Mr. Speaker, I rise with some regret today to speak to Bill C-44 at report stage. This comes from the fact that when the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness introduced this bill, he said he wanted all-party support on a very important national security matter. On this side of the House, we took him seriously and looked forward to having a full debate and discussion about what we could best do to combat some of the serious problems we face.
Instead, when we came to debate at second reading, there was a severe time allocation motion imposed. During that debate, I asked the hon. minister, who had said that he thought committee was the proper place for the debate to occur, for assurance that in committee, there would be adequate time to consider this bill. He then pretended, I would have to say, that his parliamentary secretary and his majority on the committee would be completely independent and free to make sure there was adequate time in committee. Of course, that was not the case.
On this side, we believe that with co-operation and full debate, we might actually have been able to come to a consensus on this bill. The actions of the Conservatives show that they were really never interested in doing that. Instead, what they wished to do, which I think the House will hear a lot from the Conservatives following my speech, was try to divide Canadians for their own partisan advantage.
Why do we need full debate? I have said many times in the House that we are a diverse country, with representatives who have very different interests in their constituencies and very different points of view and backgrounds, and when we bring all of that experience together in the House, we can get better and more effective legislation and legislation that would actually accomplish what it sets out as its goals.
We waste time in the House, and later waste time and resources in the courts, if bills are defective, if they are not well designed, and if they do not take into account the question of whether they are going to ultimately be found constitutional.
As I said, New Democrats had great hopes that the minister was serious and that we would have a full debate on this bill. It has been 30 years since CSIS was established, and obviously, it is time now to look at what we could do better.
Instead, in committee, there was the same kind of severe restriction on time. There were just four hours to hear witnesses, and after the minister and his officials had taken their two hours, there were just two hours for non-government witnesses. This meant that the official opposition was only allowed to call two witnesses and the third party one witness. Then there was a large group of people who actually approached the chair of the committee and said they would like to appear before the public safety committee on this bill. Of course, that left zero time for any of those witnesses.
The witnesses the committee heard were very valuable. We heard professors Wesley Wark, Craig Forcese, and Kent Roach, who raised some very important concerns about the bill, which I will return to in a minute. However, who did the committee fail to hear from? The Information Commissioner and the Privacy Commissioner wanted to appear and talk about the impact of the expansion of CSIS powers on information and privacy law. The Canadian Bar Association wanted to appear. The Federation of Law Societies of Canada wanted to appear, and civil liberties associations, including the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the BC Civil Liberties Association, also submitted requests to appear.
Probably the most important group of witnesses the committee could have heard and did not have time for were the commissioners who investigated incidents like the Air India bombing, the hon. Justice John Major; the Maher Arar case, Justice Dennis O'Connor; and the El Maati, Almalki, and Nurredin cases, Justice Frank Iacobucci. In all of these cases, there were recommendations from former Supreme Court judges and senior judges on how to make CSIS more effective and make sure that there was proper oversight of a body that necessarily has to do a lot of its work in secret. There could have been a chance to see if recommendations from those three inquiries could have been incorporated into this bill, but instead, no time was allowed to call them as witnesses.
Having used their majority in the committee to limit discussion and the hearing of witnesses, the committee also limited discussion of any amendments to this bill to just one two-hour session. There was one two-hour session to deal with 12 substantive amendments from the NDP and 11 substantive amendments from other members of Parliament. The government proceeded to reject all of them one by one in a fashion that so rapid, one could hardly turn the pages fast enough, let alone have a good debate.
I want to draw attention to just one of those amendments that was rejected, to give members an idea of what happened in this committee.
The NDP's first amendment was an amendment that would have required CSIS to provide its oversight body, SIRC, the security intelligence review committee, with complete and accurate information in a timely manner. That is something we would presume a government body would do. It is something that is not specifically required anywhere in the legislation. Why were we putting forth such an amendment? It was because in its last annual report, SIRC, the supervisory body, said that CSIS repeatedly failed to provide the oversight body with complete and accurate information and failed to do so in a timely manner.
What possible harm could there have been in such an amendment? Obviously, a lot of good could have been done by having the oversight body able to cite responsibility, in the legislation, for providing them with the information they request in a timely manner.
The Conservatives went on to reject 11 more amendments that focused, again, on increasing accountability, improving oversight, making sure the bill is effective, and making sure the bill is constitutional. The result is a flawed bill that we cannot support on this side of the House.
The amendments we introduced today take out a piece of the bill that I think is fairly egregious, when we are talking about CSIS. In fact, it makes the bill almost an omnibus bill. It has in it amendments to the Citizenship Act to bring forward the coming into force date of the ability of the government to remove citizenship from dual citizens convicted of serious offences. This really has nothing to do with the topic in the CSIS bill.
We have suggested that those be removed today, but I have no confidence that the government will be any more willing to consider amendments here than it was in committee.
What is the bill about? One day the minister assured us that it was one of the most significant bills we could possibly have on national security and that it was absolutely necessary. On his appearance at the committee, the minister said the bill was just clarifying what CSIS already does.
It is very hard for me to get a sense of whether the minister believes that this is important and significant legislation or housekeeping legislation, since he said both of those to the committee.
The minister also said that the courts had invited the government to bring in this piece of legislation. I think that is an interesting interpretation of the court decision. The court said that some of the things CSIS is doing lack legal authority and that if the government wished to correct this, it needed legislation. It did not in fact invite the government to present this kind of legislation.
What we see again and again in this bill is over-reach by the government, whether it is with regard to the warrants it is asking the superior courts to issue or whether it is with respect to protecting the identity of CSIS staff. We presented a very simple amendment that would have said that we recognize that staff who are, or are about to be, involved in covert operations might need to have their identities protected. However, what this bill says is that CSIS could keep all of its employees' names secret for all time. The person who is the receptionist could have his or her name kept secret. It is over-reach. It is overkill in this bill.
When it comes to the question of constitutionality, I specifically asked the minister if he would table in the committee the advice he had received that this bill was constitutional. We hear the Minister of Justice and we hear the Minister of Public Safety assuring us that they always check and get such advice. Well, if they do get such advice, I would like to see them share it with us on this side of the House.
We have seen, in other bills that have been passed through the House, when we had that assurance, that the courts eventually found that the bills were not constitutional. I think it is an important question, because it causes us to waste time in the House and waste the court's time later on.
When it comes to oversight, which is probably our major concern, we missed the opportunity in this bill to turn SIRC into something much more substantive. Right now it has a temporary chair. Two of its positions have been vacant for months. It is a part-time, non-specialist committee, yet any amendments we had to strengthen the qualifications of the members of SIRC and also to get all-party agreement on the appointments to SIRC were rejected by the government.
I know my time is drawing to a close. I just want to say, first of all, that we believe we need strong oversight for our national security agencies. We believe that we can protect national security and civil liberties at the same time. We believe that we have to provide adequate resources to do that.
What we will hear from the Minister of Public Safety in just a few moments is how the NDP is weak on national security and how we failed to support certain interventions in the Middle East. None of that has anything to do with this bill.
This bill fails on the grounds of providing the kind of oversight we need and providing an effective bill that would protect national security and civil liberties at the same time.
