44th Parl. 1st Sess.
November 28, 2022 11:00AM
Madam Speaker, that is going to be where we really want to steer, as New Democrats, toward more empowerment for consumers and watching that abuse be eroded. The problem we have is that some of the companies and the lack of competition we have in Canada right now could even lead to greater abuse, potentially, because the information and sharing of data can be done behind closed doors and behind the system of accountability. That will be one of the things to watch for, and that really is the objective of parliamentarians.
I am glad the member has raised that, because I think it is one of the things we do not want to lose sight of. A good example is that we see outright abuse of competition right now. When we had the Loblaws bread scandal, those involved were also putting their money offshore, and on top of that they all ended their pandemic hero pay at the same time, so these are good questions.
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Madam Speaker, as I mentioned in my speech, part of the act and its contemplation is financial consequences for misuse of the act, in terms of privacy and data breaches, so it is certainly something that would come up.
I heed warning. The member and I have talked about this in terms of the Volkswagen case in the U.S. and Canada. We need to compare apples to apples. It is a bit of apples to oranges when it comes to the litigious nature of the United States in terms of compensation and the guardrails that are here in Canada. We should always be mindful of that. While in principle we want to make sure that there is accountability and transparency in the use of this, and that with accountability comes financial penalties, I would like to make sure that it is a made-in-Canada approach.
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Madam Speaker, as I said at the beginning of my remarks, 20 years ago none of us were on Facebook. I think it was just Mark Zuckerberg and some of his college friends, and look where we are now and not only the way Facebook, Instagram and all those other social media services impact our daily lives in the sense that we are using them, but also how they are selling stuff to us, collecting information from us and feeding stuff back to us. The same could be said about Google and the iPhone. All these things have come a tremendous way in the last 20 years.
Having the proper measures in place now is critically important, because these technologies are not going to slow down. They are just going to speed up, getting better and more efficient. We need to make sure the proper accountability and rules are in place at this stage of the game, so we are not trying to play catch-up even more later on.
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Mr. Speaker, this piece of legislation is intended primarily for the private sector. It is virtually silent on the subject of the public sector's duties and obligations. As things stand, it is up to victims to fight tooth and nail to prove that fraudulent activity occurred and that they themselves are not new fraudsters. This applies to all levels of government.
I would like my colleague to comment on public sector accountability for cleaning up fraud victims' records when the fraud was caused by the public sector's weak identity verification methods.
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- Nov/28/22 6:31:06 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the last time we visited this topic, we were talking, of course, about the Minister of Public Safety's claim that police had asked for him and his government to invoke the Emergencies Act.
We know now that this was not true. This is pretty consistent with the government. It is part of a pattern, a pattern of disinformation and a lack of transparency.
Since the minister made that false claim, we have heard the stories of the ArriveCAN app. We have more than $54 million spent on this app, which wrongly sent thousands of Canadians into quarantine. It could have been built for many orders of magnitude less, some say hundreds of thousands of dollars, some say, at most, $1 million, certainly not $54 million.
We cannot get the details. The Liberals will not even tell us who did the work. They will not even tell us who the subcontractors are.
While we wait for the government to slowly produce invoices for us, and as parliamentarians and Canadians pore over that data, I will note one of the hard-working staff members who has been on my team for years. He is tireless in his pursuit of the truth and answers and accountability, a great Canadian, Jordan Johnston from Victoria-by-the-Sea, Prince Edward Island. Everyone back home should be really proud of the work Jordan does. He was poring through the information the government gives us in drip, drip, drips.
We see a lack of transparency from the government at every opportunity. It promised in 2015 that it would be open by default, but it is anything but that, whether it is with the minister's false claims on the police requesting that the government invoke the Emergencies Act, which was really just used as a way for the government to punish people it disagreed with, or with the ArriveCAN app. It does not want to tell us which Liberal insiders got these contracts. It does not want to tell us who got rich on the arrive scam.
We are going to keep asking the government for answers. We are going to keep demanding accountability. It looks like it is going to keep misleading Canadians and providing disinformation to throw us off the trail of whose pockets are being lined and who is getting rich on these contracts.
My question to the government is very straightforward. It goes back to the promise it made in 2015. It speaks to the times we have heard the Prime Minister say that the story in The Globe and Mail was false, or the stories in the newspaper of late about what the Prime Minister said about having been briefed about foreign interference in our elections, when he will not tell us which 11 candidates were receiving cash from communist China. He will not tell us. He says those stories in the media are false.
The Liberals are not being straightforward with Canadians. We want transparency. Canadians deserve it. Conservatives demand it. When will the government finally be transparent with Canadians?
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- Nov/28/22 6:38:34 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the parliamentary secretary's response. I do not think I have had the opportunity to engage in debate directly with the member before.
Aside from what the government members perceived, and in spite of their discussions and their trepidations, the situation is that the minister claims something happened that is not supported by the evidence that was offered under oath by the heads of the relevant agencies: the OPP, the RCMP, the Ottawa Police and the military police. None of them asked the minister or the government to invoke the act. We know that CSIS has said that it did not meet the threshold required.
Canadians want transparency. They want accountability. They want honesty. When are they going to get it?
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- Nov/28/22 6:40:33 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is my honour to rise to take up a point that I debated in this place when we first had the news from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in the spring of this year, that we have less time than we thought in responding to the urgency of the science. The panel reported that, if we did not reduce our emissions rapidly, we would lose any chance of holding to 1.5ºC global average temperature increase, and that we had to stay below 2ºC.
At that point, in my question to the government members, I quoted the United Nations Secretary General, António Guterres. He, when speaking recently of the promises made in Paris at COP21 in 2015 versus the delivery on climate action by governments around the world, said that some governments are promising to reduce emissions, but emissions are increasing. He said, “Simply put, they are lying.” I asked the hon. government members, when the UN Secretary General was speaking of governments that were doing one thing and saying another, whom did our government think António Guterres was referencing.
Since the time of my question, it has been clear that the government has provided additional support to the expansion of fossil fuel development. Now we have a very clear difference here, and I want to set out the problem because I want to be fair to all concerned. The government of the current Liberal minority, supported by the NDP in their confidence-supply agreement, appears to believe, or at least wants Canadians to believe, that reaching net zero by 2050 is a target that will ensure we can hold our increase in global average temperature to 1.5ºC, or at least as far below 2ºC as possible.
The Liberals put forward this notion, and they emphasized it again in the climate accountability act that was passed in the last Parliament, even though it is not true. It is not true that achieving net zero by 2050 assures us of a livable world. In fact, the science in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's sixth assessment report makes it very clear that the 2050 target of net zero is irrelevant if emissions continue to rise in the near term. In other words, again from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a 2050 target without emissions must peak globally and begin to fall dramatically at the latest before 2025 or any hope of 1.5ºC or 2ºC is gone.
A 2ºC world is unthinkable, yet we are on track to it. Again quoting António Guterres of the United Nations, when COP27 opened earlier this month in Sharm el-Sheikh, he said that the world is “on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator.”
Therefore, again, what government does the Canadian government believe the UN is referencing when it says that some governments are promising and doing the opposite? He said, “Simply put, they are lying.” As well, to whom does the government think it is referring to when it says “foot on the accelerator”, when we have a government that is insisting on building pipelines, expanding production and drilling off Newfoundland? Whom is the United Nations referencing?
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