Pat Martin

[Main Estimates, 2005-06, June 14th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to comment on the speech of my colleague and to ask some questions.

I was most interested to hear him share his views on the PCO's Gomery war room, as it is called, the four or five person swat team within the PCO in charge of damage control to ensure the public only hears what they want it to hear about the Gomery commission and the information associated with it.

My view is if the primary function of this million dollar Gomery damage control war room is to coach witnesses, and this is what we heard in testimony, how is that different from tampering with witnesses? How is witness coaching different from witness interference? Would he not agree with me that the only coaching one should need to give witnesses is to advise them to tell the truth, to tell say what they know about the corruption in the civil service or wherever else they may have found? Would he agree with me that the Gomery war room is a travesty, that it is an insult to the intelligence of all Canadians and that it undermines the integrity of the Gomery commission to have a Gomery war room for coaching witnesses?

[Petitions, June 14th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I wish to present a number of petitions signed by the good people of Winnipeg Centre and more specifically the people in the area of Weston and Brooklands in my riding of Winnipeg Centre.

The petitioners point out that juvenile gang activity is a serious problem in their area. They are calling upon Parliament to enforce the current provisions of the Youth Criminal Justice Act more vigorously and to amend the act, so that youths 14 years of age and over may be charged as adults and that parents be held accountable for the criminal activities of their children aged 12 and under.

[Committees of the House, June 14th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague too has rapidly earned a reputation as being a champion of the issue of accountability and transparency. I look to him for many years of exposing on behalf of Canadians everything that is wrong about this place.

To answer his question briefly, I can only restate that one cannot overstate what a central place freedom of information holds in our society. The Supreme Court of Canada calls access to information quasi-constitutional. It is one of those fundamental rights and freedoms that a free western society enjoys. We apparently do not appreciate what we have because we have let it go lax. We have let it slide to the point where one can no longer honestly say that Canadians enjoy the right to know and the right to access to information, because the evidence would speak otherwise.

[Committees of the House, June 14th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague's question is an obvious one that comes to mind.

If a person really is sincere about an issue and not about the political gain, then the person will pass the puck to the one best able to put the puck in the net. We all know that a bill introduced by government is more likely to succeed all the way through the Senate to royal assent than a private member's bill which would hit obstacles all the way.

Because I have great trust and admiration for the Liberal member of Parliament who came to me and made this commitment, I believed him. I trusted him and had confidence in him that he was sincere. As an added bonus, it freed up my private member's slot and allowed me to put forward another bill that I am very committed to, which is bankruptcy protection for workers in the event of bankruptcy. That is the logic. I am trying to answer as honestly as I can.

I trusted the member that he would introduce a government bill because he made that commitment not once, but twice in great detail. It gave me the opportunity to introduce another bill that I am very passionate about and that is protection of employees' wages and pensions in the event of bankruptcy.

I hope that answers my colleague's question.

[Committees of the House, June 14th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the comments of my colleague who is the chair of the access to information, privacy and ethics committee. I do feel that the only hope of steering this issue through at this time is if we maintain the continuity of the expertise that exists on this subject as developed by this information officer over his tenure of seven years. I think it would be very difficult for anyone else to pick up where this information officer left off.

What I find really frustrating, and I know my colleague shares my frustration, is that had I not been duped into dropping my bill, Bill C-201 would be law today. It would be one of those rare things where a private member's bill would have succeeded all the way and passed, and Canada would be a better place today had we allowed that bill.

I know it is jaded of me to assume this but I fear that the issue has more to do with political advantage than with actual merits of the argument in that the government would love to go into the next federal election saying that if it is elected it will introduce new access to information legislation. Whereas the truth is that when elected it did everything it could to stifle access to information legislation. It is one of those things that it is saving for the election campaign. It wants to be able to say that if Canadians want meaningful access to information law they had better re-elect another Liberal government because it is the only one that will deliver on it.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The evidence contradicts any such story but that seems to be the motivation here. As a result, another year will go by without freedom of information legislation.

[Committees of the House, June 14th, 2005]

I thank hon. members for their recognition but it was not my bill. It was a composite effort from all members of Parliament who are interested in this issue. Many on the Liberal side and the opposition side sat on a special subcommittee that Mr. Bryden put together for that very reason.

I think it is significant to note that Bill C-201 was the first bill, government or private, introduced in the 38th Parliament, which is why it is numbered Bill C-201. I think that is fitting because it is the single most important thing we could do to improve government.

If we had passed no other piece of legislation in this 38th Parliament, Canada would have been a better place had we passed Bill C-201. I say that without any hesitation. I do not say that to pat myself on the back. It is simply the conclusion that I have come to the more I study how critically important freedom of information is. We should not use that term lightly. We should reflect on the weight of those words. Freedom of information is a cornerstone of any western democracy.

In anticipation of speaking I was looking at some notes and reading something a history professor had to say. He states, “Secrecy has been the default rule of government for centuries. Revolutions in England in 1688 and in France in 1789 slowly overturned the absolute rule of monarchs and ushered in the right to free speech and the legislative process of law-making was open to public scrutiny. But within the bowels of the bureaucracy secrecy was still very much the rule and remains so to this day”.

This was stated by the author of Blacked Out: Government Secrecy in the Information Age which is to be published this year. He goes on to state, “As modern governments expanded their operations and reach, government clerks evolved into bureaucrats with extraordinary new powers to shape the content of government policy and secrecy became the rule of the day. Secrecy became the new absolute power”.

That is a worrisome thought.

In the last couple of weeks I am sure we all noticed a survey, the results of which were on the front pages of 45 newspapers across the country. It was sponsored by the Canadian Association of Journalists and the Canadian Newspaper Association and was entitled “Access denied”.

These journalists conducted a comprehensive survey of every municipal, provincial and the federal government to find out just how easy it is to get access to information under the current regime that exists. Guess where the federal government ranked in their survey? There is no big surprise here. It ranked dead last.

I believe the Province of Alberta ranked first, where 93% of all access to information requests were fulfilled to the satisfaction of the applicant. They were not always completely filled but they were filled to the satisfaction of the applicant unless there were reasonable grounds, such as national security or personal privacy, that the information could not be shared.

Manitoba, I am proud to say, my home province, ranked second, where 88% of all applications for information were filled to the satisfaction of the applicant.

Guess where the federal government wound up on that survey? Twenty-five percent of all access to information requests were filled to the satisfaction of the applicant. That is less than one-quarter.

Open government can and does exist. Two of the most successful provincial governments in the country have no problem living up to the principles of open government.

The federal government, however, is slammed shut with access denied. We do not have the right to know, no matter what it says on paper. Notwithstanding the fact that we have an officer of Parliament charged with the enforcement of the Access to Information Act, we cannot get that information. It is like giving people directions and then telling them that they cannot get there from here. Well we cannot get the information that we deserve as Canadian taxpayers in this particular regime.

Mr. John Reid, Canada's outgoing Information Commissioner, made a very poignant statement recently when he said:

In one way or another, all the checks and balances designed to limit abuses of government power are dependent upon there being access by outsiders to governments’ insider information.

A public service which holds tight to a culture of secrecy is a public service ripe for abuse.

We have graphic evidence of that before us daily in the House of Commons. We could spend all of our time chasing what the government likes to call “rogue bureaucrats”, or trying to plug the random ad hoc examples of abuse when we are lucky enough to stumble across them, or we could go to the root of the problem and wipe the slate clean. We could shine the disinfectant of sunlight on this culture of corruption that exists. If it is a powerful disinfectant, we could expose this and let the free democracy in which we live do its job to cleanse corruption from our system.

We have an example of how we might do that, which has been lovingly crafted by my former colleague, John Bryden, into Bill C-201. Let me give a bit of the sad history of what happened to Bill C-201 and where it is languishing today.

Not only was I the first one to table a bill in Parliament, government or private member, on the very first day that I could, a bill that had broad cross party support from all of the parties in the House of Commons, but then, by the greatest of good fortune, my name was drawn in the private members' lottery as the fourth bill to be debated in this 38th Parliament.

The government found itself with a real problem. The Liberals had a minority government, they had a bill they were deathly afraid of and they had a private member with an opportunity to debate the bill in four day's time. They sent out emissaries to approach me and, very wisely, chose one of the Liberals who I have great admiration and respect for, the current Minister of Justice, to be the emissary.

The minister told me that the government had every intention of introducing all the things I was calling for in my bill and that if I would withdraw my bill, take it off the Order Paper, agree not to have it debated in the House and subsequently passed, the government would introduce comparable legislation at least as good if not better in this session of Parliament. That was the commitment made.

Having not just fallen off the turnip truck, I wanted to have that confirmed so I pressed for specifics and details. I received, “Yes, this will be in there; yes, the crown corporations will be there; yes, cabinet confidences within reason will be in there; yes, all of the good things that were crafted laboriously over a decade in Bill C-201 will be included in government legislation and it will be prioritized to be in this session of Parliament”.

That was in October 2004. We now find ourselves in June 2005. The months started ticking by. Department of Justice officials produced bill after bill but we are still waiting for access to information legislation which was supposed to be priority number one.

Six months later, at the access to information committee, with great fanfare and pomp and circumstance, the Minister of Justice tabled at that committee, not a bill, but a discussion paper so we could begin the process of trying to analyze and determine if research is necessary to find out if there might be a problem with the Access to Information Act. What an absolute travesty, a breach of trust, a breach of promise and a clear violation of the commitment that was made to me to produce access to information legislation.

The government has no interest in open government. It is a government more along the lines of Sir Humphrey of Yes, Minister . It believes we can have good government and open government but not both. That is the empirical evidence we have to deal with. What other conclusion can we draw?

[Committees of the House, June 14th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, as difficult as it is to follow a gifted orator and journeyman member of Parliament like the member for Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, I would like to begin by complimenting my colleagues on the opposition benches for giving us the opportunity, on a day for their opposition day motion, to debate not one but two pressing issues. Contrary to what my colleague from Glengarry—Prescott—Russell says about not using opposition days well, in actual fact they have turned one issue into two and have given Canadians the opportunity in the twilight days of this Parliament to debate the issue that I feel is paramount, and that is access to information.

Let me begin by saying that freedom of information is the oxygen that democracy breathes. There is no greater champion in our country on the issue of freedom of information than our outgoing Information Commissioner, the hon. John Reid, who has valiantly tried in the last seven years to break down the barriers to open government and true access to information.

I would be remiss not to recognize and pay tribute as well to another long-standing champion on this issue who is no longer with us, John Bryden, a former member of Parliament. In his final days as an MP he was with the Conservative Party. He dedicated his entire career toward trying to open up Canadian government to freedom of information so citizens could access the inner workings of the governments that represent them.

Like many Canadians, I look to the senior statesman in Canadian journalism in many ways, Hugh Winsor, for inspiration and comment. He has an article in today's Globe and Mail and the headline reads, “A major government irritant is bowing out”. That sums it up. This is why John Reid is leaving us. He has been a major irritant to the Government of Canada because he has been forthright and honest about his dogged pursuit of changing the access to information rules.

I will not read what Mr. Winsor has to say but I recommend strongly that other people have a serious look at this. He makes the point quite clearly about what happened to Mr. Reid.

There were predictable turning points in Mr. Reid's career. One of them, as my colleague from the Conservatives pointed out, was his presentation to the government operations committee. It was not viewed very favourably when he pointed out glaring loopholes that had been built in to what the government tried to call whistleblowing legislation. It was really more like an act to protect ministers from whistleblowers, which is what Mr. Reid exposed, and that was not viewed too favourably.

I think the thing that was really the turning point in Mr. Reid's career, and my colleagues may agree, was he backed an access request to see former Prime Minister Chrétien's daily agendas. They may have shown how much time he was spending at the Royal Ottawa golf club. He also backed an access request, which he deemed to be appropriate, calling for the daily briefings for Art Eggleton when he was the minister of national defence.

The Privy Council Office attempted to block Mr. Reid's scope by filing 25 applications in the Federal Court for judicial review of his rulings. In other words, Mr. Reid saw it to be absolutely fitting and appropriate that we should have public access to the former prime minister's daily itineraries and Mr. Eggleton's briefing notices.

The PCO clammed up in this culture of secrecy that dominates Ottawa today. It went to ground, threw up the barriers and started filing what we would call in the private sector slap suits. In other words, it filed 25 court appeals for judicial review to silence this issue. It lost all of them. Mr. Reid was found to be absolutely accurate. His interpretation of the access to information laws was correct, and the government should release this information. To this day it has refused. We have not seen those agendas. This is a graphic illustration of what is wrong with the freedom of information laws in our country.

The laws exist on paper, but it is like the bill of rights in third world countries where it looks good on paper but the proof is in the pudding. To this day we are still waiting for these things. Even though Mr. Reid won all 25 applications in the federal court, the government is still not coughing up the documents and the commissioner has had to go back to the federal court.

Mr. Reid's career has been seven years of frustration. After focusing attention on the need for reform and trying to enforce the laws as they are, it has been nothing but headaches.

We will be very sorry to see him go. We very much regret what I view to be a binding recommendation of a newly created access to information, privacy and ethics committee. A House of Commons standing committee recommended that Mr. Reid's term of office be extended for one year. Partly because of the sensitive nature of the work the committee is doing and the point that we have reached in terms of trying to achieve access to information, for the purposes of continuity, the committee feels it is critical that the same information officer maintain his office for one more year.

We have noticed a worrisome trend. The Government of Canada has ignored the recommendations of House of Commons standing committees. I am sure we could parrot off four or five recent examples where the standing committees have very clearly given direction to government to take a certain route and they have been ignored, completely contrary to the Prime Minister's commitment to do something about the democratic deficit.

Sunlight is a powerful disinfectant and some of us view freedom of information laws as the sunlight of politics. Freedom of information laws are the natural enemy to a culture of secrecy that has allowed corruption to flourish in the country. It is hard to overstate what a central role freedom of information plays in our culture.

The House of Commons justice committee referred to Canada's Access to Information Act as holding a similar significance to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Supreme Court recently referred to our Access to Information Act as quasi-constitutional. That is what we are playing with here. These are fundamental rights that are the cornerstone of any western democracy, yet they are being trampled on, ignored and trivialized by the experience, certainly in the past seven years when Mr. Reid has been our access to information officer.

Too clearly, many senior officials in Ottawa subscribe to the views of Sir Humphrey in the British comedy Yes, Minister when he said to his boss, “You can have good government or you can have open government, but Mr. Prime Minister, you cannot have both”. We do not want to reduce ourselves to the level of a sitcom here, but we are approaching that point in our treatment of access to information laws. While transparency and accountability are the buzzwords of the day in Ottawa, in practice there are many who resist them and who spend their every waking moment trying to find ways to confound people's right to know, their right to access to information. Very few government insiders are fans of the public's right to know. That is the fundamental problem that we have.

When members of the public submit access to information requests, too often government officials undermine the intent of the act by imposing unreasonable delays, or performing inadequate searches, or charging outlandish fees or fees that constitute a barrier to getting that access to information, or in the larger policy level, by opposing the expansion of the act so it might apply to more activities of government. That is where my interest comes in.

It is hard for me to understand, for instance, why only 49 of 246 crown agencies and corporations are subject to the act. Why can I get easy access to information on the Atlantic Pilotage Authority and not on Canada Post or VIA Rail?

In the last Parliament I was proud to second a private member's bill, Bill C-462, which was put forward by my former colleague, Mr. John Bryden. In that bill, John Bryden for 10 years tried to break the barriers within his own party, his own ruling government, to introduce meaningful amendments to the Access to Information Act. Being a former journalist, Mr. Bryden had firsthand knowledge of the barriers that are in place.

When Mr. Bryden was not re-elected in the last election I took over his bill and introduced an identical bill, in fact word for word, under my own name, Bill C-201.

[Fisheries Act, June 13th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague from Delta—Richmond East gave a very useful and interesting speech.

Would he agree with me from the tone and from the content of the speeches we have heard that the most worrisome thing about Bill C-52 and I think the reason the Conservatives put forward amendments is the whole thing seems to be shrouded in falsehoods and misinformation? My colleague cited the Ontario hunters and anglers who have been led to believe things that simply are not true in order to push forward the world view of the Liberal management of the fisheries.

Would the member expand a little on how the Ontario hunters and anglers and even the Sport Fishing Advisory Board and others seem to have been misled or sold a bill of goods about the impact of action or inaction regarding Bill C-52?

[Fisheries Act, June 13th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, the member for Vancouver Island North has given us a very knowledgeable speech on this subject and on the Bill C-52 subamendment, which I believe is what we are talking about now.

I know that my colleague actually comes from the industry. I often wonder what it would be like if we actually had a minister of fisheries who was in fact a fisherman. What a novel concept that would be. What a refreshing change it would be to have somebody with that personal experience actually running DFO.

I took note of the comments my colleague was making on the subamendment to Bill C-52. He both introduced it and summarized it by saying that it was about enforcement in a primary way. I believe that was his opening remark.

I can share with my colleague that I once built a house for a scientist who worked at the Pacific biological research station at Nanaimo. He was studying groundfish and the aging of groundfish. I asked him why. He said it was so that we know what age is the right time to harvest them and what would be too young and should be thrown back.

I said to him that it was 1985 and he was just then studying the appropriate age of groundfish and what time we should be harvesting them, and I asked where they had been for the last 50 years when we were talking about enforcement. That was just basic science that they were doing; it was elementary level science. As a lay person not in the field, I was shocked to learn that.

My question is about another project. I am a carpenter by trade. Another project I worked on was up in Alice Arm in Kitsault, B.C., where we were building a new molybdenum mine. We built all the houses for that new mine.

We talk about lack of enforcement, but I can personally attest to what it was like the day that mine opened up and the effluent and the tailings started dumping into Alice Arm. We could see the cloud, the plume in the water. As we flew over, we could literally watch that plume of effluent drive all the life out of that very narrow fjord-like inlet to the sea 80 miles down. It literally sterilized Alice Arm. The mine is now closed. I do not think Alice Arm has ever recovered.

I have a question for my colleague. If this is all about enforcement, in his experience where has the enforcement been? Where has the responsibility been over all these years when travesties like the experience at Alice Arm were taking place in his own general region of the country?

[Fisheries Act, June 13th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, those are very useful questions. It was helpful to me to learn some of the tests that exist with the creation of regulations. I fully agree that any new regulatory regime should meet those basic standards.

I would be very concerned that Bill C-52 seeks to bypass that methodology, those tests that were put in place for very real and important reasons. This is another example of how we are encouraging the arbitrary authority of unelected individuals instead of meeting the tests of scrutiny, by the scrutiny of regulations committee at least.

I am also very concerned to learn that the bill contemplates vesting this authority in bureaucrats to set conditions of licensing. This is not a matter for unelected officers, especially when penalties are associated with violation of the conditions of these licences. This goes far beyond the ordinary and acceptable scope of any bureaucrat. Frankly, as a member of that bureaucracy, I would not want that authority or that responsibility that comes with it. That should be vested in the legislative branch of government and not the administrative branch of government.

Bill C-52 is riddled with flaws. It is a continuation of a disturbing trend that we have noticed, a motif that we have recognized to be the characteristics of the Liberal government, a disrespect for Parliament and a penchant for vesting ministers with absolute arbitrary authorities. It is a worrisome trend that we should discourage every time we can.