Mr. Speaker, I was not going to speak to this given that I am not even on the schedule but I am on House duty and I used to be the critic for transport. In fact, I had the pleasure of being the minister for transportation issues when this bill was first proposed on the very last sitting day of the session in June, just before the House recessed for its summer break.
As one can imagine, I was immediately outraged both by the process and the substance of the legislation. I note, with some pleasure, although with some astonishment as well, that the NDP today has arrogated to itself sole possession of the virtue of being the watchdog on people's issues. However, it was rather silent in June. In fact, its silence was only replicated by the deafening tomb-like response of government members on the following issues. Bill C-42 is couched a security issue. The government addresses all issues as matters of security and/or law, crime and justice. There is no other government agenda, none whatsoever, that anyone can discern. In fact, all issues relating to the economy, which it purports to hold as the closest and most important priority of the nation, take second place to security, crime and justice. All economic issues are tied to those but this bill fits in neither of those categories.
Bill C-42 does one specific thing. It alleviates the risk factor, the liability issues associated with revealing information on private Canadian citizens that airline operators might divulge without their knowledge to foreign states. Notice that I said “foreign states”. I did not say the United States. I said foreign states because the bill was poorly drafted. It says that as long as a country can draft regulations demanding to know information that is in the possession of the airline operator on each and every one of its passengers and that airline operator overflies our territory, our airspace, it does not matter where we are, we have a right to demand it.
What the legislation says, notwithstanding the privacy regulations in Canada and the guarantees that we provide our own citizens within our own borders, is that the airline operator can provide passenger information to a foreign state if the plane overflies or lands there. That is all this would do. It would protect the airline operators from any civil suit for the breach of the privacy laws that we have taken great care to implement in this country and, in fact, which we promote everywhere as the hallmark of a very progressive nation.
I might be tempted in an unkind moment, and I am not there yet, to suggest that perhaps the government is treading marginally close to no longer worrying about the progressive component of the quality of Canadian life. However, as I say, I am not there yet so I will move on to the second thing that the legislation does.
The legislation speaks to the total inability of the government to negotiate with the one foreign state that matters to all Canadians, our neighbour. It matters not because we have an economic relationship that we have not nurtured well but take for granted because we are in the same hemisphere and share a common border, most especially in the central Canadian Great Lakes Basin, because that is where the greater part of the population lives, or even out west where the border is long. The Americans defined it in a fashion that is pejorative but I like to think of it as progressive, that it is open and people actually talk to each other across a fence that does not exist.
The bill does not erect a fence but it does say something about the Government of Canada. I am getting close to that unkind moment now so I need to be forgiven if I breach that aura of kindness that I wanted to envelope myself in and name the type of government we have. However, I will not do it yet.
The legislation does not say that we will erect a fence. This is not a security issue. This says that the Government of Canada heard the Government of the United States plead with it for the better part of three years by saying that it will enact homeland security issues that will infringe upon Canadian sovereignty and that the Government of Canada should take note, submit its objections or put in place legislation that will take this into account.
Can members guess what happened? The government snored for three years and then last June suddenly woke up to the fact that homeland security had said that Canada needed to have legislation in place by the end of December for passengers flying over American airspace.
My colleague from Winnipeg, who flies to Ottawa, does not land in the United States. However, he says that his aircraft may fly over the northern tip of the central northern United States, which means that the U.S. would want to know everything that the airline has about him. He is not going to the United States and is not landing or transiting through the United States. He is going directly to Ottawa or Toronto.
The problem is that the shortest distance between Winnipeg and Toronto will probably see that aircraft carrier, for economic reasons, use American airspace. Now the airlines would need to give up information about Canadians who travel from one part of Canada to another part of Canada. The Americans are saying that our airlines should either go around their airspace and pay more or they can come through their airspace and let them know who everybody is.
The Americans were right to do that but we were wrong not to have objected. We were especially negligent in not taking the opportunity to negotiate with them when they invited negotiations. Now we must protect our airlines because of our own negligence. I should not use the first person plural pronoun anymore because it is no longer “our government”. It is the Conservative government that is less than progressive, totally negligent and derelict in protecting the rights of Canadians.
The government is now saying that it has to protect. Who? Is it the Canadian citizen? It is the corporate citizen first and foremost. In this sense, this now becomes part of an economic issue because the corporate interests of any aircraft carrier needs to take precedence over privacy issues.
The third thing about this bill that grated on everybody was that the Conservative government was not only negligent in its duties and obligations in accepting an invitation, but it was totally incompetent in its negotiations once it was given the final verdict. The Americans said, “Please, do you want to trade something off?” We have lots of things to trade-off but the government chose not to trade-off with whatever leverage the people of Canada had with the Government of the United States on its perceived needs. The government did not do that, but came forward with this legislation. In so doing, the government has now opened us up to every other interest, any country around the world that Canadian carriers fly over.
Is it the Americans' will to harass us to do something? It is not a problem. As they would say, they have regulations and they want the information on those travellers. I am not exaggerating. We were just kicked out of Camp Mirage. Two of our ministers were not allowed to go over Emirates' airspace because it had a problem. What did the Conservatives do by way of negotiations? They got down on their knees and begged forgiveness.
I want to compliment my colleagues from the Liberal Party who sit on this committee for having introduced a couple of motions that would mitigate the absolute atrocities that the Conservative government was trying to perpetrate last June on the people of Canada. My colleagues on that committee deserve to be complimented and I look forward to hearing their advice on where we go from here.
However, these are the initial impressions that Bill C-42. If I were sitting on that side of the table, I would be embarrassed. They have forgotten about Canadians, they have forgotten about our interests and they have promoted everybody else, in their negligence.
