James Rajotte

[Government Loans, February 17th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, Export Development Canada has a massive outstanding loan portfolio to two companies, Nortel and Bombardier. The total amount outstanding to these two companies is $10 billion.

Over the weekend it was revealed that the Liberal government added to that total with a $1 billion loan guarantee to Nortel.

With taxpayers already on the hook for $10 billion in guarantees, why did the government commit to another $1 billion of corporate welfare?

[Question No. 37, February 14th, 2003]

Since 1993, what grants, contributions, contracts and/or loan guarantees made either through a crown corporation, department, and/or agency of the government were received by the holdings of the “blind trust” of the former Minister of Finance specifying the source and dollar amount, date made, reason(s) for providing the funding, and present status of the grant, contribution, and /or loan guarantee (whether repaid, partially repaid, or unpaid--including the value of the repayment--in the case of contracts please specify whether the contract is fulfilled, whether it was tendered and any reason for limiting the tender)?

Return tabled.

[Supply, February 13th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his excellent question. I do not know what I could say beyond what he has said, except for the fact that he is absolutely right. This goes far beyond any type of card that we already have. We can compare it to a driver's licence, in which case we walk into a registry and give a few simple facts about the colour of our eyes and how much we weigh. This goes far beyond that.

For the government to have access to this information and, as I said before, because of the fact that we could possibly lose this card and lose this information, I think that is a road that we do not want to go down in this country.

[Supply, February 13th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the question from my colleague, but I have to correct him. I am not an admirer of Ayn Rand and I am not an admirer of her works. When I think of libertarian thought, I think of people like John Locke and others. I think we should read the classics. I am not one who considers Ayn Rand part of the classics.

I would certainly agree with his assessment and the tenor of his question, which is the fact that we should not want the type of society he asked about, a society where we have to produce an ID card just for simple transactions.

That goes to my fundamental point, which is that in my view most of the interactions between human beings in a society can be accomplished without government interference, and we should have as many as possible without government interference. Where it is necessary, it needs to be there, and government is necessary in a limited role. Where it is not necessary, let us not encourage it. Let us not, in a very sloppy and incompetent way, introduce a card which we do not even know the purpose of.

[Supply, February 13th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I very much appreciate the fact that we are having a discussion. I would like to stand up in the House and thank the New Democratic Party for allowing us to have this discussion, because it certainly was not the government that sparked this discussion. It was an opposition party that stood and said that it was time for us to have a discussion and a debate on this matter.

[Supply, February 13th, 2003]

Absolutely, Mr. Speaker. I would agree 100% with my colleague and his wise words. I am just astounded at this. When government introduces something as fundamental, something that would change Canadian society to the extent that a national ID card would, one would think that government would have very substantive detailed answers to these questions. What is the purpose of the card? What will it be used for? What will it replace? How will it affect other cards that we have, like provincial health care cards and even Visa cards? Will there be a relationship between this card and other cards?

These are questions which, before something like this is introduced, I would think that the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration would do well to sit down and consider. He should consider all the possibilities and all the questions and come up with substantive answers.

It just seems to me that there is this tendency with the government. Whether it is on this card or on Kyoto or even on Iraq, there does not seem to be a substantive and clear policy direction from beginning to end.

I would advise the government to take this recorded debate into consideration. The fact that fundamental answers cannot be given today should certainly give it pause in introducing such a card.

[Supply, February 13th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his question, and he certainly raises the most fundamental point. If we have our most precious and our most intimate information on this card, that certainly gives a lot of power to the government. As someone who is very concerned about civil liberties, I am very concerned about government having that power.

His question also raises the other issue. What if somebody loses their card? There is that information. I have my retinal scan and my fingerprints on this card and I lose my card. There the system is not secure, because that will happen. People lose their SIN cards or credit cards all the time. What do we do once somebody has that information? I assume that it can be accessed through some sort of computer system. How is the system secure when that happens?

It does come down to the fundamental point: There is no reason why we should be giving these powers to the government at this time, or to any government. Regardless of political party, there is no reason why we ought to be giving any sort of government these types of powers.

[Supply, February 13th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to address the motion presented to us by the New Democratic Party. First, for the benefit of the House, I want to read the actual motion:

That, in the opinion of this House, the introduction of a national identity card offends the principle of privacy and other civil rights of Canadians and this House therefore opposes its introduction.

Mr. Speaker, as you and other parties know, the Canadian Alliance is supporting the motion. We do oppose the introduction of an identity card.

It is interesting, especially for my friend the member for Winnipeg Centre, who is now the critic for the Canadian Alliance. He is not only critiquing the government side, he is critiquing the Canadian Alliance in that he referred in question period today to a cabal of Alliance members and Liberal members. I am wondering what he is going to tell his party members now that the Alliance and the NDP are actually agreeing on some issues. I think it shows that in this House there are times when we can set partisanship aside and really judge the merit of an idea. That is certainly what we are doing in this case.

There are two main reasons I want to put forward that many members have touched on before with respect to why we oppose the introduction of an identity card. One obviously deals with the whole privacy issue. The second one deals with the concerns about the competence of the government in dealing with other databases. The third is not a concern but is more what has been revealed during the debate, which is the fact that the government simply has been unable to answer some basic fundamental questions. Before Liberal members introduce something as earth changing as this, surely they should do their homework and be able to answer some of these questions.

It is interesting that the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration has proposed this idea but members of his own caucus and members of his own cabinet have expressed opposition to the card. The Minister of National Revenue has said it makes her nervous and she does not think we need it. Members of his own caucus from London and elsewhere have said that this is simply a bad idea and we should not go forward with it.

The minister has said that it is simply in response to security concerns. There are many other things the government could do in the first place to address other security concerns, namely deal with issues at the border without introducing such a card.

In looking at the concerns, I will deal with the whole issue of privacy first. The Privacy Commissioner, George Radwanski, has actually said that the new card is part of a growing intrusion of government into the private lives of Canadians. He also criticized this specific proposal when he said a national ID card tends to end up being linked to data. He said that it tends to facilitate compiling more and more data about every single Canadian which of course then becomes subject to all kinds of intrusions, to say nothing of the spectacle of the government in a mandatory way; even if it begins as a voluntary measure, these things eventually become mandatory.

That is true. If this starts out as voluntary, and members have said that this should be voluntary, then the question becomes why would a person not want this national ID card? Is that person hiding something and he or she does not want this fingerprint and retina scan data? Obviously people can travel more quickly between countries if they provide this information but if there is a national ID card and someone chooses not to participate, then the onus obviously is placed on that person to justify why he or she is not participating.

This is very fundamental, particularly for those of us who are libertarian in nature about the whole issue of government. We believe there should be a sphere of privacy for individual citizens. They should have certain rights. They should not be subject to government involvement in every aspect of their lives. One of my biggest concerns about the government is it introduces legislation and regulations and it is regulating more and more of our everyday lives which it does not need to.

We should go back to the great philosophers who really developed the parliamentary principles, people like John Locke. We should heed their words and their concerns about government being too involved in our daily lives.

There is the philosopher Thomas Hobbes and his Leviathan . He was considered to be an authoritarian philosopher because he favoured a strong sovereign. Even he said that we should have a circumference around the powers of the sovereign and there are things that individual citizens should not be subject to. That is something the Privacy Commissioner has said over and over again and which we have to pay attention to.

If we allow government to simply encroach more and more on our rights as citizens, in the end we do not develop a healthy community. We do not develop citizens. We develop subjects. That is certainly a trend we want to fight against.

We in the Canadian Alliance certainly heed the concerns of the Privacy Commissioner with respect to the ID card. He also raised concerns about the whole technological problems with such a card. During questions and comments today it has been revealed that the government simply does not know the full purpose of the card. Also, the government has not really addressed any technological problems.

A previous speaker said there were no concerns with security and it is very secure. In a day and age when we know hackers are very prevalent and we have seen problems with other database systems, to say that a system is 100% secure is simply foolish without actually having a system present that Canadians can view. The fact is that with a lot of the other databases that have gone awry, why should we assume that the government would handle this database any better?

Before I go to the question of confidence, I want to touch upon the hearings today. The Information and Privacy Commissioner for Prince Edward Island, Karen Rose, appeared before the committee today. She is opposed to the development of a national identification card, especially with biometrics. She gave three reasons why she is opposed.

She said that a national ID card would be an unprecedented invasion of the privacy of Canadians due to the establishment of a national database of personal information and because it would require Canadians to identify themselves on demand.

Second, she said that there is no evidence that a national identification card would achieve the purposes it sets out to achieve. That is the question we constantly have to ask ourselves. Aristotle, who was steeped in philosophy, always said to ask oneself why. That is the most fundamental question. We always view things in a teleological manner. We always ask what is the purpose, the why question. We ask ourselves the purpose. We identify the purpose. Then we establish whether what we are doing will actually fulfill the purpose that have set out.

What Karen Rose is saying is that it is not going to fulfill the purpose that is actually being set out. Clearly, members on this side of the House have exposed that the government does not know what this card will fulfill, even the purpose that it is setting for it.

Her third concern is that the very existence of such a card could open the floodgates to drastically increase police powers as well as the collection of personal information of every Canadian, and would change the nature of our free society.

This is another point that goes back to the whole sphere of privacy. It also touches upon a very fundamental issue about law and about the use of police resources. The use of our police resources should be very limited, but it should be utilized in a very effective way to combat against those who break the law.

The fundamental basis of law should be the protection of persons and their property. Those people who offend against persons or their property should certainly be pursued and should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. We should not be using our laws and our police resources to move beyond that and set up an ID card which would not accomplish those goals and would basically be an invasion of privacy.

Another big point I want to touch upon after privacy is the whole issue of competence. The fact is the government's track record is one of absolute and utter incompetence when it comes to the administration of important programs: the millions spent on advertising contracts for little or no work; the grants and contributions debacle at HRDC; the over $1 billion by 2004-05 spent to register rifles and shotguns, which will probably grow exponentially after that; the big brother database which it had to dismantle when it was accidentally discovered and thousands of Canadians wrote and phoned their members of Parliament and demanded that it be dismantled.

All of this serves to convince Canadians that this is not a government which is either capable or trustworthy enough to require each and every citizen to have a comprehensive ID card including biometric identifiers.

The fact is that Canadians are still seething about the gun registration fiasco. A citizen in my constituency phoned my office. He said he was a law abiding citizen and did not agree with the registry, but two years ago he went down to Southgate Mall, signed up the information, had the pictures taken and handed the information over. He said that two years later, in December of last year, he phoned to ask where his card was. He was told that there was no record of him. He said that he had put all his personal information on the form, his three firearms, his house and everything, including pictures of himself, and that someone had the information because he handed it over.

If the government is not competent enough to actually collect this information and store it in a database, protect it and ensure that it is secure, then the whole purpose of the database in the first place is destroyed. If the government lost it, or if someone else who had malicious intentions picked it up, that person would know where my constituent lives. They would know the firearms he has. They could break in and commit some sort of heinous crime with this information.

This situation with the firearms registry now is one that the justice minister is completely unwilling to address. He stands up and talks about public safety every day, as if wasting a billion dollars somehow improves our public safety, as if directing resources away from our police services somehow in some way protects our public safety.

I have mentioned just HRDC and the firearms registry, but we also know about the whole issue with the SIN cards. I had another constituent phone my office. She lost her SIN card and phoned HRDC to request another one. The government bureaucrat told her she was not allowed to have another one. She then phoned my office to check this information. We phoned HRDC and initially were told that this was correct, that she could not access a new ID card, that she actually would have to go into a witness protection program to access a new one. I asked, what if this person was using her information to obtain new cards? This is ridiculous. Somehow the policy changed and she now can obtain a new SIN card. However, just the whole fact that the government has lost control of so many SIN cards should certainly give us pause when we are considering something as fundamental as a new ID card for everyone.

I just want to touch upon some comments made by a University of Toronto information technology professor, Andrew Clement. He has studied the whole issue of national ID cards. He has warned us that such an offline system is not much use as a security tool since someone could obtain a card under another name with his own fingerprint or eye scan on the bar code. Even with a central database such a card would not be much of a deterrent for terrorists, in his view. Anyone would be able to obtain such a card by presenting other fraudulent documents such as birth certificates. The creation of a secure card depends on the presentation of much less secure documents.

I think that is important for us to keep in mind. That is why we on this side of the House and in this party oppose the introduction of a national identification card and why we support the motion presented by the NDP today.

[Trade, February 13th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I must conclude from that non-answer that it is a no.

The government might as well post a closed for business sign on the 49th parallel. In Ontario alone up to one million jobs depend on cross-border trade. The U.S. government has made it clear that pre-notification is coming. The government must convince our major trading partner that Canada is not a security risk.

What is the government doing to ensure that a system of pre-notification will be up and running before security threats shut down our border, harm our industries, and our jobs here in Canada?

[Trade, February 13th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, heightened security and the soon to be imposed 24 hour notification requirement threaten to shatter businesses and industry and in particular our auto industry.

Yesterday, the Government of Ontario warned that U.S. based parent firms will start moving their existing Ontario auto plants to the United States and stop building new plants here in Canada unless goods continue to flow freely across the border.

Has the government received an exemption from this 24 hour notice? Yes or no.