Murray Rankin

[Paris Agreement, October 5th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, we do believe that under the Constitution there is a strong role for the federal government to show the leadership that Canadians have been demanding. We have seen local governments take the lead. The City of Nelson has a program for the installation of solar panels, whereby the individual consumers who install them will receive a lower price on that utility and save as a result. In the city of Hinton, Alberta, geothermal is taking off.

I do believe that the clean energy future we are talking about will start at the federal level, through its leadership. However, it also has to be acknowledged that is happening in the provinces and at the local level.

If the government is serious, the provinces should be able to make this a revenue neutral initiative. I think it is important that the revenues levied are not seen as a mere tax—they should not be, and were not seen as such in the British Columbian context, and need not be in this one either—and the provinces need to be allowed to retain the revenues, but only as a step to do what needs to be done, and much more aggressively than the Liberals are talking about with their initial $10 a tonne price, which will of course do nothing.

[Paris Agreement, October 5th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I support the ratification of the Paris agreement. I support aggressive action to cut carbon pollution and to create clean energy jobs. In fact, I ran to represent Victoria here in Parliament, in large part, because I just could not stand on the sidelines any longer, as the Conservative government drove our country further down the road toward the enormous economic, social, and environmental costs of climate change.

Never before has one generation handed such a hefty bill to the next. We owe it to young Canadians to do everything in our power to reduce that bill. The next generation deserves a healthy environment and a prosperous, resilient, sustainable low-carbon economy.

I am proud to support the ratification of the Paris agreement, but I fear that the targets now shared by the Liberals and the Conservatives, as well as the recent decisions of the government with regard to Site C and the Pacific NorthWest LNG proposal, are simply inconsistent with our obligations to that international agreement, to indigenous peoples, and to young Canadians, who will bear the burden of our inaction.

We meet today as the people of Haiti are digging out from the destruction of yet another hurricane, Hurricane Matthew, and millions of Americans are evacuating their homes on the eastern seaboard as the storm approaches. In Florida, a state of emergency has been declared. Families are stocking up on gasoline and bottled water, and shop owners are boarding up their businesses as we speak today.

This is just one storm, but it illustrates a trend Canadians are seeing across our country and around the globe. A changing climate is bringing more extreme weather, more ice and wind storms, more fires, and more floods. The Calgary floods, for example, cost Canadians $6 billion, and only a third of that was covered by insurance, leaving families and governments to pick up the tab. The Fort McMurray fire destroyed 2,400 homes and became the costliest disaster that insurers in Canada have ever seen.

Canadians know that climate change is not coming; it is here. If we do not take aggressive action, the costs are just going to keep climbing. The Liberals' plan to go back to Stephen Harper's plan, Stephen Harper's targets, and Stephen Harper's timeline is deeply disappointing to my community in Victoria and, indeed, to many Canadians who care deeply about the future of our planet.

Five years ago, the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy wrote a major report. It forecast that climate change will cost Canadians $5 billion each year by 2020. That is about the cost of the Calgary floods each year.

We owe it to look down the road, not look at the short-term vista only, and to think about what we are doing to our children's and grandchildren's futures. I had the opportunity to meet last night with David Suzuki to talk about the carbon pricing that the Liberals have put on the table, and I can say that he was as deeply disappointed as the people in my riding are with what this plan would actually accomplish.

By the middle of this century, that bill I mentioned that the round table talked about is expected to grow to $20 billion a year and $40 billion in the worst case. That is the equivalent of several Calgary floods and Fort McMurray fires each year. That means more damage from storm surges, particularly in Atlantic Canada, as sea levels rise and as the Greenland ice cap melts. A drop in air quality means more hospital visits in Toronto, Montreal, Calgary, and Vancouver. There is not a single member in the chamber who wants to see that happen, so let us talk plainly about what needs to happen next.

To avert catastrophic climate damage, we need to reduce the pollution that we pump into the air each year. The more we cut pollution, the lower the bill for future generations. It is really that simple. That pollution is measured in megatonnes or millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent.

In 1990, Canada emitted 613 megatonnes. A Liberal government then signed the Kyoto protocol, promising to reduce emissions by 6% by 2012, but by 2012, our carbon pollution had actually gone up from 613 megatonnes to 710. By 2014, according to Environment Canada, our emissions reached 732 megatonnes, 20% higher than when we signed on to Kyoto.

The fact that pollution keeps going up has never stopped governments from making promises. At another summit, this time in Copenhagen, the last government pledged to reduce Canada's emissions to 611 megatonnes by 2020, effectively bringing them back to where they were in 1990. Are we on track? Environment Canada projects that carbon pollution will get worse between now and 2020. According to its data, we will miss our target by 116 million tonnes. Let us not forget that the target, the one chosen by the Conservatives and then xeroxed by the Liberals on the way to Paris, is not nearly enough to save future generations from the enormous costs I spoke of earlier.

The best science shows that a tipping point will be reached if our planet heats up more than 2° above the pre-industrial level. Once we cross that tipping point, the damage to ecosystems and to our economy could be catastrophic and irreversible. That is why article 2 of the Paris accord calls for nations to work together to hold temperature increases to “well below that 2° red line”, and ideally to 1.5°. That is the goal of the Paris agreement and what I stand here to support.

The hard truth is that the targets set by Stephen Harper and now supported by the Liberals will not meet that goal. In fact, they knowingly undermine it. One virtue of the Liberals and Conservatives sharing the same climate goals is that it simplifies the math, because Mr. Harper's targets were already part of the calculation made by the UN Climate Secretariat last year before the Paris accord.

It does not have to be that way. The Americans and the Europeans are on track to meet the Copenhagen targets. They are cutting their pollution. Their economies are not stagnant. The American economy is growing.

We have a choice. Adapting to climate change is the defining challenge of our time. We can buckle underneath it. We can let it slam the brakes on our economy and tear down our infrastructure and damage our health, or we can rise to meet a challenge that will organize and measure the very best of our energies and skills as Canadians. We in the NDP intend to see Canada rise to this challenge. We have always done it before and we will do it again.

[Business of Supply, September 29th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, of course, I agree entirely. We should follow the truth where it leads.

Accountability sometimes means learning unpleasant truths. When we have more information, it sometimes puts a different perspective on what we think we know. What is sadly lacking, of course, is that kind of information.

The member used the example of asbestos. When I was growing up, asbestos was everywhere. Now we are spending billions to remove it, because we know more. I think we can follow that logic in this area as well with the billions of dollars in sales of Canadian products to other countries, which may or may not be contributing to peace.

When we learn more, we might consider that is the case. We might also learn that we used to sell primarily to NATO allies and that we are now selling to countries like Algeria, Saudi Arabia, and China to a larger degree, countries where human rights abuses may or may be taking place.

Accountability means learning more, getting more information, learning the truth, and making informed decisions with the information we have. That is what this motion is about. I do not see why we cannot accept it.

[Business of Supply, September 29th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I am not sure if I have much to add on that.

I understand the debate that the member for Calgary Nose Hill is having with the member for Winnipeg North. I hope I was not accused of using any inappropriate language. I do not have anything to add to that debate.

[Business of Supply, September 29th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise in this important debate. Before I begin, I should indicate that I will be sharing my time with the member for Windsor West today.

I think it is really important that we start with what we are talking about and what we are not talking about. This is a forward-looking motion that is designed to achieve greater transparency and greater oversight. It calls upon Parliament to create, by amendment to the Standing Orders, an oversight committee for the issue of arms sales abroad and related procedural matters to that particular motion.

The objective is to say, learning from what we have done in the past, how we can do better in the future. The proposition in the motion that is before Parliament today is that we create a committee that would study this because our allies are doing a much better job and because we lack the information they have to do that job. That is what I would like to focus on in my remarks today.

In the last couple of days we have been dealing with another important initiative, Bill C-22 in which the Government of Canada has liberally adverted to the experience in the United Kingdom with its security intelligence oversight committee, and called for greater accountability through that process and greater access for parliamentarians to information about national security operations in our country.

Today's motion would do the same thing, but in a different context. It would create oversight of how arms exports occur in Canada, particularly when we learn more information about human rights abuses that may or may not be occurring in a particular country.

Let us examine the situation in the United Kingdom. Just as the government would want us to learn from their experience in national security oversight, I am suggesting that the House could profit from learning about the United Kingdom experience in this same area.

It was over 15 years ago that the United Kingdom set up a parliamentary committee on arms export controls. That committee had people drawn from a whole variety of other parliamentary committees to examine all aspects of the United Kingdom arms exports, from licensing to broader policy issues such as human rights. Every year in that country there is a government annual report on U.K. arms exports, and it has recently been focusing on exports to countries of concern, many of which are the subject of the debate we are having here today. It is looking at the role, for example, of U.K. exports to Saudi Arabia and the war in Yemen, which of course are very much at the core of why this debate is before us today.

That is about oversight, but what about the need for greater transparency and information? The British public, through that committee, has had much more access to information about what is going on so that they can hold their government to account as to the extent to which arms exports are being sent to countries most people in Britain would not want to receive them.

What is the situation in Canada? We have an Access to Information Act, but its exceptions swallow the rule. The moment anything to do with international affairs or foreign policy comes up, it is a black hole. The ability to actually find out what is going on is very limited. This committee would be an opportunity to hear, not just from the public, NGOs and the like but also from people in industry, which is perfectly appropriate, as well as government representations and indeed the public so that we can have a broader national conversation about this important issue.

I had the honour of working with the former member for Mount Royal, Irwin Cotler, a champion of international human rights, and we are on a committee called the Raoul Wallenberg human rights committee, with members drawn from all the representative parties here. We had the opportunity to meet the wife of Raif Badawi here in Ottawa, who was arrested and imprisoned in that country for insulting Islam, sentenced to 10 years and a thousand lashes. That international human rights debate was the subject of great concern across this country.

We have understood in recent years more than we understood before about where Canada's arms are going. I will admit, I had no idea the extent to which Canadian arms abroad have become an important component of international trade in arms. Canada's weapons exports have nearly doubled over the last 10 years. I confess, I did not know that.

In fact, Canada is the second-largest arms dealer in the Middle East, according to Jane's All the World's Aircraft, the defence industry publication. Now Saudi Arabia is the world's second-largest buyer of Canadian-made military equipment after the United States. I do not think many Canadians are aware of that information. It may be that I am the last to know these things, but I find it very disturbing, as I think a lot of Canadians would, that we have become such an important arms export contributor in the international sphere.

Therefore, I ask myself, what do we have to hide as a country? Why can we not know more? Why can we not know the human rights records of the countries to which we are sending arms? Yes, we have assessments, but those human rights assessments have been watered down over the years. They are not as available as they should be to the Canadian public and to us so that we as the representatives of the public can have a better idea of just exactly where our money is being spent, where our arms are going, and the extent to which we are contributors to world peace. I think that is something that we need to look at very carefully.

Apparently our existing arms export rules have changed over the years. They are supposed to prohibit sales of military hardware to countries “whose governments have a persistent record of serious violations of the human rights of their citizens”, and here is the condition, “unless it can be demonstrated that there is no reasonable risk that the goods might be used against the civilian population”. Well obviously there are problems, because we have seen in the Saudi example how arms sent to that country for domestic purposes have been diverted to put down Shia protests in one part of the eastern provinces of Saudi Arabia, and, it seems, to be used by the Saudis in countries like Yemen, where human rights atrocities have been so widespread. Over 6,000 people have been killed there.

Do Canadians realize that their arms may be used in that theatre of war? Do we not need to know whether light armoured vehicles, which are used for the suppression of those people, are in fact made in Canada? Maybe that is good public policy. Why can we not have a committee tasked with doing just that, not as an add-on to other work that the foreign affairs committee might be doing but as a stand-alone committee to address what is obviously a growing and important industry in our country, and its ramifications? Why is that any different from what we do with other committees that look at an area of our economy and address its ramifications?

Why would the House be opposed to greater transparency and accountability through an oversight mechanism like the British have? Why does the current government refuse to see that what it proposed two days ago in one bill, following the U.K. example of oversight and transparency, should not be used a couple of days later in another important area of our economy and society? That is what is before the House today. I really fail to see how this can be politicized as if we were somehow trying to talk about past events, who supported what and who did not, and how much information we had at a particular time versus how much we have now.

Anyone who has seen the videos of the repression of Saudi citizens with Canadian light armoured vehicles at least has to ask questions about whether we are on the right track. We do not have time, as parliamentarians, to cover every single piece of policy. Why can we not give a multi-party committee the opportunity to look at it, to get the information that members need, and to report to Canadians what it can legitimately report to them about what is going on with our dollars abroad?

That is what is before us today. I urge the House to support a motion that would provide greater accountability and greater oversight of our arms export industry.

[National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians Act, September 27th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I guess I share the opposition disappointment that in the last few months efforts that have been made by both recognized parties in the opposition to reach out to the government seem to be not accepted. I find that disappointing. I understand, however, the government House leader being here because this does cover a number of what are called appropriate ministers in the bill, the vast part of our government bureaucracy in all of the departments for which a government House leader would speak.

I am more concerned, however, not about the past. I am concerned about how we work together to get it right in the future. Notwithstanding the very powerful and forceful presentation by the official opposition public safety critic earlier this morning, I know him to have the same desire to work in a non-partisan way to fix the bill. Members have my assurance that the NDP, my colleagues and I, will work in that spirit. We extend a hand across the aisle to the government members, hoping they will agree that this is central and critical if we are going to get this right for Canadians.

[National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians Act, September 27th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I am always hesitant with my colleague from Burnaby South, his being an old professor and trying to rank and grade things. I would have to say that the bill has the potential to be an A statute. At the moment, I would give it a B- because it has the basis of things that can be built upon if parliamentarians of goodwill and a government with an open mind are prepared to roll up their sleeves and get it right.

The good news is that we have all sorts of analogues, from Australia, Britain, the United States, and Germany, that we can choose from. We can get, as the government House leader said, a made-in-Canada solution that works. However, if we simply leave the bill as it is, this lost opportunity is crushing. It can be improved. It should be improved. With parliamentarians in a non-partisan spirit working together to improve it, we can get it right and it can become an A piece of legislation.

[National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians Act, September 27th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, yes, indeed, those amendments will be forthcoming. I would be pleased to share them with everyone in the House in order to ensure that those are at least starting points for a dialogue about how the bill could be improved.

I think that if we create a committee that has, in an unprecedented way, security-cleared people, in that all nine members will have top secret clearance, they will meet in separate, especially assigned rooms, and they are people sworn to eternal secrecy, and we act in good faith in that way, I think they could be trusted with the kind of information that, sadly, the bill would withhold from them.

I guess the critical point I would make to my hon. friend is that if we do not earn the trust of Canadians with the bill, we have lost an enormous opportunity. It was rightly pointed out that the House has not dealt with this. It has been 35 years since the Macdonald Commission. All of our allies have something like this. We are finally getting it on the order paper. Let us take it to the last step and get it right.

If we do not, if people think this is not a credible oversight operation, then all of the things we are trying to do to improve Bill C-51, which I certainly hope the government is going to fix in due course, and all of the scepticism Canadians have about our national security apparatus is going to be exacerbated.

If we, however, create a committee that has access to information, that has an independent chair, that is not seen to be under the thumb of any government of the day, we can create the trust that Canadians need and it can help our security service do its critically important job with that trust in mind.

[National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians Act, September 27th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to rise to address this very important bill.

I want to thank my colleagues for their insightful contributions to the debate already. We agree on a great deal, and it gives me confidence that we will be able to work together to ultimately improve this bill.

Let me be clear: New Democrats support parliamentary oversight to finally bring Canada up to the standard of accountability that our closest allies have enjoyed for decades.

This bill would fulfill recommendations made some 35 years ago and ignored by successive Liberal and Conservative governments ever since. Neglecting that warning and ignoring our allies' examples has not enhanced Canadians' security or protected their rights.

Let us be clear: We face real threats to both our security and our rights. Canadians are concerned about the threat of foreign and domestic terrorism, they are concerned about cybersecurity, and they are concerned about armed violence and unrest around the globe, but they are also deeply concerned about their freedoms and their privacy. They are concerned about government secrecy and surveillance, and above all, they are wondering why, after nearly a year in power, their new government has maintained Bill C-51 as the law of the land without changing a single comma.

I support the principle of this bill and will be voting in favour of referring it to the committee so that it can get on with the study to get it right. However, I have deep concerns about many aspects of it.

I am concerned that this bill would fail to account for the lessons of the last decade and the experiences of our allies. Unless it is fixed, it will create a committee that is neither strong enough to be effective nor independent enough to be trusted.

I have solutions to propose for each of these flaws, and I welcome the input of all members on them, because this is no place for partisanship or politics.

Before we dive into the details of the bill, let us be clear on three important points of context. First, this bill is not a new idea. Rather, it answers a warning made 35 years ago in the wake of a string of high-profile scandals surrounding the RCMP.

One major recommendation coming out of the 1981 McDonald Commission of inquiry was the creation of CSIS as a separate intelligence gathering service. Another major recommendation was the creation of an overarching parliamentary oversight committee. That one has gathered dust for three decades, so the idea behind Bill C-22 is not new. In fact, our allies, including the United States, Britain, France, Germany, and Australia, each created similar oversight committees decades ago.

The second point of context is that we should all be clear that the bill before us today is far from a fresh proposal. It is nearly identical to an earlier Liberal bill, introduced in November 2005, in the final days of the Paul Martin government, by the public safety committee as Bill C-81. While the powers of security agencies have grown considerably since that time, the few minor differences between the 2005 oversight bill and this one would reduce the committee's powers and independence. For instance, Bill C-22 introduces security vetting for members and a new power for ministers to halt investigations.

An old bill is not necessarily a bad bill, but the government must surely accept that a proposal drawn up before the Snowden revelations, before the October 14 attack on this Parliament, and before the shocking overreach of the Harper government's Bill C-51 must be open to updates from members.

The third and last point of context is that we should all have a clear picture of how this proposal compares to the practices of our allies so we can learn from them, and, as the government House leader said, create a made-in-Canada solution that works for us.

The body proposed by Bill C-22 is essentially a weaker version of its closest analogue, namely Britain's intelligence and security committee.

In 2013, after public criticism of its many shortcomings, the British government significantly overhauled its committee, strengthening its powers and its independence. The committee emerged with an independently elected chair, operational oversight powers, and a shift in appointment power from the prime minister to Parliament. We heard a great deal about that in the speech from the hon. member for Durham.

These reforms are simply not reflected in the bill before us today, and I do not understand why. The British committee was in fact in Ottawa last week, and its chair warned us to work hard to earn public trust. We do not want to repeat the errors of our allies; we need to learn from them.

Last week, when the previous chair resigned, the head of a prominent British legal advocacy group responded in this way:

From UK complicity in CIA torture to mass-surveillance, the [committee] has missed every [single] major security-related scandal of the past 15 years. It has fallen to the press, the courts and NGOs to expose these events, with the [committee's] members only discovering them by reading the newspapers.

We do not want the same to be said of our committee a decade from now; rather, we should be aiming to be the leading edge of international practice. That was the advice in 2004 of the interim committee of parliamentarians on national security when that committee recommended granting complete access to information far beyond what is considered in the bill before us today. Here is what that committee said:

Though this arguably goes further than the legislation enacted by some of our allies, it is in line with developing practice....

We strongly believe that a structure which must rely on gradual evolution and expansion of access, power, and remit would be inappropriate for Canada.

Therefore, there are examples we can learn from around the globe. Could we give elected representatives a bigger role in operational oversight? Absolutely; in the United States, federal law requires intelligence agencies to keep congressional committees “fully and presently informed” of all covert actions and operations. In Germany, the group that authorizes each interception of private communications is controlled by a committee of parliamentarians.

Could we give the committee stronger investigative powers? Absolutely; Germany's oversight committee can conduct random site investigations, and subpoena witnesses and documents. Belgium's committee can even launch criminal investigations. The committee in our case would not even have subpoena powers.

I raise these comparisons not to disparage the bill before us, but to show that the door must be open to amendments. If the government shuts the door on amendments from other parties, we will be shackling ourselves to a blueprint that ignores the last decade of history and falls short of the current best practices of our allies. To me this is simply unacceptable when our safety and rights are at stake.

With that in mind, let me point to five weaknesses in the current draft and propose some solutions. I have amendments ready for each and would welcome the chance to work with members of all parties to craft a solution by consensus.

First, the government is proposing that the chair be selected by the Prime Minister rather than elected by the committee. As I say, that is what Britain originally did. It changed its way; why can we not? We have to earn the trust of Canadians. It seems like a pretty poor place to start when the government gets to control who runs the watchdog committee in the first place.

The bill should be amended to allow the election of a member from outside the governing party to chair this committee. That was exactly what Mr. Justice McDonald recommended 35 years ago to another Liberal government. It is not unprecedented, as I said; examples are Germany, Australia, and elsewhere. I fear we are going to lose the confidence of the public if we do not get this right.

Second, the committee's access to information, as has been said, is really limited. Full information is a prerequisite to effective oversight and to earning the public trust, which the British chair told us we must earn.

If the government can keep its secrets from the oversight committee, how can Canadians trust its findings? To call the committee's access rights broad, as the minister does, ignores many exemptions that make Swiss cheese of its powers. No fewer than seven different categories of information would be absolutely denied to the committee. Two more, including a catch-all category, could be denied at the discretion of any cabinet minister. Some of these are innocuous, but some of them are not.

The committee would be absolutely denied access to special operational information as defined in the Security of Information Act. This would mean that the intelligence oversight committee could be denied all information on intelligence sources, methods and targets, encryption systems, and information received from foreign partners. If this information is not relevant, indeed central, to the committee's mandate, I do not know what is. Is this not, in fact, the very type of information that the committee was designed to safely handle? Is that not why its members are to have security clearance and be sworn to eternal secrecy?

The worst is what security expert Professor Craig Forcese has called the Mack truck exception: the power of any cabinet minister to withhold information from the committee on the grounds that providing it—are members ready?—would be injurious to national security. This phrase is not defined anywhere, nor is it explained how sharing information with a group of top-secret-cleared individuals inside a secure facility could compromise Canada's security. These holes have simply got to be closed.

The committee must have complete access to information, as was recommended in 2004 by another parliamentary committee. As a solution, we should grant the committee that kind of access with the reasonable exception, I concede, of cabinet confidences, and the power to compel documents and testimony, a glaring omission in the bill. I am preparing amendments to this effect, and again, I would welcome input from members on all sides of the aisle.

Third, clause 8(b) of the bill would allow any cabinet minister to bury an investigation into his or her own department by claiming that the committee's confidential inquiry would be damaging to Canada's national security. The potential for abuse to cover up sloppy management or a scandal within a department is simply overwhelming. This line simply has to be removed if any credibility is to be retained.

Fourth, clause 21 of the bill currently would give the Prime Minister's Office complete power to censor the committee's reports before they are released. Let us pause on that. So far we have learned that the government would appoint the chair, control what information the committee sees, and stop it investigating certain areas. The government proposes to control what it can report to Canadians. It is easy to see how, as the chair of the British committee warned us, the public trust could be so easily lost.

The government has a responsibility to ensure that sensitive information is handled appropriately. We all agree. However, this must be balanced against the need to earn and maintain public trust, and that requires meaningful commitment to transparency and accountability, not verbiage.

I propose a compromise. I would propose an amendment that would require any revised report to indicate the extent of and reasons for any censorship by the Prime Minister's Office. Ideally, this would include a description of the type of information removed so Canadians can distinguish the redaction of confidential sources from the redaction of committee findings, for example.

I would ask the members on all sides to consider the utility of what I call an override clause, such as the power of the German oversight committee to publish a general assessment of an ongoing intelligence operation if supported by a supermajority of the committee. That is an idea we can look at.

Last, I would propose an amendment to give the committee a legal duty to report all suspected non-compliance or illegal activity to the Prime Minister and the Attorney General of Canada. There is a precedent for this. Section 273.63 of the National Defence Act imposes the same whistle-blowing obligation on the commissioner responsible for CSEC, the Communications Security Establishment of Canada.

That kind of duty would not only bolster Canadians' confidence; it would resolve any confusion within the committee over the proper course of action when non-compliance is suspected. To reject that kind of duty, in my view, would send a very worrying signal to Canadians.

As I said, I am prepared to introduce amendments proposing solutions to each of these five weaknesses, as I perceive them, in the current version of the bill. I would, of course, welcome the input of any member from any party. This is not a place for partisanship or ego. All parties have to work together on this committee, and we may as well begin now.

Before I close, I would also like to take the chance to flag one last issue for the government, which I believe requires further consideration but for procedural reasons cannot be addressed through amendments to this bill.

I would urge the government, as part of its broader security review, to amend the CSIS Act and the National Defence Act to require the Communications Security Establishment of Canada, CSEC, to inform the committee every time a ministerial authorization is granted to intercept private communications, and to require CSIS to inform the committee when it conducts threat reduction activities, as that term is defined, or when CSIS seeks a warrant to do so under section 21.1 of the CSIS Act.

Canadians are rightly concerned about the use and abuse of these powers. There is no justification for withholding their use from the oversight committee.

In closing, let me say again that New Democrats welcome this bill and commit to working together with any member of any party to improve it. I have identified five flaws, in my judgment, and proposed five solutions, but I know there are many more of both, and I welcome input from all.

As I said at the outset, this bill is crucial to protecting all Canadians' safety and upholding their rights. Oversight makes security services more effective, and it bolsters public trust in them. This committee will be equally useful in closing gaps as in reining in excesses, but we cannot take its utility for granted. The bill before us is imperfect. Without amendments, it will fail to give the committee either the strength to be effective or the independence to be trusted.

We cannot settle for good enough when it comes to Canadians' security and rights. I call on every member and all parties to work together to improve this critically important bill. Above all, I urge the government to demonstrate openness to that input and to these amendments. The security and rights of Canadians are not places for partisanship.

If the government demonstrates that openness, all parties may be able to work together to craft a committee that is independent, secure, and effective at strengthening our security, protecting our rights, and upholding Canadian values. However, if the government refuses to work in good faith with other parties to make changes to this bill, I fear the support of parliamentarians and the trust of Canadians will be lost.

Three decades ago, the McDonald commission warned us as follows:

....security must not be regarded as more important than democracy, for the fundamental purpose of security is the preservation of our democratic system.

Every parliamentarian will see that balance differently, but all of us must work together to get it right.

[National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians Act, September 27th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to salute my colleague and friend, the official opposition critic on public safety and the MP for Durham, for his forceful and I thought very lucid presentation this morning. He said a great deal about his efforts to try to get the government to collaborate on what is obviously a very non-partisan and critical issue. I share his sense of deep disappointment in the government's unwillingness to work with the opposition on this. He said so much about the failure to provide access to information in this bill. He also spoke, I thought, very forcefully about the need for the chair of this committee to be elected as an alternative to being appointed by the Prime Minister.

I understand that the British system, which the government has talked about being one of the models for this, used to allow the Prime Minister to chair the oversight committee, but that was abandoned several years ago in favour of an election. Similarly, other Westminster systems, such as Australia's, allow that. Indeed, Germany alternates between a government-side person and an opposition-side person. A private member's bill from the Liberals, brought by the MP for Vancouver Quadra, suggested an elected chair.

Through you, Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask the hon. member whether he believes there is any chance that the government might get it right, allow that in our bill, and accept an amendment to that effect for all the good reasons he elucidated in his remarks.