadian. In some cases that has already been circumvented by clever legal means. Nonetheless, the principle remains. The aviation industry being an industry that can utilize services from any part of the world needs to have a significant portion of the ownership reside within Canada.

Why did the Liberals support this bill? I think it goes back to the basics of what I was talking about earlier. We simply do not trust the Conservatives to deliver on their promises. We did not trust the Conservatives to come up with a budget that was a budget that could bring Canadians together. The Liberals made a choice to support the budget for the reasons that they felt it was politically expedient. They have chosen to go into an alliance with the Conservatives to put forth their somewhat considerable connections they have within their ideological grounds as well.