Madam Speaker, the Conservative member for Bruce—Grey—Owen Sound is proposing that we examine Bill C-377.
It is an important bill that requires serious consideration. The bill summary states the following, and I quote:
This enactment amends the Parliament of Canada Act to specify that a member of the Senate or the House of Commons who applies for a secret security clearance from the Government of Canada is, for the purposes of the consideration of their application, deemed to need access to the information....
The whole issue of confidentiality is rather vague in the bill. Like my kind neighbour from Barrie—Innisfil, this morning, I received an email because I am a member of the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics. The committee had asked Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada for some information about TikTok because we are doing a study on that app. This morning, we got an email saying that it is none of our business. Come on. The question that has to be asked is whether parliamentarians, who have the privilege of obtaining information, should be able to get it. The answer is yes.
Now, let us look at how that should be done, what the guidelines are and what could be done.
What are we talking about here? If we want to define privacy, we are talking about a secret. What is a secret? A secret is what is not said. It is as simple as that. However, that includes things that we do not wish to say, things we cannot say and things we must not say. It can be a bit tricky.
Everyone agrees that the government must be accountable. However, it cannot be the sole judge of what it is to be accountable for. The member who spoke earlier cited the example of the special committee that studied the documents concerning the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg. I was part of this committee. It was a good initiative, but, quite frankly, we had to twist the government’s arm for nearly two years before this came about. Yes, it was a good choice, but there were many bumps in the road.
The member for Bruce—Grey—Owen Sound wants to promote a bill aiming to rectify certain situations and to ask Parliament to act wisely when it comes to accountability. The topic of secrets is by no means new. According to Voltaire, “To say the secret of another is a betrayal, to say yours is a stupidity”. The current government seems to be taking a page from Voltaire.
What is a secret? For the purposes of our discussion, it is the redacted portion. The French term for redaction, “caviardage”, dates back to the time of Nicholas I in Russia. At the time, it meant to conceal or remove. I am going to stay with the idea of concealing. To redact something is to conceal it. Over the years that I worked in the ethics field and the months that I spent on the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics, I came to realize that redaction is one thing, but preventive redaction is another. Preventive redaction is when something is excessively redacted just in case. That is problematic.
According to an article that appeared in the spring 2022 edition of Foreign Affairs entitled “Keeping the Wrong Secrets”, the preference is to conceal more so as not to conceal too little. The article goes on to say that information that is kept secret often should not be. Certain information is treated like the Crown jewels, but at the same time we fail to even protect private data. This is all frustrating. The example cited in the article, which was positively ridiculous, had to do with a Christmas card that someone had redacted. Frankly, this makes no sense.
The sheer number of “overredacted” documents is huge. At the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics, historians have come to tell us they cannot learn anything about the Second World War because the information is classified “Top Secret.” There are things that will always remain secret, but I cannot believe that the entire body of government decisions concerning the Second World War must be off limits. When documents are needlessly redacted, we cannot attain wisdom, we cannot do as our good friend Socrates suggested, which is “know thyself”.
If we do not know our own history, we cannot know ourselves as a population, as a people. There are things that must be kept secret, but for how long, for what purpose and from whom? These questions must be asked as part of the debate sparked by Bill C-377. That said, I understand that certain things, of an intimate, sacred, delicate or dangerous nature, must be kept secret forever. These are things we have always sought to keep secret.
However, the bill does not deal with the intimate, sacred, delicate or dangerous. It deals with classified information. We know from experience that there is a confidential level, a secret level and a top secret level. There is also a “for Canadian eyes only” level for certain documents. We can see that classified documents are often classified at too high a level. This prevents people who should know from being able to know. Of course, many pieces of information marked “Top Secret” come from a foreign source, such as a member of the Group of Five, and making the information public could well harm that member.
We have to be careful and use judgment.
It takes judgment, but the Winnipeg report basically consisted of 600 redacted pages, pages that were redacted by the ad hoc committee. When we see 600 pages redacted under the pretext of national security and in the end there are only 13 or 14 pages left, then no wonder we have questions about the “overredacting” at issue, the “overclassification” or the excessive secrecy, if you will.
Unfortunately, keeping too many secrets leads to mistrust. Not keeping enough secrets, of course, is unworkable. Too many secrets breed mistrust, and, in today's world, with its echo chambers and the conditioning created by some social media, this leads to defiance. We saw some of that defiance in the streets last winter in front of Parliament, but that is not the only form of defiance.
Let me come back to Bill C‑377, a bill to provide access to documents under two conditions. First, individuals must pass a personnel security screening process. That makes sense. Second, they must need access to the information for the purposes of their work. Of course, it is easier to define the scope and parameters of that work for public officials than it is for parliamentarians. In the case of a parliamentarian, it may be more complicated, but it can still be done.
As I said earlier, the government is accountable to Parliament for all of its activities. It should not have the right to decide on its own what needs to be kept secret from the get-go. That is a first recommendation.
Bill C‑377 takes this into account by proposing subsection 13.1(1), as follows:
A member of the Senate or the House of Commons who applies for a secret security clearance from the Government of Canada is, for the purposes of the consideration of their application, deemed to need access to the information....
The proposal is good, but let us just say that it seems an automatic approach that could go awry at times. Bill C-377 considers parliamentary privileges. It is a step forward, but it could be dangerous.
One thing I do like about this bill is that the government will not be the sole judge of its own secrets. That is a very good thing. However, it does not mean that information should be handed over lock, stock, and barrel simply upon request. That could be dangerous.
My colleague spoke earlier of the Winnipeg lab. I sat on the ad hoc committee that studied that issue, which was made up of parliamentarians from four parties. I will say again that the committee was struck as a result of a wild discussion. Nevertheless, we four parliamentarians were able to issue an opinion on the redaction in question and that opinion was submitted to three judges for arbitration. To my great surprise, their verdict was identical to that of the committee members. The document was released “unredacted”. There was no national security issue concerning that document. There was certainly some embarrassment, along with some shame and discomfort, but no national security issue.
As La Rochefoucauld, another soul I greatly admire, said, everyone agrees that a secret must be inviolable, but we do not always agree on the nature and importance of the secret, and we consult only ourselves on what we should reveal or withhold. That is the dilemma here. The problem is that the government itself decides what should be kept secret.
As a second recommendation, I propose that steps be taken to put an end to overclassification and preventive redaction. Redaction keeps us from knowing who we are and what happened, and it exacts a great cost in terms of maintaining the secrets in question.
With Bill C‑377, we have an opportunity to initiate a discussion on the very concept of secrecy. That kind of reflection is healthy for democracy. It can only make parliamentarians more confident, while boosting Canadians' confidence in parliamentarians and government, which admittedly could really use it.
Let us begin this reflection.
