Mr. Speaker, at the outset, I want to be as clear as I can about my position on the bill, and it is rather convoluted how we got here. In its present form, with the amendments offered in the motion by my friend from Edmonton—St. Albert, I would be 100% behind what he has done and I commend him for his amendments to the bill. However, if those amendments were not enacted by the House, I would be utterly opposed to this legislation for reasons I would like to outline.
I understand these amendments were required after the Conservative caucus gutted the original bill brought in by the member when he was still on the government bench. These changes to the bill before the amendments on the motion paper were rammed through by the Conservatives on the committee. It would allow scrutiny for only those people earning more than $444,000.
As the member for Winnipeg North put it eloquently, that is a very small number of people, almost half a million dollars a year, and only those people with incomes higher than that income level would be subject to the scrutiny of this legislation, which is shameful and is entirely inconsistent with the views of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada when she testified before the committee. If anyone should be worried about privacy, it would be she and, in fact, she is entirely on board, as I will explain in a moment.
The purpose of the amendments is to provide true accountability to the taxpayers and all Canadians to know just how much money people are earning in the public sector. It seems to me the threshold was set at a very fair level. I commend my friend for New Brunswick Southwest for acknowledging this. It is a very fair threshold. That is what only 2% of the population make, namely $160,000 some or more. I commend him for referencing that situation. I agree that would provide more accountability than the anemic legislation that would only allow specific knowledge of salaries and bonuses when they exceeded some $444,000. I think Canadians would see right through the sham of that bill being portrayed as some kind of access to information or accountability measure, on the contrary.
The legislation has been changed in the committee, as I said, to try to make it up to $444,000. I see that as exactly the opposite of transparency.
There was something said in the committee by the hon. member for Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie that struck me as rather shocking. He pointed out that the author of the bill, the hon. member for Edmonton—St. Albert, said in his testimony that Canada had fallen to 56th out of 90 countries with regard to transparency. I am quite ashamed of my country's record on access to information. We used to be seen as a bit of a beacon. Now we are seen as a laggard when it comes to information and access. I will speak about this in some greater detail in a moment, as I put this, I hope, into some broader context.
What did the Privacy Commissioner say about the fact that individual salaries would be made known? Is that some kind of privacy breach? We would think that as the watchdog in that field, she would be the first to be concerned, but she in fact was not. We have a very superb Privacy Commissioner who has served the country with distinction over the last few years, and I was really impressed with her testimony.
My friend from New Brunswick Southwest has already given some rather interesting statistics on this. I would like to repeat some of them and emphasize a couple of others.
Some governments use thresholds to disclose the salaries of public sector employees. Some governments, for example in Manitoba, as he pointed out, have a very low threshold, $50,000. People making therefore more than $50,000 it is perfectly okay to know what their salaries, including bonuses, would be. British Columbia has $125,000 threshold. Other places, Ontario and Nova Scotia have $100,000 and so on. After that magic number is reached in a given province, one is able to know just how much those individuals are paid.
The Privacy Commissioner said something really telling. She said that in the private sector, publicly traded companies had to disclose the compensation paid to their chief executive officer, chief financial officer and the next top three executives, all their shares, all their options and all their bonuses for anyone earning more than $150,000 in total compensation, which is remarkably close to the threshold that has been proposed in the motion by the hon. member for Edmonton—St. Albert.
Given these examples, I want to quote the Privacy Commissioner. She said:
...it would appear that disclosure of salaries for individuals in leadership roles within organizations, in both the [Canadian] public sector and private enterprise, is already best practice.
She also said:
In the opinion of my office, and taking into account best practices elsewhere in Canada, the disclosure of the salaries of the most senior officials in the federal public sector does not represent a significant privacy risk relative to the goal of transparency and the broader public interest.
Therefore, we are good to go, to use an expression that is used a lot in the Prime Minister's Office. We are good to go with this legislation, according to the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. I respect very much that she has given us the green light to do this.
With regard to bonuses, it was very clear, at the committee stage, that the hon. member for Edmonton—St. Albert intended bonuses to be considered part of the compensation package. He pointed out that sometimes, and I was shocked to learn this, bonuses can be as high as 39% of one's remuneration. Consequently, it is a very wise thing to have included. I commend him that in the motion he prepared and put on the order paper, he is explicitly including those bonuses, and I thank him for his efforts.
I want to put this in a broader context. This is a bill purporting to amend the Access to Information Act. I studied this at graduate school and lobbied for the Canadian Bar Association when the first Access to Information Act was being considered in the House. Later I worked for the committee that studied the Access to Information and Privacy Acts as a research officer when the six-year review was undertaken.
The first government to have to live with the Access to Information Act was the Conservative government of the right hon. Mr. Mulroney. The government has had to live with this legislation. Others have talked about it.
I have to say, when I heard today and yesterday that emails were being deleted in the Prime Minister's Office, or are at least alleged to have been by the RCMP, I was quite shocked. I was actually, frankly, saddened to hear that this is what we have come to in our country.
We have heard about the pathetic ranking of our country as a laggard on access to information. However, to think that the RCMP believes that people are destroying emails, which requires, under the Library and Archives Act of Canada, explicit permission before that is done, is absolutely pathetic, if that is true.
The Conservatives talk about an accountability act, and I was proud when they brought that in, but to see the implementation of that act and the way the government is acting now vis-à-vis freedom of information is, frankly, absolutely shocking.
I want to again say that the context is relevant for this amendment. Our Information Commissioner, on October 17, in her annual report, used words I have never seen in a report by an independent officer of Parliament. She said this about the government's commitment to freedom of information. She said that the report highlighted weaknesses in the information system that need to be urgently addressed. There are institutions that do not have enough staff to even acknowledge that they have received requests for six months. She said,
All together, these circumstances tell me in no uncertain terms that the integrity of the federal access to information program is at serious risk.
This is not partisan rhetoric. This is the Information Commissioner of Canada reporting to Parliament on what she has discovered about the government's commitment to openness.
In conclusion, I respect enormously the amendments proposed by my hon. friend from Edmonton—St. Albert, and I hope that they are accepted by the House.
