Derek Lee

[Canada Pension Plan, October 22nd, 2002]

My friend opposite has corrected me. It is 30%. That is the limit on foreign investment of our Canada pension plan funds.

The last amendment in the bill has to do with accountability. All of us in the House are true believers in the process of accountability. The trick is to get the right mechanisms that reflect what is happening with these types of investments to allow at least trained observers, and some untrained observers like most of us here in the House, to assess how the pension plan is doing.

The final amendment which I am referring to with regard to Bill C-3 relates to changes in reporting mechanisms for the Canada pension plan. In saying that we want good and effective reporting mechanisms, I have to point out what is probably obvious to most of us, which is that in requiring our public pension plan to report, it is important that we not remove from our pension plan the ability to make appropriate moves with respect to investments.

If a large fund is going to make a big investment, it probably is not a good idea to announce it in advance. Sometimes the movement of moneys in capital markets needs appropriate levels of confidentiality before and after they are moved to protect the integrity of the investment. At the end of the day, there is no confidentiality. It has to be reported. It has to show up on the books. Reporting mechanisms that we design and put in place have to take into account the need for large pension plans like this to operate with reasonable confidentiality and integrity as they move our money around.

That is the list of housekeeping reforms. All of them are important in their own way. I hope I did not diverge too much onto other issues. We are back on relevance and back on focus on this very boring bill. Maybe there are some questions from members about this very important subject.

[Canada Pension Plan, October 22nd, 2002]

Madam Speaker, my remarks will not be lengthy. The House will know why they are not going to be lengthy after I begin my preamble. Listening to the debate today made me think about the issue of relevance. It is definitely a fact that most of what is being discussed today is in some way relevant to the Canada pension plan, most of it.

I have noticed that members on both sides of the House have taken advantage of the debate on Bill C-3 to raise issues relevant to the Canada pension plan. That is all well and good, except that the bill in question is relatively a housekeeping bill with five or six types of changes to the existing Canada pension plan.

Maybe those elements in the bill are just too darn boring for everybody. Maybe they are not that important. It makes me wonder why we just would not adopt the provisions and move on to debate something else. It is not that the Canada pension plan is not a worthy subject of debate. It is just that the debate today is supposed to be on the contents of the bill, yet the debate seems to be on more general issues involving the Canada pension plan.

We have heard about the process of appointments to the pension plan investment board. We have heard about how the pension plan should be investing its capital, the level of benefits to those who receive the pension, the survivor pension or the disability pension, and the health of the plan itself. All of these are important public issues but none of them deal with the contents of the bill.

I will try to focus my remarks on the bill itself. I know that earlier speakers will have done that. I know it may be boring, but such is the nature of these types of legislative amendments. Let me address the five or six changes just so the record can show it and so we can all be bored as we get ready for members' statements and question period.

As everyone knows, the 1998 legislation created a Canada Pension Plan Investment Board which would take all of the money contributed into the plan, or most of it, and invest it to obtain a return to the plan higher than that which was originally being obtained by the silly practice of lending the pension plan moneys to the provinces. That practice was based on a political deal struck two or three decades ago here in Ottawa. The money was lent out from the pension plan pool to the provinces, I suppose at appropriate rates of interest but using investment methods that did not allow for any appreciation or accumulation of capital. Most of that money is still outstanding I guess. The money was lent. The provinces owe it. They pay interest and they repay it over time.

That provided very little in the way of growth to the pension plan pool. That became painfully obvious in the 1980s and 1990s as we saw other public pension plans grow, public pension plans where the funds were invested in the capital markets in a prudent fashion. There are several pension funds in Canada and the United States which have grown hugely with prudent investments, even grown beyond expectations. There are private pension plans that have so much money they have to take some of it back. There are fights by labour unions and corporations about how much money should be taken back because the pension plan has been invested so wisely.

Here we have our own public Canada pension plan and to some degree the Quebec pension plan, which does not run exactly the same way but in a sense runs in tandem for the same objectives. We have now allowed the definite investment of these moneys which proves beneficial for our whole country over the long term and medium term.

The first tinkering amendment to that existing legislation is one which seems to be pretty trite stuff. It would allow some or all of the money which, by law, has to be held not in the investment account but in the plan account, which was three months worth of capital sitting there just in case it was needed, to be turned over to the investment account so it can be invested as well. At the same time as we do that, the pension plan itself needs a legal mechanism to draw back from the investment account the money it needs monthly, daily or whatever to run the pension plan. It pulls it back from the capital markets.

Those two amendments run in tandem. They make sense. We could ask why those provisions were not there before. They were not there when the amendments were made in 1998. Some elements of the original pension plan legislation were kept in place and better foresight on the part of the managers and the government now allows us to see that we should make these changes.

There is also the matter of long term investments held not by the investment fund but by the Minister of Finance. Over all of the years, the Minister of Finance, on behalf of the Government of Canada and on behalf of Canadians, was the named owner of many investments that the fund had. Those investments are principally loans to provinces.

Just to pick an example, the province of British Columbia or Ontario owes the Canada pension fund $20 billion. The debt instrument reflecting that account is in the name of the Minister of Finance for Canada. This amendment will allow the Minister of Finance, who is statutorily obliged to be the named owner as trustee, to turn those long term investments over a three year period over to the investment fund.

It is possible in theory that the investment fund in prudence and with good investment intent may decide to actually sell some of that debt. It may decide to cash it in now depending on the interest rates, sell the money that is owed by Ontario on the open market, take the cash and reinvest it elsewhere.

I hope I am not making it sound like the investment board is into funny money investments and playing Monopoly with our pension funds. These are financing and investment techniques that are in use now and if used properly and prudently will serve the beneficiaries, the annuitants of our national pension plan, the Canada pension plan.

At some point in time over the last few years it has been questioned whether or not our Canada pension plan should have to live by the same foreign investment rules that our personal pension plans, statutory pension plans, RRSPs, have to live with. There is a limit on how much Canadian law will allow a statute based pension plan to invest in foreign funds. Forgive me for not knowing precisely what it is, but I think it is 20% now. That is a cap on how much can be invested in foreign funds.

Should our pension plan be able to be invested in no foreign funds or some and how much? This statutory amendment makes it clear that our Canada pension plan will follow the same rules as all of our other pension plans. If I am correct that the limit is 20%, that is the limit of investment of our Canada pension plan funds.

[Terrorism, June 13th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of National Revenue.

In light of the continuing terrorist threat to North America and many other places in the world, could the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of National Revenue tell the House what Canada is doing to stop weapons of mass destruction from crossing our borders and what we are doing to meet the challenge of high tech smugglers without clogging our border crossing points to the U.S.A.?

[Sex Offender Registry Act, May 30th, 2002]

Madam Speaker, I welcome the opportunity to speak to second reading of Bill C-333, an act to establish and maintain a national registry of sex offenders to protect our children, as proposed by the member for Langley--Abbotsford.

I am sure all of us in this place are unequivocal in expressing our support for any feasible measure that will effectively protect our children, indeed all our citizens from sexual predators. I would like to outline the efforts of the solicitor general to date on this matter.

The solicitor general has stated many times that he supports a registry of sex offenders. This nation already possesses one of the most technologically advanced criminal history registries in the world in the Canadian Police Information Centre, CPIC. The solicitor general told the House that his department would consider improvements to CPIC in the specific area of sex offences, citing concerns that CPIC was not address searchable by police officers.

In a very short period of time he met that commitment when he announced, on September 11, 2001, that a new database within the CPIC system would be created and known as the sex offender category. Further, he announced that this database would be both address and offence searchable, that it would be up and running within a year and that it would be funded completely by the federal government.

That is not all the government has done in recent years to combat the dangers of sexual predators.

In 1997 we proclaimed Bill C-55 which strengthened the dangerous offender rules in the criminal code and also created a new sentencing provision called long term offender.

As a result of these changes, prosecutors in almost every province are now aggressively pursuing dangerous offender and long term offender options. In fact, since 1997 the number of successful dangerous offender applications has doubled each year.

The 1997 legislative package also created a new category called long term offender, targeting individuals who were clearly a threat but would not meet the threshold of dangerous offender. This new designation recognized that released sex offenders who received supervision and treatment in the community experienced dramatically lower reoffending rates than an offender who entered the community at the end of his sentence without conditions for supervision or treatment.

In addition to the long term custodial term, long term offenders can be ordered to comply with a further 10 years of community supervision and conditions. This innovative measure has already resulted in over 100 long term offender orders.

In addition, another provision was created in section 810 of the criminal code called community protection orders. These are issued by a court and reviewed every 12 months to place conditions on a sex offender even when no sentence is being served.

As well, on November 17, 1994, the government introduced a national screening system to help organizations screen out child sex abusers applying for work with children by disclosing their criminal record.

None of these initiatives happened overnight. While I agree with my colleagues in the House that this is a pressing problem, cobbling together a mandatory sex offender registry without looking at all of the issues, all the details and all the facts will not result in effective legislation.

The solicitor general has taken a slightly different approach. He has asked his officials to work with all the provinces and territories to fully explore this issue, to determine what is and what is not feasible in a Canadian context and to find out where some jurisdictions have succeeded and where others have failed. I fully support this approach. It now appears that all of the provinces support this approach. Why else would they be participating fully in the federal-provincial-territorial working group on high risk offenders currently seized with this matter?

This approach makes sense. If we are going to have a registry, we want one that works, that is efficient and affordable and that is supported by all of the provinces. We want one that will recognize the impact of the charter of rights and freedoms. We want one that is not in breach of federal or provincial privacy laws. We want one that local agencies will have the ability and resources to administer and enforce. We want one for which all provinces from coast to coast can agree upon a consistent approach. Finally, we want one that will not drive convicted sex offenders underground with assumed identities and no assistance with their rehabilitation.

At the Moncton meeting last February federal ministers agreed to bring forward legislation to support a national registration process in the same time frame as the completion of enhancements to CPIC including mandatory registration of specified offenders as hon. the member for Langley--Abbotsford has referred to. They will again discuss the matter when they meet in early June a couple of weeks from now.

It is essential for senior officials to continue this important work and develop a common model before deciding how best to proceed. A detailed model would help us consider and, it is hoped, come to agreement on important matters such as cost, charter compliance, privacy issues and potential liability. We do not know how much the entire system would cost. We would prefer not to enter into a new system arbitrarily but to do so knowing what the real costs would be at all levels of government.

We must carefully address the issue in the context of a national system while recognizing that not all jurisdictions have the same needs. Without completing this work it will not be possible to decide with precision what the legislation should contain.

The bill put forward by the hon. member proposes policy and legislative options. It has support on both sides of the House although there are differences in terms of timing and detail. I congratulate the hon. member for his continuing work on the issue. Although his remarks were phrased somewhat in the negative he should not underestimate the importance of private members' business in fostering, promoting and exhorting government legislation in the House.

The work of the hon. member and other members in this place has fostered support for the type of sex offender registry now evolving within the CPIC registry system. With the co-operation of the provinces and territories we in the government hope to have in place a system of mandatory registration for certain offenders so we can make the system work as the hon. member stated earlier.

In closing, I note the importance of Bill C-333 and all private members' business in spurring the government and this place to enact better policy and legislation.

[Justice, May 24th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Justice.

In a recent study by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health it was noted that children who were victims of bullying stopped regarding school as a place of learning but instead associated it with mental, emotional and physical abuse. Other studies have shown that bullying is a marker for future criminal behaviour and that it can have serious long term negative effects on the self-esteem of its victims.

I want to know what the government is doing to respond to concerns about this issue.

[Assisted Human Reproduction Act, May 24th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to have an opportunity to contribute a small bit to this debate of a significant legislative area which in my view has been left unregulated for far too long.

I do recall standing in this place approximately 10 or 12 years ago on a debate that covered a part of this field and suggesting that somewhere out in the real world, not in this place but somewhere out in the real world, there were scientists doing their work and somewhere out there in a laboratory closet there was someone developing what might become a mutant of the species, because we are never sure as scientists carry on their work what they will end up with, and sometimes they are not sure.

We knew then, as we know now, that the implications for the future of the human race were actually in the hands of individuals most of whom were well-meaning, but some of whom were quite possibly simply looking to make the fast buck, the quick discovery. That made me, among others, fairly nervous.

Over the years we found it necessary to study this and related questions and put a magnifying glass on the whole area. It was quite appropriate. I regret that it has taken a decade or more to reach the point where we feel we have enough consensus in our society to impose some regulations and some guidance, let us call it, for those in the field.

There are in existence in Canada now groups of scientists and teachers who feel that they have a reasonable handle on these related fields of endeavour in human reproduction. They feel that their professional expertise and their commitment to country, to family, to community and to the conventional morality is sufficient to guide them in their work.

I am not suggesting for a moment that any one particular group of them or any particular scientist, teacher or professor is not doing things properly, but it is always a risk in the modern world. We know that around the world people operate on different moral codes and have different ways of looking at things. The risk of some person or group of persons going off on a tangent and manipulating the human genome in a way that might create a mutant of the species, a strain that would not have been there had they not gone through the laboratory effort, no matter how they got there, no matter what their objectives were, would not only embarrass us but prejudice us as a human race.

At the time, I remember trying to figure out what we would have if we were to end up with a mutant of the species. Would that mutant be a human being? Whether it was just so big or as tall as I am now, how would we treat that human existence? I could not come up with an answer, which then led me to conclude that we have to do something to reduce the risk of our scientists going off on a tangent and doing things that would prejudice the whole human race.

Lying in the background of this, of course, is a way of looking at the human race which rests on a foundation of religious faith. No matter what one's faith happens to be, I think all religious faiths subscribe to the belief that the human race is here because it has been willed by God and our position here is very much in the hands of God or a god. Although there may be some divine providence out there most of the time or some of the time, the human race has made mistakes in ways that we do not think our God has willed. We fight these huge wars, we do pretty mean and evil things, and sometimes we have accidents.

The bill attempts to regulate different aspects of human reproduction. I know that one of the areas of debate concerns the use of human stem cells. There are two or more different types of stem cells. It is the embryonic stem cell that has become the focus of some of these issues. Is the way the embryonic stem cell is produced, the way we use it and the way it is or is not protected compliant with an application of moral rules? There is some division of opinion on this, but I think most of us would agree that where there is doubt and concern we must take the safe route. We must protect human life wherever it comes into existence. We must not abuse our position, our condition here on the human planet, whether one chooses to view it as a scientific, biological one or as an extrapolation of creation by God subject to moral obligation.

To wrap up, I want to indicate that I am very pleased we have come this far. I do not really regret that it has taken all this time provided that we have a good product, a good piece of legislation. I hope we can take the time to consider it. I hope that Canadians will have an opportunity to follow the debate and that in the end we will have an opportunity to pass a piece of legislation that will serve all of us, not just in Canada but around the world, including scientists and the community, in the hope that our work in this field will produce benefits for the human race in health and in human reproduction and will do it in a way that will protect our global, collective human futures.

[Public Safety Act, 2002, May 2nd, 2002]

Madam Speaker, the hon. member is right. However she is talking about designations under the National Defence Act. I was talking about the dozen to 15 interim order scenarios created by the bill.

The hon. member has read the act and it is fairly accurate. If a Canadian or foreign military ship were in Nanoose Bay carrying on exercises, yes, it would be possible to create a military exclusion zone for that purpose.

[Public Safety Act, 2002, May 2nd, 2002]

Madam Speaker, when people buy airline tickets they do not need to have criminal record checks. Let us suppose someone suspected of hijacking an aircraft a year ago in some other country happened to be in Canada, the paperwork had not followed and he or she had not been arrested. Let us suppose such a person went to buy an airline ticket. Surely the average Canadian would agree that a warrant for the arrest of an accused or convicted hijacker is relevant to whether the person should be allowed to get on an aircraft.

The only way we can deal with this is to allow passenger lists to be verified in the usual way by our police forces. They can do this kind of thing using the databases and indices they normally use. This would mean turning passenger lists over to the RCMP and/or CSIS. We do it now with the American authorities so we can fly our aircraft into American airspace. Under Bill C-55 we would do the same thing here. If we did not we would be stupid.

Are there privacy issues? Yes, there are. Everyone who bought an airline ticket would have his or her name on a list that went through a computer search. That is one of the implications of 9/11. We must realize that. We all said it would happen. We all said the world would change. We said big brother would be following right behind. It is here and we must deal with it.

I am not prepared to accept that we cannot find out who is getting on an aircraft because of privacy concerns. Our police make us all more secure in the public interest. We must let them do their job. We must co-operate not only with our police but with police agencies in other countries. We will find a way to do it properly.

[Public Safety Act, 2002, May 2nd, 2002]

Madam Speaker, on the first question, I would certainly be in support of sending the bill to the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights. I would not want to support a motion that had contained in it an opposition poison pill of some sort. Where a bill goes for study is really determined by members in the House. The government of course has an interest in that sometimes, but I think we can probably work this out. That would be my objective.

Second, in terms of who makes interim orders, as I said in my remarks, it is usually a minister but in many cases the minister has designated that authority to a specific government official or category of official. That is most appropriate at times. For example, when there is a train accident and an inspector is on the site dealing with hazardous goods, we have to allow that inspector, that federal official on the site, to make the appropriate order. It is not always practical to have the minister on the phone. By the way, this is a fairly structured system within the privy council and within government. It is not as if anyone can make the order. It is actually quite organized and specific.

We might also note that when we come to the military exclusion zones the section states specifically that the Minister of National Defence personally may make the order. That is one where the statute does not allow the delegation to a government official.

The process that we are dealing with here already exists in government. We are not all familiar with it, but it is quite organized thanks to a very strong public service. We have all been well served by the privy council and its officials over many years here.

[Public Safety Act, 2002, May 2nd, 2002]

Madam Speaker, I will jump into the debate and continue where my colleague left off. This has to do with which committee the bill should be referred if it is in fact adopted at second reading by the House. I tend to agree with him that the justice committee might be the preferable committee to deal with it.

Some of our colleagues on the transport committee might be wondering why they would not be so favoured or perhaps they might regard the bill as a burden. It is certainly not out of any disrespect for their abilities on the transport committee, but it appears clear that the bulk of the bill does not involve mainline transportation issues. One quarter to one third of the bill does deal with transportation related issues but the bill, as it appears from the debate here, is clearly more about the issue of citizen-state relations such as civil liberties, constitutional compliance and privacy.

Having sat on the justice committee, I know that those are issues with which the justice committee has dealt previously and with which it will continue to deal as part of its mandate from the House. Therefore, I am rather inclined to suggest either the bill go to the justice committee or that a special legislative committee be constructed and comprised of some individuals from the transport committee and some from the justice committee. The bill would get a better procedural scrutiny in that manner and therefore I do not object to those issues being raised by the opposition.

The manner in which the opposition is addressing the bill is not wholly constructive. There is a lot of exaggerated rhetoric. We all know it is part of its job. The opposition is invited to support a bill but it does not usually. Anything it does not like it tends to react with mock indignation and exaggerated rhetoric. Most of us on this side of the House understand that and most of the issues, and not necessarily the positions raised by the opposition, have been noted by members on this side.

I will address parts of the bill. As everyone knows, the bill has a large number of components involving many federal statutes. It makes it difficult to address the bill easily from a general perspective.

As an example, I read part 7 dealing with the Export and Import Permits Act. It is not a particularly exciting part of the of the bill. One might wonder why that statute would be amended by the bill which is supposed to deal with our response to the terrorist threat. There are reasons related to the export of technology and our protection of technologies which are Canadian or based in Canada and which might in the wrong hands facilitate a terrorist act, either here or abroad. Therefore, the act is being amended.

As a legislator who has been around here for a few years and one who has been fairly picky from time to time on legislation passing through this place and committee, I noted in section 55, which deals with section 7 of the Export and Import Permits Act, that there was a fair bit of discretion being bandied about in the section that would allow officials to give permits for import or export. It simply says: “subject to such terms and conditions as are described in the permit”. There does not appear to be any constraint on the kind of discretion used in setting those conditions.

All our public servants exercise their authority with appropriate good faith. Our job in this place is to ensure that when they exercise their discretion, they do it in a framework that at least controls their discretion and prevents abuse of discretion and the use of authority to achieve objectives which were not envisaged by the original statue which gave them the authority. Those kinds of decisions that might redirect their discretion in that improper way are frankly an abuse where it has ever occurred. I am not suggesting any particular instance of abuse but our job is to prevent that.

As an example, I would like to move now to part 8 of the act dealing with the Food and Drugs Act. This section of the bill is an example of a number of other sections of the bill that provide the authority to the minister to make interim orders to respond to emergency situations. What we are envisaging here is in response to a terrorist act.

Most reasonable people would agree that where there is an incident, the government should have the ability and the authority to respond and respond quickly. In other statues dealing with transportation, like the Atomic Energy Control Act and other federal statutes, authority for public officials to react quickly and to make orders that will protect public safety exists. They are buried in federal statutes and they are used from time to time to protect the public interest.

What we have in this bill is the creation of a whole lot of new sections of this nature, whereby when we conceive of a terrorist incident we in government then have to think through how we could or should respond to those incidents. We create in the bill what we call the interim order. Some people have called it a power grab. It certainly is an attempt to legislatively create an authority for a minister or public official to react in the interests of public safety after an incident.

I will give an example of how it works. It says that the minister may make an order. It should be known clearly that when a statute says that in this manner it is also possible for a government official, as I understand it, to make the order if the official has been designated by the minister to make that order. Those orders will be made by a minister and in may cases by a public official who has been designated by the minister to make the order. It will not be made necessarily by the minister sitting at his or her desk. As I said, this framework already exists in federal statute. There is nothing too scary about that. It is pretty normal.

Let us say an order is made under the Food and Drugs Act where there has been a contamination by a terrorist act. I do not like to talk about these things but let us just suggest there has been a contamination of the food supply somewhere by a terrorist act and it is necessary to make orders to remove food, to prevent public access to food and to protect the food supply and water supply. An official may make that order. That order, under the proposed bill, is to be tabled in parliament within 15 sitting days.

We all know around here that if such an order were to be made on June 28, parliament might not have it on the table until some time in September or October. This is nonsense and whoever has drafted this totally misunderstands the purpose of the section and the way parliament works. If the purpose of the section is to notify parliament, it should say that the order is to be tabled in parliament forthwith or within two, three or five days. Let us be reasonable here. That can be tabled if parliament is sitting. If it is not sitting, then we use what is normally called back door tabling. The order is delivered to the clerk's office in the House just down the hall. That is sufficient as tabling.

I suggest that that must be changed. If it is not changed, parliament in practice could be the last to be advised of an interim order. This is simply not acceptable to me and I do not think it is acceptable to my colleagues.

After the order is in place it can last for only 45 days unless it is made permanent by cabinet, by the governor in council. If the order needs to be continued up to 100 days, it can be done by the governor in council. That interim order continues for 100 days. At the end of 100 days the order dies, and there is no provision for renewal under the proposed section.

I would prefer these proposed sections to state that officials may not re-enact the interim order. They do not say this. Currently one of our committees has a difference of opinion with a federal department over this very issue. Federal officials say the statute does not state that they cannot re-enact the interim order and the committee is saying that it only has the authority to create an interim order and it dies after so many days, so we have a difference there. I would prefer this section to state that the interim order cannot be remade. If officials want to change a few words or change some of the elements of the order perhaps they can remake it, but they should not be able to remake the identical order. If it is important enough to be in place, the governor in council, the cabinet, should enact it as regulation, as an order, and make it permanent.

No matter how that particular order ends up here, it is published in the Canada Gazette after 23 days. We can see how silly it is that parliament might not find out for many weeks that the order is going to be in the Canada Gazette in 23 days. If it can get into the Canada Gazette in 23 days, we can get into parliament a lot sooner than that.

I want to point out something that has not been talked about yet. The right hon. leader of one of the opposition parties said yesterday that there is no parliamentary scrutiny. Under section 19 of the Statutory Instruments Act, every regulation of this nature stands referred to the Standing Joint Committee for the Scrutiny of Regulations. All these interim orders, as soon as they were made, would stand referred to that committee .

This committee scrutinizes all federal regulations and orders except those that are explicitly exempt and these interim orders are not exempt. One of its scrutiny powers is scrutiny of unusual or unexpected use of power, so these interim orders would be reviewed by a parliamentary committee very quickly. The committee has a permanent secretariat and sits 12 days a month, 24 hours a day. It does not work 24 hours a day, but it is fully functional even when parliament does not sit.

This committee, I will remind the House, has what we call the power of disallowance. If a scrutiny criterion is offended, that committee can commence a procedure resulting in a disallowance. I believe there have been 8 disallowances in the House in the last 10 years. A disallowance happens when the committee initiates a procedure to disallow a regulation. These interim orders are reviewable and disallowable by the House under existing procedures, and I refer members to Standing Orders 123 to 128 and to section 19 of the Statutory Instruments Act.

There are a number of privacy concerns raised by Bill C-55. The privacy commissioner has gone public with his concerns about the bill's proposed procedure that would allow police forces, the RCMP and CSIS, access to airline passenger databases. Principally it is intended to allow police to locate people against whom there are outstanding warrants for serious offences, that is, those punishable by five years or more, or immigration warrants.

I must say that I am looking at this issue carefully and trying to sort it out myself as to whether or not we have the right balance. However, I think that the House has already passed a bill in regard to the information sharing power of airlines that makes airlines share that same data with U.S. police authorities. If it is an issue now, it must have been an issue then, but I do not remember it coming up as an issue. In fairness to people on this side and that side of the House, I just do not remember a lot of wailing in the dark here about those provisions. If it is important in fighting the threat of a terrorist incident to provide that information to American authorities so that we can fly into American airports and American airspace, then I would think it is just as important for our federal policing authorities to have that same information.

Right now I am accepting of the concept, but that is not to say there are not ways to further confine the process of sharing what happens with the data and rendering it inaccessible or destroying it if it is no longer needed to protect against the threat of a terrorist incident. I consider that an important part of the bill, I know that the government does and we will watch that one closely.

Now I want to talk about the part of the bill that deals with military exclusion zones. I think we ought to call them military equipment zones. I think most Canadians would be shocked to know that in regard to a piece of military equipment, and as example let us just take an aircraft that lands at a civilian airport, the military does not have any special powers to protect that military asset. Most Canadians would say that is pretty stupid. They would ask if that really means that the soldiers or the aircrew or whatever have no power to protect that asset other than as citizens. However, we must keep in mind that as citizens or military on the aircraft they do not own the aircraft.

I would say that most citizens would see it as pretty normal stuff for the military to have control over the area where the military asset is, whether it is a ship or a plane or some other piece of military equipment. Someone mentioned a jeep. I do not even think that in theory we could get an order from the minister for that. It is simply absurd to suggest that the Minister of National Defence is going to take the time to create an order to protect a jeep in a parking lot. This is silliness and it is hysteria and it is coming from the opposition, but we have already accepted that from time to time the rhetoric of the opposition is hysterical and over the top. It is the opposition's job to look at the edge and sometimes it looks at the edge so closely it goes over the top.

In any event, I suggest that these provisions are quite reasonable. We all should note that the provisions have been narrowed from what they were in the previous bill, which was withdrawn.

It is true that in the previous bill the Minister of National Defence had the authority to create a military exclusion zone without reference to any military assets. The zone simply could be created if there was not even a military paperclip in the zone, but now there are constraints: reasonableness, necessity, and the presence of military assets in the zone. I have sort of knocked this one off my list of areas of concern. The opposition will still suggest that it is the case. They will have to make the case. I have not stopped listening. None of us have stopped listening. We will all be dealing carefully with the bill.

Generally, to wrap up, although the previous bill was withdrawn some days ago, all the components of the bill, save one or two, were contained in the previous bill. There have been some refinements in the bill to respond to concerns expressed by members on both sides of the House. The bill is a much better bill.

As I have indicated, there are questions. These questions can be dealt with at committee. I would suggest that we are not all going to hell in a handcart here with this bill or with any other. The bill is quite a reasonable response to the events of September 11 and the threats that we perceive as being out there, in air transport and in many other areas. I think we have the ability to create a good bill, a statute that will serve the public interest well for many years to come.