Madam Speaker, I am pleased to join the debate on Motion No. 19. I thank the hon. member for Skeena for raising the issue and for bringing it before the House.
I believe that it has enough merit to be made votable. I would have liked to have seen that. I am disappointed, as I know he must be, that the committee and members of the House chose not to allow that, which will terminate the debate after only one hour.
I tried to listen carefully to understand the motivation. I think I understand what the member for Skeena had in mind when he put this motion forward. I find the motion vague, but I suppose that is the nature of motions. It gives a general direction; not a specific task, as would be set out in a bill.
I understand that the Privacy Act can be a source of frustration for some in that it does not have the teeth, as the member put it, to really change patterns of behaviour because there is no real discipline involved. There is no real penalty involved for violations.
The member used the example of a motor vehicle violation. People would not be stopped from speeding if there were no penalty associated with it. We will not get voluntary compliance, and that must be what the Privacy Act is relying on. It is asking people to change their patterns of behaviour, but there is no threat of consequence if they do not choose to do so and do something wrong.
I recognize the whole issue of data services these days. The storage of data is becoming very complex. There are huge personal privacy and public interest issues associated with it.
One of the worst examples that I can think of, in which the member would be interested, concerns the province of Manitoba. The previous Tory government in the province of Manitoba contracted out the Manitoba health data services to a private firm. It was a local firm, albeit, but everyone's personal medical records were in the hands of a private company.
That was bad enough. A lot of us did not think that was a good idea. It was on a fee for service basis. That company then further contracted it to Dallas, Texas. So now all of my personal medical records, my mother's records and everybody else's records in Manitoba are stored in Dallas, Texas. We do not know under what circumstances. We do not know if the people there sell membership lists to pharmaceutical companies that may want to mail a letter to a person who has a specific medical condition.
The fact is that it is no one's business and there should be a tighter grip on very private and very personal medical information. I think it is fundamentally wrong. This is one example of how a person's privacy can be jeopardized by new technology and the way the world is moving in those directions.
I am a little disappointed about the incident that gave rise to the creation of the motion. It was quite narrow in scope. We are really talking about one individual who had a problem with one letter. I am sympathetic. I think it was wrong that the letter became public without the person's knowledge or consent. However, I also feel that if the letter was full of accusations about wrongdoing, people have a right to know who their accusers are. It is a basic tenet of law. It is a basic tenet of natural justice and fairness that we get to know who is making accusations about us.
Therefore, I am not totally stressed by the idea that somewhere along the line the Indian band in question found out who it was that was essentially blowing the whistle on some alleged wrongdoing.
That leads me to another point I would like to make. This incident may be better addressed through legislation trying to craft whistle blowing protection rather than amending the Privacy Act. What Bruce Starlight was really doing, I suppose, was blowing the whistle on some alleged wrongdoing in the enterprise of which he was a part. He must have been associated with that Indian band.
I ask the hon. member to consider the much broader issue of whistle blowing when he looks into this further. This was not a workplace situation. In this case, it was blowing the whistle on an organization in which the person was a member.
In a workplace, it could become even more complex. Many recent incidents have surfaced where a worker comes forward, blows the whistle on some alleged wrongdoing in his or her workplace and ends up getting disciplined for it. This is getting to be a very big issue.
We would like to believe that the public sector is a good employer. I would like to think that it would welcome whistle blowing, that it would want to know if there is something going amiss in its enterprise. Instead, the first swift and immediate reaction is usually to fire the person. The employee does not have any recourse because it is just cause to fire someone for taking any steps that might be to the detriment of the operation.
Another basic tenet of law is that there is an implied loyalty that is required between an employer and an employee in that situation. An employee is not allowed to do anything that will really damage the reputation of the company or the boss. Therefore, when an employee comes forward and makes public facts that might shut that operation down or cost it money, or essentially blows the whistle on anything that it might be doing, he or she is breaching that implied loyalty of employers and employees.
I would rather have seen the issue of Bruce Starlight addressed in the larger context of whistle blowing legislation of some kind.
We are looking forward to the day in the not too distant future when that sort of thing is welcomed. I think 35 out of the 50 states in the United States have whistle blowing legislation that is very strong in their public sector. Again, they recognize that a good employer probably wants to know if someone is pilfering money, polluting or any number of things that they might be doing that are not quite copacetic.
I was interested to learn from the member of the Bloc Quebecois that the Privacy Act just underwent a comprehensive review. I would have thought that would have been the time where we could have made amendments to the Privacy Act to try to add teeth, as the member said. I do not know how that opportunity was missed but I did not have any personal dealings with that.
I know most Canadians do want a Privacy Act and most Canadians do worry about what happens with their personal and private information, whether it is their credit card number or, as in the example I gave of the Manitoba health records in the hands of a private firm, and we have lost all ability to edit or control how that material is going to be used or if it will be made public.
From what the hon. member for Skeena tells us, there is no penalty if a person does breach the implied trust relationship that exists between my information and the person who is holding my information. I think it is a very legitimate point and makes for an interesting debate. It is frustrating because these debates go nowhere when the item is not deemed votable. It is only an academic exercise we are playing here but to raise the issue on the national stage is a bit of progress we can measure.
While I support the concept and I admire the member for bringing the issue forward, I am somewhat frustrated that it is so narrow in scope that it is really only addressing one individual who had a problem with one letter that went public. I am not even sure that it was so wrong for that letter to be made public because somebody who is accused of doing something wrong does have a right to know the accuser. The accuser also has a right to be free of discipline or suffer any negative consequences for bringing these things to people's attention. This brings me again to the point that I wish this issue was dealt with within the context of whistleblowing, not Privacy Act amendments.
