Ryan Cleary

[Questions on the Order Paper, May 15th, 2014]

With regard to the Department of National Defence: (a) how many foreign and domestic fishing trawlers were boarded outside the 200-mile limit on the nose and tail of the Grand Banks, as well as the Flemish Cap, in 2013; (b) how many warnings, if any, were issued to the fishing vessels; and (c) how many official citations, if any, were issued to the fishing vessels?

[Questions on the Order Paper, May 15th, 2014]

With regard to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard: (a) how many foreign and domestic fishing trawlers were boarded outside the 200-mile limit on the nose and tail of the Grand Banks, as well as the Flemish Cap, in 2013; (b) how many warnings, if any, were issued to the fishing vessels; and (c) how many official citations, if any, were issued to the fishing vessels?

[Fisheries and Oceans, May 8th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, all players in the Newfoundland and Labrador fishery agree that the quota for northern shrimp must be reduced to protect the stock. Most quarters in the fishery also agree that inshore fishermen, who are becoming a rare breed, must not bear the pain alone. The quota must be balanced between the inshore and big business offshore sectors.

The inshore fishery is the heart and soul of our outports. Will the minister defend the survival of these communities by ensuring they are not sacrificed on the altar of big business?

[Business of Supply, May 6th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for some of the points that she made in her speech. I wrote some of them down.

She mentioned how Canada lacked reliable job data, and so it does. She also mentioned how the temporary foreign worker program was completely out of control and how the program was “off the rails”. Could the hon. member elaborate on how to stop the flood, as she put it, of temporary foreign workers. How do we fix the program?

I know the hon. member has mentioned bringing in the Auditor General of Canada, which is what my party, the New Democratic Party, called for last week. However, we also called for a moratorium on low-skilled occupations. Why will the hon. member not go that far?

[Business of Supply, May 5th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, the member brought forward a good example about being worried about “Big Mayor”, but all Canadians are more concerned about Big Conservative Brother. This comes back to having no policy and no procedure in place with respect to the release of information, from telecom companies to government departments. We need procedure and we need policy.

[Business of Supply, May 5th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, when the private information on 750,000 Canadians is released and the government has no policies or procedures governing the release of that private information, even if it is a name, phone number, or address, that is obviously a problem that needs to be addressed.

[Business of Supply, May 5th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I do take the member up on the first point that she made. All Canadians should be concerned about privacy. All Canadians may be concerned about it, but the Conservative government is definitely not concerned.

I mentioned two bills, Bill C-13, the bill aimed at attacking cyberbullying, and Bill S-4, the digital privacy act. Both of these bills expand warrantless disclosure of Internet or cellular subscriber information to law enforcement.

There is no oversight. The Conservative government does not have a grip on the laws of social media.

[Business of Supply, May 5th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I stand in support of the motion by the hon. member for Terrebonne—Blainville.

The motion calls on government to make public the number, and just the number, of warrantless disclosures made by telecom companies at the request of federal departments and agencies. The motion also calls on government to close the loophole that has allowed the indiscriminate disclosure of personal information of law-abiding Canadians without a warrant.

To simplify, how many times have telecom companies handed out personal information about Canadians without a warrant to government? The government must find an immediate way to shut down the loophole that allows such personal information to be released.

We live in an incredibly connected world. Earlier this year I travelled to Tanzania, Africa, to tour Canadian development projects with a group called Results Canada. Its mission is all about ending extreme poverty, and I did see some extreme poverty. One of the images that will always stick with me is walking into a maternity ward at a rural hospital, or what they called a hospital. The maternity ward was crammed with nine or 10 beds, but there were two women in labour to a single bed.

The Tanzanians I met were the finest and best kind of people, a lovely people, but they were living with basically nothing. Still, almost every adult I came across, who could have absolutely nothing but the second-hand clothes on their back and be sleeping under a tree, still had a cellphone, and they looked at the screens as often as we do.

My point is that from Tanzania to Mount Pearl, Newfoundland and Labrador, my neck of the woods, the dependency on the Internet and on cellphones is universal.

Just this weekend I read an article by Stephen Hawking, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, on how artificial intelligence—and we are almost to that point—could be the worst thing to happen to humanity. It would be more or less the rise of the machines. I cannot even imagine a country being led by a robot.

Oh, wait; yes, I can.

Another article I read this weekend outlined how U.S. intelligence whistle-blower Edward Snowden has warned that entire populations, rather than just individuals, now live under constant surveillance. I do not know if it is to that point in Canada, but we do have some serious cause for concern.

Let us look at the numbers first.

In late April, we learned that government departments and agencies—the RCMP, Canada Border Services Agency, and CSIS, the Canadian spy agency—requested personal information from telecom companies almost 1.2 million times in 2011 alone. That is staggering. It is a jaw-dropping rate. As the previous speaker said, it is one request every 27 seconds.

However, the number of requests for personal information is most likely greater than 1.2 million, because three of nine telecom companies told the Privacy Commissioner how many times they granted the government's requests for customer data, not how many times the government asked for the data. It was how many times they gave the data.

It is reported that wireless telecom companies complied with the government's requests for customer data at least 785,000 times. The 2010 data from the RCMP show that 94% of requests involving customer name and address information was provided voluntarily without a warrant.

Here is another indicator or how often warrants were used or not used. Canada Border Services Agency obtained customer data from telecom companies 19,000 times in one year, but it obtained a warrant in fewer than 200 of those cases.

Do Canadians have a problem with telecom companies handing out their personal information left, right, and centre? Yes, we do. This is not 1984 or Brave New World. The idea of a Conservative Big Brother does not sit well with Canadians.

That said, it is generally understood across the board that police need information to catch criminals and to protect Canadian society. There is no time to get a warrant when a life is in danger, when a life is in jeopardy.

However, this is beyond that. At least 1.2 million requests for personal information, most times without a hint of a warrant, is a staggering statistic. The current Conservative government is paying to access our personal information, to the tune of between $1 and $3 for each request.

More than two years ago in this House, the former minister of public safety, Vic Toews, introduced Bill C-30, a bill to expand police surveillance of the web. At the time, he said “[You're either] with us or with the child pornographers”. That statement got the attention of all of Canada, and the immediate and appropriate backlash forced the Conservatives to back down, to walk away from the bill.

Since that outrageous bill was dropped and Toews was appointed to the Manitoba bench—but that is another story—the current government has introduced other legislation to this House that it says will protect the privacy of Canadians. In fact, the legislation may actually increase spying on Canadians without a warrant. The first example, Bill C-13, is a bill that is aimed at tackling cyberbullying and is expected to expand warrantless disclosure of Internet and cellular subscriber information to law enforcement agencies. Another example is Bill S-4, the digital privacy act, which would extend the authority to disclose subscriber information without a warrant to private organizations, not just law enforcement agencies.

The government has a bad habit of doing through the back door what it cannot do through the front door. The current government also has some hypocritical tendencies. On the one hand, the Minister of Industry argued that the long form census was intrusive, so the Conservatives eliminated it. On the other hand, this administration has no qualms and sees nothing wrong with invading the private information of Canadians and not telling them about what it is doing. It has repeatedly introduced legislation that would make it easier for Conservatives to snoop on Canadians.

Here is another example of hypocrisy. This country's information watchdog has said that it has been flooded with complaints that the current Conservative government is too often citing security in order to withhold documents requested under the Access to Information Act. The Conservatives are using the security excuse to withhold public information at the same time that the floodgates are open on the personal information and security of Canadians.

We live in an age where technology is advancing at an incredible pace and rate. Yet, the Privacy Act that is meant to protect the privacy of Canadians and keep government accountable has not been updated since 1983. That was before the Internet, Google, email, Facebook, and Twitter. Another act, the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, has not been updated since 2000, also before social media was born.

New Democrats believe that privacy laws should be modernized. We also believe they should be strengthened, not weakened, to better protect the personal information of Canadians. We also believe we can pursue bad guys and throw the book at them without treating law-abiding Canadians like criminals and violating their rights.

I will end with words from Edward Snowden, the former U.S. intelligence contractor, who said last week that state surveillance today is a euphemism for mass surveillance. He said:

It's no longer based on the traditional practice of targeted taps based on some individual suspicion of wrongdoing. It covers phone calls, emails, texts, search history, what you buy, who your friends are, where you go, who you love.

In so many ways, the Internet and social media are the new frontier. They are still the new frontier. It is our duty to ensure that laws and security do not fall to Big Conservative Brother.

[Fisheries, April 30th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, yet another commercial fish stock off the east coast is in trouble.

The quota for northern shrimp will be cut this year by 30%. That is a lot of grief that the Conservative government has chosen to inflict on the inshore fishermen of Newfoundland and Labrador, on our processing plants and on our outports that have had more than their fair share of grief.

The Conservative government has decided to follow the so-called last-in-first-out policy that favours big business offshore licence holders. This is not about conservation or economics; it is about blatantly serving the top of the food chain at the expense of our fishermen.

The principle of adjacency whereby those closest to the resource benefit from the resource has been tossed overboard. The last-in-first-out policy should only work for the Conservative government and the cabinet ministers on the front bench.

Our inshore fishermen, who have cast their nets outside their front doors for 500 years, should be at the front of the line. They should play second fiddle to no one.

[Business of Supply, April 29th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I sincerely thank the hon. member for bringing up that point because I want to highlight it. The New Democratic Party of Canada, Her Majesty's official opposition, is not against the temporary foreign worker program. We are against the exploitation of temporary foreign workers. We are against temporary foreign workers being paid less than Canadians. We are against temporary foreign workers being housed in squalor, being forced to sleep on filthy mattresses in apartments where the ceiling is falling down and the water is pouring in. We are against up to 26 temporary foreign workers being forced to live in a single home.

We are not against the temporary foreign worker program. We are against how temporary foreign workers are being treated. We are against how the Conservative Government of Canada has allowed this program to spin out of control.