Mr. Speaker, on behalf of the constituents of my riding of Winnipeg Centre, I am very pleased to take up the baton, as it were, as NDP speakers rise one after another to sound the alarm on this intrusion into our Canadian sovereignty.
I would life to preface my remarks by reminding the members present that the right to privacy is a fundamental cornerstone of any western democracy. We have this debate completely upside down today. We should be pointing out that the people of Canada have a right to know what their government is doing at all times, and that door should be wide open and transparent. But the Government of Canada does not have a right to know what its people are doing at all times, and that right to privacy should be protected as one of those fundamental cornerstones that we rely on in a progressive western democracy.
Why then would the government be willing to compromise and sacrifice in any way that fundamental right to privacy, or watch its erosion, by virtue of this bill? Why would it be prioritizing this over all the issues facing the Government of Canada and the people of Canada today, all the challenges that we face in an economic downturn where there is work to be done? Why is our Parliament occupied today with a bill that does nothing to advance the rights and freedoms of Canadians, but fundamentally erodes, threatens and chips away at those fundamental rights and freedoms? It annoys me that we are seized of this issue and not the many pressing issues that face our government and our country.
This is a pressing issue, though, in one sense in that we are under attack in this regard. I can only speak to the report stage amendments, but I will preface those remarks by saying that I have been a personal victim of some of these erosions to our Canadian right to privacy. It has been referenced before by previous speakers, for example, the member for Western Arctic, who has been perhaps the singular champion of Canadians' rights in the process of this debate, and also my colleague from Vancouver East, who approached the same subject.
I am talking about a graphic, local, current and topical example of the erosion of the right to privacy with the do not fly list. If there has ever been a more egregious and graphic illustration of an erosion of our Canadian national sovereignty and an intrusion by the long arm of the American national security program across our borders and into our sovereignty, it is the do not fly list.
I was on that do not fly list. I am still on that do not fly list. The only way I can get on an airplane in Canada, even to fly within our country, is to deliberately misspell my name. That was the solution they came up with because we cannot fix it. It is resident in Washington, D.C. or somewhere in the United States. Believe me, our Department of Foreign Affairs, our Minister of Foreign Affairs, everybody I could go to tried to get my name off this do not fly list. Nobody could because it is not our list. It is an American list. An American list is stopping a Canadian member of Parliament from boarding a plane in Winnipeg and flying to Ottawa without ever going out of Canadian airspace. That list blocks me from doing so.
When I try to get my boarding pass, airline staff at the counter who know me by my first name say, “Sorry, Pat, the red light is up here. I can't issue a boarding pass for you”. Why? Because the do not fly list has kicked in, and 45 minutes later, they phone these numbers in the United States and get the clearance to get permission for me, a Canadian member of Parliament, to fly within Canada. It is absolutely absurd. This is the road we are going down, and the contrast that exists here should be glaring to most Canadians.
We have a federal government that is so obsessed with the right to privacy in some capacity that it is actually doing away with the long form census, because somehow it is an intolerable invasion of one's privacy to ask how many people are living in one's home so that the government can design social service programs that are proportionate to the need and demand of the population.
However, somehow it is okay for the Government of the United States to know not only that someone is flying on a particular day but also to know the person's credit card information, with whom the person is travelling, the hotel he or she will be staying at, other booking information such as tours or rental cars, and the person's personal health information, one of the things that nobody has a right to know except the person and his or her doctor.
Even though the Conservatives are so offended by the long form census that might ask how many washrooms one has in one's house, they think it is okay for the United States not only to have this information but to hold it for 40 years without the individual having any access to it. There is no avenue of recourse. There is no grievance procedure if the list happens to be erroneous. If errors have been made, an individual will never know and there is no ability to correct the errors.
Perhaps most egregious is that this information can be forwarded to the security service of a third nation without the consent or notification of the other signatory and certainly without the consent of the individual Canadian. This is a compromise of our national sovereignty the likes of which we have never seen. With the globalization of capital, we must be ever more vigilant that Canadian sovereignty is not eroded. We do have a border and Canada is distinct and different from the United States. We have a right to control our own destiny without intrusion and interference from the behemoth south of the border. It makes me mad even as I speak about it.
There should be a new era of Canadian nationalism and sovereignty, not the reverse. We have watched the Conservative government make strong noises about our Arctic sovereignty, even the sovereignty of the seabed below the Arctic Ocean. It is taking great steps to protect that.
We have heard the Conservatives talk about protecting the sovereignty of our airspace. One of the justifications for their exorbitant investment in 65 new F-35 jet fighters is that they will be able to patrol the sovereignty of our airspace, et cetera, yet they are willing to compromise the most fundamental principle of Canadian sovereignty by allowing another nation-state to interfere with the free movement of not only goods and services but people of this country. It is appalling. Canadians should be shocked that we are wasting the time of Parliament debating this particular bill.
There is no evidence that these draconian measures being proposed by the United States and other nations that wish access to this information will make the world more secure or help fight terrorism. There is no evidence partly because if there has been any interception of terrorism by virtue of this sharing of lists, we would never know anyway because it is all done behind closed doors.
But there is evidence of how disastrous the consequences can be when mistakes are made. Without the oversight and the scrutiny of any regulatory body, we will never know, I suppose, the number of mistakes, but we do know mistakes could be made and we will never be able to monitor or correct those. The most egregious example, I suppose, in recent Canadian history is the case of Maher Arar as a graphic illustration of the rights of Canadians being undermined by an over-zealous American national security initiative.
The NDP is opposed to this bill. We sought to make amendments at committee stage. We are seeking to make amendments at report stage. The bill in its current form should be rejected by Canadians and those people who are charged with the responsibility of representing Canadians, the members of Parliament in this chamber. This bill should go no further than the vote at the current stage.
