1972-06-14

ROUTINE PROCEEDINGS


[Stage Direction]
Fourth report of Standing Committee on Justice and Legal Affairs-Mr. Gervais.
[Editor's Note: For text of above report, see today's Votes and Proceedings.]

Mr. Elmer M. MacKay (Central Nova):: Mr. Speaker, I have the honour to present a petition from several hundred people from the eastern shore region of Nova Scotia praying that the government provide funds to assist in the construction of a vitally needed highway in this area to alleviate transportation and development difficulties there.



FEASIBILITY OF USE OF UNIT TRAINS FOR SHIPMENT-REQUEST FOR UNANIMOUS CONSENT TO MOVE MOTION UNDER S.O. 43

Mr. R. R. Southam (Qu'Appelle-Moose Mountain):: Mr. Speaker, under Standing Order 43 I request the unanimous consent of the House to propose a motion on a matter of the most urgent and pressing necessity. The subject is the government's proposed policy to utilize the inland terminals at Saskatoon and Moose Jaw to assemble unit trains to ship cleaned grain to export positions and the subsequent purchase of 2,000 new hopper cars to implement that policy. In view of the well-founded criticism that the use of these trains for grain shipping will add additional costs to the grain moving system, and therefore to the producer, I move, seconded by the hon. member for Lisgar (Mr. Murta):
That the Standing Committee on Agriculture be instructed to investigate the financial feasibility of the use of unit trains for grain shipment from inland terminals, and report back to this House as soon as possible.


Mr. Speaker:: Is there unanimous consent?


Some hon. Members:: Agreed.


Some hon. Members:: No.


Mr. Speaker:: There is not unanimous consent and the motion cannot be proceeded with.



RAILWAY BOXCAR ALLOCATION TO MEET FARMERS' DELIVERIES-REQUEST FOR UNANIMOUS CONSENT TO MOVE MOTION UNDER S.O. 43

Mr. Bill Knight (Assiniboia):: Mr. Speaker, I rise pursuant to Standing Order 43 to ask the unanimous consent of the House to propose a motion in the following case of urgent and pressing necessity. Because of the lack of boxcar allocation by the railway companies to meet the specified time of Wheat Board quotas, thus creating inability on the part of farmers to deliver their grain within the specified time, I move, seconded by the hon. member for Saskatoon-Biggar (Mr. Gleave):	__ .
That the question of boxcar allocation by the CPR and CNR be referred to the Standing Committee on Agriculture and that the standing committee report to the House thereon by the end of the month.


Mr. Speaker:: Is there unanimous consent?


Some hon. Members:: Agreed.


Some hon. Members:: No.


Mr. Speaker:: The motion cannot be put.



LABOUR RELATIONS


Mr. Gilbert Rondeau (Shefford):: Mr. Speaker, I rise under the provisions of Standing Order 43. I wish to ask the unanimous consent of the House to present a motion on a matter of pressing necessity, concerning the longshoremen's strike which has been lasting for months in the ports of Quebec City, Montreal and Trois-Rivieres, on account of one item in an already signed collective agreement which is interpreted one way by the employers and another by the unions.
As the Minister of Labour (Mr. O'Connell) does not permit the employers-


Mr. Speaker:: Order, please. The hon. member must state, without making a speech, what the purpose of his motion is so that the Chair can ascertain whether or not there is unanimous consent.


Gilbert F. Rondeau: Mr. Speaker, I was indicating that my motion is intended to ask the Minister of Labour why he

June 14, 1972
Science and Technology
denies the employers the right to prosecute the unions because of an illegal strike.
Therefore, I move, seconded by the hon. member for Bellechasse (Mr. Lambert):
That this House directs the Standing Committee on Labour, Manpower and Immigration to study this situation and, if necessary, that a recommendation be made to the minister to use compulsory arbitration as a means to put an end to a labour conflict which has lasted too long, causing difficulties for Quebec consumers as well as employees and employers and which is resulting in the import and export trade being diverted to Ontario.


Mr. Speaker:: Is there unanimous consent?


Some hon. Members:: No.


Mr. Speaker:: The motion cannot be put.



SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY


Mr. Randolph Harding (Kootenay West):: Mr. Speaker, I rise under the provisions of Standing Order 43 to move a motion related to the pressing need to protect the important research work being done by the White Lake Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory near Penticton which is being threatened by encroaching land subdivisions. I would move, seconded by the hon. member for Fraser Valley West (Mr. Rose):
That the matter of the White Lake Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory and the severe damage which will result to its outstanding research facilities from encroaching land subdivisions be referred to the Standing Committee on Miscellaneous Estimates for study and report.


Mr. Speaker:: Is there unanimous consent?


Some hon. Members:: Agreed.


Some hon. Members:: No.


Mr. Speaker:: The motion cannot be put.



BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE


[Stage Direction]
Hon. Allan ]. MacEachen (President of the Privy Council): Mr. Speaker, I wish to advise the House that tomorrow has been designated as an opposition day.


Hon. H. A. Olson (Minister of Agriculture) moved: for leave to introduce Bill C-214, to promote agricultural and fishery exhibitions and to provide for the development of multipurpose community facilities suitable for use in connection with such exhibitions.


[Stage Direction]
Motion agreed to, bill read the first time and ordered to be printed.

[Stage Direction]
(Questions answered orally are indicated by an asterisk.)

Mr. Burton: 1.	What was the total cost to the government of construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway?
2.	Since completion of the St. Lawrence Seaway, what was the total spent on the Seaway?
3.	What is the total cost to the government, to date, in developing harbour and grain storage and loading facilities at the Port of Churchill, Manitoba?


Mr. Gerard Duquet (Parliamentary Secretary to Minister of Transport):: Mr. Speaker, the answer to this question being quite lengthy, I would ask that it be printed in Hansard and taken as read.


Mr. Speaker:: Does the House agree?


Some hon. Members:: Agreed.
[Editor's note: The answer referred to reads as follows:]
1.	At 31 December 1959, the year in which the Seaway opened, the cost (in thousands) to The St. Lawrence Seaway Authority was $310,691,000 comprising: Montreal-Lake Ontario section, $284,971; Welland Canal, $25,720; Total $310,691.
2.	Since 1959, up to 31 December 1971, the construction cost has been increased by: Montreal-Lake Ontario section, $51,773; Welland Canal, $75,902; Welland By-Pass, $144,570; Total $582,936. (Construction cost-31 December 1971 (including interest during construction-$36,431.))
3.	The National Harbours Board advises as follows: The cost of berthing facilities, land, buildings, grain elevator system and equipment is $19 million at the end of December 1971.
June 14, 1972


CANADIAN LIBERATION MOVEMENT-DIRECTORS AND MEMBERS
Mr. Robinson: Will the government advise the names of the Directors and Members of the Organization that opposed President Nixon's visit: [DOT]Canadian Liberation Movement*, Box 41, Station E, Toronto 4, Ontario. Telephone: 964-1174.


Hon. Jean Pierre Goyer (Solicitor General):: The following names are known to the Government: Executive: Gary Perley, Barry Lord. Spokesman: Larry Haiven. Editors: Gail Dexter, Caroline Perly. Members: Greg Keilty, Vicki Postl, Danny Drache, Dawn Aspinal, Bill Postl, Larry Michailuc, Dave Lurner, George Haggar.


LIP-CENTENNIAL PROJECTS FOR QUEBEC PARISHES
Mr. Lambert (Bellechasse): Have projects been submitted under LIP to help organize centennial celebrations of Quebec parishes and, if so, (a) what are the projects (b) what parishes are involved (c) what projects were accepted?


Hon. Bryce Mackasey (Minister of Manpower and Immigration):: Records of all projects submitted are not maintained by the Local Initiatives Program under such categorical listings as "projects to organize centennial celebrations of Quebec parishes". A file search of active LIP projects reveals that: (a) no such projects can be identified; (b) parishes cannot be identified; (c) no such projects would seem to have been accepted.


QUESTION PASSED AS ORDER FOR RETURN
Mr. Coates: 1.	How many agencies of government have had a name change since June 25, 1968, and in each instance, what was the former name and what is the present name?
2.	What has been the cost to the federal treasury of eliminating stationery and other such matters associated with the operation under the former name and what has been the cost of replacing such necessary requirements of these agencies under their new names?
Return tabled.


William George Knight: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker, may I bring to the parliamentary secretary's attention question No. 525 of April 25. Would he look into the matter of having that question answered?


Mr. Jerome:: I will do so, Mr. Speaker.
Motions for Papers


MOTIONS FOR PAPERS
James Alexander Jerome: Mr. Speaker, notice of motion for the production of papers No. 50 is acceptable to the government.


CONTRACTS DEALING WITH PUBLICITY FOR DEPARTMENT OF LABOUR
[Stage Direction]
Motion No. 50-Mr. Nystrom:
That an Order of the House do issue for copies of all contracts dealing with publicity and/or information entered into by the Department of Labour (including the Unemployment Insurance Commission) in the fiscal years 1970-71 and 1971-72.
Motion agreed to.
James Alexander Jerome: Mr. Speaker, would you be so kind as to call notice of motion No. 12.


COPY OF FEASIBILITY STUDY COMMISSIONED BY AIR CANADA REGARDING CONSOLIDATION OF RESERVATION OFFICES IN CANADA
[Stage Direction]
Motion No. 12-Mr. Orlikow:
That an Order of the House do issue for a copy of all papers including the Feasibility Study commissioned by Air Canada in respect to the consolidation of reservation offices of Air Canada in Canada, including estimates as to the savings to be made by the Company, the reduction in staff complement, etc.
Mr. Knowles (Winnipeg North Centre):: Mr. Speaker, I move the motion on behalf of the hon. member for Winnipeg North.


Gérard Duquet: Mr. Speaker, this motion was dealt with in the last session. It was explained at that time that the feasibility study requested relates to an aspect of Air Canada's internal operation. The report is considered privileged. In these circumstances, the hon. member may be willing to withdraw his motion.


An hon. Member:: Agreed.


Stanley Howard Knowles: Question.


James Alexander Jerome: Transfer for debate.


Mr. Speaker:: Transferred for debate. Shall the remaining notices of motions stand?


Some hon. Members:: Agreed.


Mr. Howard (Skeena):: Mr. Speaker, on two or three occasions I have raised the matter of notices of motions for the production of papers Nos. 52 to 55 inclusive which relate to correspondence and documents regarding the possibility of assistance being given for the building of a fish processing plant in the vicinity of Prince Rupert, B.C. With the sad event last week in which another cannery and part of the waterfront of Prince Rupert were destroyed by fire, these motions take on even more signifi-

June 14, 1972
Inquiries of the Ministry
cance. The parliamentary secretary has committed himself on two occasions that he would deal with them expeditiously. I wonder whether he could explain what he meant by that?


James Alexander Jerome: Mr. Speaker, I do not recollect that that was my choice of language. I did say that we were having difficulty in answering some of these. There was a series of five which the hon. member put forward. We also indicated to him that another notice of motion for the provision of documents which he tabled will be dealt with next Wednesday. We are trying to do as much of this as we can in the time available and will continue to do so.



ORAL QUESTION PERIOD


Hon. Robert L. Stanfield (Leader of the Opposition):: Mr. Speaker, I have a question for the Minister of Labour with regard to the dock strike in Quebec. Can the minister inform the House whether he has personally intervened in the Quebec dockworkers strike? If so, can he indicate what action he has proposed?


Hon. Martin P. O'Connell (Minister of Labour):: No, Mr. Speaker, I have not personally intervened in the sense that the Leader of the Opposition probably means. I have on repeated occasions urged the parties to do that which they are obliged to do having regard to their obligations to each other, their obligations to the port and their obligations under the law. That kind of intervention I have indeed pursued vigorously.


Robert Lorne Stanfield: Does the minister feel that there is no position that it is appropriate for him to take other than to urge compliance with the agreement that exists between management and the dockworkers? Is it the position of the minister that the strike must continue with the government standing by except for urging compliance with the agreement?


Mr. O'Connell:: Mr. Speaker, there is more than compliance with the collective agreement involved: the law must be complied with. I am placing myself in the position of urging that position on the parties. I go beyond that and say that for the long-term interests of the docks and the long-term interests of the port of Montreal, in which we are all vitally interested, the two parties must come to a mature position of honouring their agreement for the public interest as well as their own. If we permit them some escape from their obligation, the long-term interests of the port of Montreal will not be well served.


Some hon. Members:: Hear, hear!


Robert Lorne Stanfield: In view of the fact that the country is being very ill served by the strike, which has been described as calamitous by the president of the Wheat Board and is costing millions of dollars, is the Minister of

Labour not prepared to intervene personally and actively with a view to bringing about a situation that he regards as necessary for the long-term health of the docks and the industry associated with it in Montreal and other ports in Quebec?


Mr. Speaker:: Order, please. It seems to me this is essentially a repetition of the first question asked by the Leader of the Opposition. Perhaps for the moment we might allow the hon. member for York South to ask a supplementary.


Robert Lorne Stanfield: A supplementary question, Mr. Speaker. My question to the minister is simply this: Is he not prepared to intervene actively, personally, in order to bring about the result he says is essential and desirable rather than simply stand up here and preach?


Mr. Speaker:: Order, please. The hon. member for York South.



QUEBEC-LONGSHOREMEN'S STRIKE-USE OF ARBITRATION PROCESS

Mr. David Lewis (York South):: Permit me to say to the
minister that 1 appreciate his position in connection with the need to observe the collective agreement as well as the law. But may I ask him to inform the House whether either of the parties has declared itself ready to use the arbitration machinery provided for in the collective agreement? As I understand it, not only is there provision for arbitration machinery but a panel of arbitrators has actually been named, headed, if I remember correctly, by Judge Gold. Has either of the parties agreed to use that arbitration machinery and, if so, why is it not doing so as it has to do under the law?


Abram Ernest Epp: Yes, Mr. Speaker. The Maritime Employers' Association has expressed its willingness to arbitrate. It has, however, not initiated the proceedings. The International Longshoremen's Association has put its position somewhat in this fashion, that it is open to the other party to initiate proceedings but the longshoremen do not themselves wish to initiate these proceedings. But their own agreement provides that either party may begin arbitration proceedings. It is not enough to express willingness; one must take action.


David Lewis: In view of the provision in the agreement and, if I remember correctly-I have not looked at it for a long time-the provision in the relevant section of the act that either party may initiate arbitration proceedings, and in view of the fact the employers have said they are willing to go to arbitration, may I ask the minister, first, whether the employers are demanding as a condition of going to arbitration a prior commitment on the part of the union that it will accept the arbitration award, as it is required to do by law in any event, and, second, whether the expression of willingness on the part of the employers does not open the door for the minister to enter and make sure that they write the necessary piece of paper which would start the procedure?
June 14, 1972


Martin Patrick O'Connell: They do not need a piece of paper. The grievance procedure does not call for the other party in the dispute to make any prior commitment as to the result, and it is not proper, in my view, for one party to anticipate either the nature of an award or the posture the other party might adopt.


Some hon. Members:: Hear, hear!


Mr. Speaker:: Order, please. The Chair will recognize the hon. member for York South on a further supplementary and then the hon. member for Temiscamingue for a following supplementary.


David Lewis: I could not agree more with what the minister has just said. Therefore the employers are obviously playing some kind of game in failing to initiate-


Mr. Speaker:: Order, please. This is debate. Perhaps the hon. member would now ask the supplementary.


David Lewis: I was about to do so, Mr. Speaker. This is the reason for my question. In view of the fact the employers have no right to anticipate either the result of the award or the posture of the union if the award goes against it, is it not the minister's duty to make sure, now, that the arbitrator under the collective agreement is appointed? Has he not the authority to appoint an arbitrator and start the arbitration proceedings going?


Martin Patrick O'Connell: There are two aspects of that question to which I ought to reply. First, I would not follow the hon. member in laying the onus entirely on the employers. The Longshoremen's Association is as much in violation of the agreement and the law as are the employers. They, too, if they are aggrieved, ought to initiate proceedings. As to the second point, I do not have the authority under the law or, of course, under the terms of the collective agreement to appoint an arbitrator. I would point out that the two parties themselves appointed the arbitrators and that four arbitrators are named in the agreement. The initiative falls on one or the other of the two parties. They each have the obligation.


Some hon. Members:: Hear, hear!



QUEBEC-LONGSHOREMEN'S STRIKE-REQUEST THAT MINISTER INTERVENE TO SECURE COMPLIANCE WITH COLLECTIVE AGREEMENT

Mr. Real Caouette (Temiscamingue):: Mr. Speaker, I have a supplementary.
I have just arrived from Montreal where I appeared this morning on a television program and I was asked by longshoremen, over the telephone, to invite the minister to intervene in their dispute. Does the minister recognize that, first of all, the provisions of the present collective agreement have not been respected by shipowners, computers, which were to be introduced only as from September, having been put into operation earlier, actually in May? Is the minister prepared-I believe he has the power to do so-to intervene in order that at least the provisions of the collective agreement be adhered to?
Inquiries of the Ministry


Abram Ernest Epp: Mr. Speaker, the collective agreement provides the means for resolving that dispute. The minister is not in a position to resolve the dispute for the parties.


Mr. Warren Allmand (Notre-Dame-de-Grace):: Mr. Speaker, I have a supplementary question for the minister. Is it not a fact that under the collective agreement it is the grieving party that must start the arbitration proceedings? In this case-


Mr. Speaker:: Order, please. The hon. member might like to rephrase his question. First, he might resume his seat. I do not want to interrupt the hon. member for Notre-Dame-de-Grace, but when a question is prefaced by "is it not a fact" that such and such is the situation, that is clearly argument. It seems to me that the last questions have clearly gone from questions to argument between the minister and hon. members. I would think that we should try to return to the question period and perhaps after a while recognize an hon. member on the next question. For the moment the Chair recognizes the hon. member for Notre-Dame-de-Grace.


William Warren Allmand: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker, I feel that the hon. member for York South was argumentative and put to the House something that was incorrect.


Mr. Speaker:: Order, please.



QUEBEC-LONGSHOREMEN'S STRIKE-ALLEGED REFUSAL OF DEPARTMENT TO ALLOW SHIPPERS TO SUE UNIONS

Gilbert F. Rondeau: Mr. Speaker, I should like to put another question to the Minister of Labour.
Can he tell us whether his department has denied shipowners the right to prosecute the unions for calling an unlawful strike?


Abram Ernest Epp: Mr. Speaker, the last part of the question escaped me, I regret to say. I wonder whether the hon. member would kindly repeat it.


Gilbert F. Rondeau: Mr. Speaker, I would like to know whether it is true that his department has denied shipowners the right to prosecute the unions for calling an unlawful strike.


Martin Patrick O'Connell: Yes, Mr. Speaker, the Maritime Employers Association did at an earlier point request consent to prosecute. At that time I declined on the ground that other remedies more rapid than a court proceeding were available to them.


Mr. Speaker:: Order, please. As hon. members recognize, we might go on for the whole question period on this subject. For the moment the Chair will again recognize the hon. member for Shefford, and then the hon. member

June 14, 1972
Inquiries of the Ministry
tor Prince Edward-Hastings who seems to be very worried that he may not have a chance to ask a question.



QUEBEC-LONGSHOREMEN'S STRIKE-PROPOSED MEASURES TO SETTLE DISPUTE

Gilbert F. Rondeau: Mr. Speaker, could the minister tell the House what remedial measures he would suggest to conclude an agreement as quickly as possible, since he has just admitted that there are other remedies?


Abram Ernest Epp: Mr. Speaker, I cannot add further to the responses I have given this afternoon.


Hon. George Hees (Prince Edward-Hastings):: I have a supplementary question, Mr. Speaker. In searching for a means by which the minister might be able to be of assistance in bringing this disastrous strike to an early and satisfactory conclusion, has he conferred with his predecessor who qpce described himself as the "Babe Ruth of the bargaining table" so that he might try to make a few hits himself in this important matter?


Mr. Speaker:: Order, please.



ENVIRONMENTAL AFFAIRS


Mr. Mark Rose (Fraser Valley West):: Mr. Speaker, in the absence of the Secretary of State for External Affairs perhaps I might direct my question to the Prime Minister. It concerns Canada's posture at the Stockholm conference in abstaining on the resolution banning nuclear testing. Does this indicate a new policy and does the government or the minister intend to announce a new policy in light of Canada's abstention on this very important issue?


Right Hon. P. E. Trudeau (Prime Minister):: Mr. Speaker, I think I can answer the question on behalf of the Secretary of State for External Affairs. The abstention was in committee at a preliminary stage of the resolution. The reason for it was that the Canadian delegation, after consultation among its members and with Ottawa, found the resolution could be improved by not being directed at one country in particular but by expressing more thoroughly Canada's opposition to all forms of nuclear testing. It is because this type of amendment was not brought into the resolution that we indicated some dissidence at the committee stage but, as the minister has said publicly, if no amendments are brought forth we still intend to vote for the resolution in the plenary session.


Mark Willson Rose: Mr. Speaker, I thank the Prime Minister for his explicit response. In view of that response and Canada's action in sending a note of protest against the proposed French south Pacific tests, does the government

intend to take further steps to oppose the forthcoming tests in the south Pacific scheduled for this summer?


Pierre Elliott Trudeau: Mr. Speaker, as I said a moment ago, when the question is before the plenary session, if it has not already reached it, we will of course vote for the resolution. That is one further step that comes to mind immediately. I have no other that I can indicate at this time.


Mr. G. H. Aiken (Parry Sound-Muskoka):: Mr. Speaker, was the government of Canada consulted before the decision was made to abstain on the interim resolution? Were instructions given by Ottawa?


Pierre Elliott Trudeau: Mr. Speaker, I know there was consultation between the delegation in Stockholm and the Department of External Affairs here. I cannot say that instructions were given. It was not a matter that was raised at the cabinet level. But the officials, the Secretary of State for External Affairs, and the Minister of the Environment have great experience in these things and they took what was the best tactical position in order to further our aims at the conference.



EXTERNAL AFFAIRS


David Réal Caouette: Mr. Speaker, I should like to put a question to the right hon. Prime Minister who must know that Rene Levesque is now in France.
A morning paper reports what a French official said, who calls Mr. Levesque "Mr. President" and expresses the wish that Quebec separate from the rest of Canada indicating that France would support him completely.
Does the Canadian government intend to make representations to the French authorities with regard to the attitude of that French official?


Pierre Elliott Trudeau: Mr. Speaker, I know nothing about that story, but should it be as the hon. member has just told us, it seems to me it would be improper for the federal government to worry about what an unknown civil servant might be saying in France.


David Réal Caouette: Mr. Speaker, I did not say "an unknown civil servant" but "a French official", a man who belongs to the French government and who calls Mr. Levesque "Mr. President". It is also said that separatism is inevitable-


Mr. Speaker:: Order, please. Would the hon. member ask his supplementary?


David Réal Caouette: Mr. Speaker, what I want to say requires a preamble, but that is done.
I therefore ask the Prime Minister whether the government intends to protest against that behaviour of a member of the French government who interferes in the
June 14, 1972

affairs of Canada, which are our business and not that of France?


Pierre Elliott Trudeau: Mr. Speaker, the hon. member knows how much we agree on the heart of the matter but, as I said, I am not aware of the statement to which he referred and I do not know who made it.
Mr. Speaker, I suppose that we could call Mr. Levesque president of something even though this is not very important for us. So, I cannot very well see for the moment any cause for concern to the government, except that I think it would be a mistake to give too much publicity to a Canadian who travels in Europe, as he is perfectly entitled to do, in order to get votes there because he cannot find enough here.


Mr. Speaker:: Order.


INSTRUCTIONS TO EMBASSIES CONCERNING VISITS BY LEADERS OF CANADIAN POLITICAL PARTIES
Mr. Rene Matte (Champlain):: Mr. Speaker, I also wish to direct a question to the right hon. Prime Minister.
Does the government give special directives to its embassies when the leader of any political party of the federal or provincial scene visits foreign countries?


Pierre Elliott Trudeau: Mr. Speaker, we do not issue special directives. I said a moment ago that all Canadian nationals who hold a Canadian passport-whether they are proud of it or not is another matter-are entitled to the services of their embassy if they so wish.


Mr. Speaker:: Order, please. I will recognize the hon. member for South Shore on a supplementary question, but we should try to move on more quickly. Hon. members will appreciate that we have not yet completed the first round of questions. I would invite the co-operation of hon. members in limiting the number of supplementary questions, if we are going to make some progress.


Mr. Lloyd R. Crouse (South Shore):: Mr. Speaker, I have a brief supplementary question for the right hon. Prime Minister on the subject of Canadian affairs. Having gone from the NDP to the Liberal party, does the blue carnation he is wearing today mean he is going to consider joining the Conservative party?


Some hon. Members:: Oh, oh!


Mr. Speaker:: Order, please.


OPPORTUNITIES FOR YOUTH PROGRAM-ALLEGED REFUSAL OF NAME AND ADDRESS OF LOCAL PROJECT CO-ORDINATOR
Mr. A. D. Hales (Wellington):: Mr. Speaker, I should like to direct my question to the Secretary of State. In view of the fact I have been refused the name and address of the project co-ordinator of the Opportunities for Youth proinquiries of the Ministry
gram in my area, information I require for reasons well known to the minister's office, I should like to ask whether this concealment of information is the result of a directive of the minister or some other member of his staff and, if not, could I be supplied with that information forthwith?


Mr. Speaker:: Order, please. Perhaps the minister might reply, but I have some doubts about the kind of question asked by the hon. member. It seems to me that we will have a debate on this subject in a few minutes. I sometimes think that hon. members during the question period set foundations for the contribution they intend to make in the debate later during the day. Having said that, perhaps the minister might be allowed to reply.


Hon. Gerard Pelletier (Secretary of State):: Mr. Speaker, the truth is that I did not conceal anything. I gave the telephone number and I do not know what more the hon. member wants. Apparently he has not had success with that telephone number. I tried it myself an hour ago and got all the explanation I wanted. The hon. member says the telephone does not ring or that it is not answered. This was not my experience.


Alfred Dryden Hales: Mr. Speaker, I rise on a question of privilege concerning the concealment of information brought about by the fact that a member of your staff refused to give me-


Mr. Speaker:: Order, please. I am wondering whether the hon. member is addressing the Chair.


Alfred Dryden Hales: I am sorry, Mr. Speaker. I shall address the question to the minister through you. The fact is that a member of your staff refused to give me-


Some hon. Members:: Oh, oh!


Alfred Dryden Hales: -a member of the minister's staff refused to give me the name and address of the project co-ordinator. He informed me he had received a directive that this information must not be given. My point of privilege, and it affects all hon. members, is that concealment of information should not take place. I ask the minister why this information is concealed from hon. members? It is well known that the information I want cannot be obtained in Ottawa and that it is easier to get it at the local level. However, we are not allowed to find out the name and address of the co-ordinator.


Mr. Speaker:: Order, please. I suggest that if the hon. member has a question of privilege he ought to give notice in the usual way and the Chair would then rule whether privilege is involved. It seems to me the hon. member has asked a question and the Chair has allowed the minister to reply. If the hon. member has a supplementary question perhaps he might try to clarify the situation in that way but again I must remind hon. members that we are running short of time.


Alfred Dryden Hales: Mr. Speaker, my supplementary will be very brief. Will I be provided with the name and address of the project co-ordinator in my particular area?

June 14, 1972
Inquiries of the Ministry


Gérard Pelletier: Mr. Speaker, all I can say is that according to my information the hon. member has been provided with all the information, but apparently he cannot make any better use of it than he did the telephone number.


FINANCE
Mr. William Skoreyko (Edmonton East):: In view of the fact that the ex-convicts society in Edmonton, which received a large grant from the Secretary of State's department, has now revealed that approximately $10,000 is missing from that fund and that someone absconded with the money, is it the intention of the department to prosecute the guilty parties, if caught?


Gérard Pelletier: Mr. Speaker, I am not aware of the case mentioned by the hon. member and I question quite seriously his allegations, but each time irregularities have crept into the management of a project-very seldom fortunately-order was restored, appropriations were cut off and even reimbursements were demanded.


WHEAT-SUGGESTED EXTENSION OF DELIVERY QUOTAS BECAUSE OF ALLEGED FAILURE OF RAILWAYS TO ALLOCATE BOXCARS TO MEET NEED
William George Knight: Mr. Speaker, I have a question for the minister in charge of the Wheat Board. In view of the fact that Canadian National and Canadian Pacific rail car allocation is not meeting the needs of the Wheat Board quota system, can the minister inform the House whether or not quotas will be extended so that rail cars may be properly allocated and farmers may meet their delivery requirements?


Hon. Otto E. Lang (Minister of Justice):: Mr. Speaker, as has been explained to the hon. member from time to time, the allocation of cars is handled effectively by the Canadian Wheat Board. So far as I know the railways have been meeting the requests of the Wheat Board for the spotting of cars. There are difficulties from time to time about the exact number of cars to meet total quotas and these are dealt with especially by a very effective Wheat Board.


William George Knight: In view of the fact that the last car allotted for durum at Crane Valley was on October 19, 1971, and that quotas will soon run out, would the minister consider extension of the quotas at least in the Weyburn block?


Otto Emil Lang: The Wheat Board had this matter brought to its attention and in the past they have handled it very effectively. If there is a special difficulty to which I should direct my attention I will be glad to do so.


REQUEST THAT AVAILABLE SPACE IN COUNTRY ELEVATORS TAKEN OVER BY POOLS BE LISTED
Mr. S. J. Korchinski (Mackenzie):: Mr. Speaker, in light of the fact that the pools have taken over many of the country elevators and there is no longer competition at many points, would the minister ask the Canadian Wheat Board to request elevator agents to list the amount of available space at these points, because there seems to be some discrimination against shippers who were formerly not pool customers? Will he ask the Wheat Board to list the amount of space at these particular points so that these people will have the same privileges as other customers of the pools?


Otto Emil Lang: There have been thorough discussions between the Canadian Wheat Board and the various elevator companies in connection with the operation of the distribution of cars during the months of May, June and July. A satisfactory agreement was reached about the handling of this matter to ensure that every producer would have the opportunity to deliver grain to the elevator of his choice.


Stanley James Korchinski: Mr. Speaker, I rise on a question of privilege. I happen to have had a different experience from that related by the minister. I ask him whether he will ask the Wheat Board, or will the Minister of Agriculture ask the Canada Grains Commission, to instruct elevator agents to list the amount of available space each day so that every customer may have an opportunity to deliver?


Mr. Speaker:: Order, please. That is a representation on the part of the hon. member.


INQUIRY AS TO REFERENCE OF ANNUAL REPORT OF CANADIAN WHEAT BOARD TO COMMITTEE
Mr. J. H. Horner (Crowfoot):: Mr. Speaker, my supplementary is for the minister in charge of the Canadian Wheat Board. Is he now prepared to refer the annual report of the Canadian Wheat Board to the Standing Committee on Agriculture so that answers to questions like this can be sought?


Otto Emil Lang: Mr. Speaker, reference of the report to the committee is on the order paper. I take it that discussions are going forward in the ordinary way about moving this recommendation forward. For our part we are ready to go ahead at any time.


Mr. Speaker:: Again I wish to point out to hon. members that there are five or more supplementaries and perhaps 25 other members seeking to ask questions. There are just a few minutes remaining before the end of the question period. Hon. members who have questions that can wait until tomorrow should resolve right now that they should be postponed until tomorrow. The hon. member for York-ton-Melville on a supplementary.


Mr. Nystrom:: Mr. Speaker, my question is not a supplementary.
June 14, 1972


POSSIBILITY OF INCREASE IN INITIAL PRICES
Mr. A. P. Gleave (Saskatoon-Biggar):: Mr. Speaker, in view of the continued decline of prices for wheat, barley and rapeseed and the disastrous effect this will have on the income of farmers in western Canada, I should like to ask the minister whether it is his intention to review and increase initial prices for the new crop year under the Canadian Wheat Board?


Otto Emil Lang: Mr. Speaker, I should like first of all to reject the premise in the opening remarks. Declines in prices have not been continuing. Levels of prices have remained fairly constant in a number of grains to which the hon. member refers. There are, of course, periodic fluctuations in the case of rape-seed. There is certainly no intention to make any change at this stage in the initial prices.


Mr. Speaker:: The Chair will recognize the hon. member for Vegreville on a supplementary, but we must try to give other hon. members an opportunity to ask questions.


OATS-INQUIRY AS TO FINAL PAYMENT FOR 1970-71 CROP YEAR
Mr. Don Mazankowski (Vegreville):: Mr. Speaker, my supplementary is directed to the minister in charge of the Wheat Board. On May 3 and again on May 31 I asked the minister about the status of the final payment on deliveries of oats for the 1970-71 crop year having due regard to the fact that a credit of $4.5 million appears in the pool account as indicated in the Canadian Wheat Board annual report. On one occasion he advised this could be discussed when the Wheat Board appeared before the committee, and on another occasion he advised that the information would be supplied to me. Can the minister provide further enlightenment on this subject?


Otto Emil Lang: Mr. Speaker, 1 understand that the Canadian Wheat Board closed that particular oats pool effective May 19. It ordinarily takes approximately a month for it to finalize accounts. Before very long I should think the final cheques will be going into the mail.




René Matte: Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask a question of the Secretary of State.
In view of the imbroglio at the Paris meeting of the directors of the Agence de cooperation culturelle et technique, could the minister tell us if there were previous agreements in that connection between Quebec commis-sionner Yves Michaud and the Canadian delegate, Mr. Bissonnette?
Inquiries of the Ministry


Gérard Pelletier: Mr. Speaker,
I am not aware of the particulars regarding the imbroglio mentioned by the hon. member, but I can assure him that an agreement was concluded between the federal government and the provincial government of Quebec to the effect that the delegates of each government could occupy the two seats provided for Canada on the board of that agency.


TRANSPORT
Mr. David MacDonald (Egmont):: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Transport but in his absence I will direct it to the Prime Minister. In view of the meeting yesterday of the maritime council of premiers at Charlottetown and their decision to establish a task force on transportation, and in view of the soon to be implemented further freight rate increases, does the Prime Minister know whether the Minister of Transport has been in touch with the Maritime premiers and has indicated whether or not some assistance, both financially and in terms of information, will be provided so that this important task force can be effective?


Pierre Elliott Trudeau: Mr. Speaker, I can say the minister has been in touch recently with some Maritime premiers. I cannot answer the last part of the question, but I am sure the minister will give it consideration when he returns from Toronto.


David Samuel Horne MacDonald: Mr. Speaker, in view of the fact that yesterday the Minister of Transport undertook to contact the Atlantic premiers, and also in view of the fact there has been an expressed inability to acquire sufficient information on transportation problems within and to the Atlantic region, would the Prime Minister undertake to contact the Atlantic premiers so that such information might be available to them?


Pierre Elliott Trudeau: Mr. Speaker, I am frequently in contact with the Maritime premiers. We exchange telephone calls and visits, and I am sure that if they have something to raise with me they will do so immediately.


NATIONAL DEFENCE
Mr. Murray McBride (Lanark-Renfrew-Carleton):: Mr. Speaker, I wish to direct a question to the Minister of National Defence. Does the Department of National Defence make Canadian Armed forces personnel and equipment available for search and rescue operations within the province of Ontario, as requested by the

June 14, 1972
Inquiries of the Ministry
Ontario Provincial Police, and, if so, can the minister assure the House that every possible assistance is being offered by the Canadian Armed Forces in the search for five year old Adrian McNaughton, lost since the evening of June 12 in dense bush near Calabogie, Ontario?


Hon. E. J. Benson (Minister of National Defence):: Mr. Speaker, we have a helicopter and over 100 servicemen taking part in this search. We are willing, of course, to give all the help we can.


PUBLIC SERVICE
Mr. A. C. Cadieu (Meadow Lake):: Mr. Speaker, I wish to direct a question to the Secretary of State. Why is it necessary for the Public Service Commission to have a form letter to notify recruits that an error has been made in the starting salary quoted?


Mr. Speaker:: Order, please. It seems to me that that question might be placed on the order paper. If this is a matter of urgency, which is not obvious at least to the Chair, it might be considered at the time of adjournment.


Albert C. (Bert) Cadieu: Mr. Speaker, my supplementary question would be: how many such errors have occurred in the past six months where the salary quoted has been downgraded?


Mr. Speaker:: Order. I am not saying the matter is not important-I am sure it is-but the supplementary seeks statistical information and I would urge the hon. member to consider the advisability of placing the question on the order paper or giving notice to the Chair to discuss the matter at the time of adjournment.


ECONOMIC VIABILITY OF UNIT TRAINS FOR SHIPMENT-REQUEST FOR CLARIFICATION OF STATEMENTS
Richard Russell Southam: Mr. Speaker, I have a question for the Minister of Agriculture. With reference to my proposed motion under Standing Order 43 of a few minutes ago, will the minister make a full statement on motions as soon as possible to clear up what appears to be a serious credibility gap between statements he has made recently with respect to the economic viability of the unit grain train experiment and the answer given to me by the Parliamentary Secretary to the President of the Privy Council on May 24 as found on page 2502 of Hansard?


Horace Andrew (Bud) Olson: Mr. Speaker,
I do not believe there is a credibility gap between those two answers. I will give the hon. member an undertaking to make a statement in the House. We are undertaking some pilot projects and when we have the results there will be some useful information to give to the House.


Richard Russell Southam: Can the minister assure the House that if there are any increased costs because of the trucking of grain to inland terminals the farmers, directly or indirectly, will not have to bear the cost of these experiments?


Horace Andrew (Bud) Olson: Mr. Speaker, in the announcement of the experiments it was made clear that we were participating financially.


Mr. Speaker:: The hon. member for Surrey-White Rock.


Mr. Barry Mather (Surrey-White Rock):: Mr. Speaker, I had a question I wanted to ask the Minister of the Environment, but in his absence may I direct it to some British Columbia minister or related minister?


Mr. Speaker:: Order, please. Perhaps the hon. member might give that some consideration. For the moment I will recognize the hon. member for Waterloo.


OPPORTUNITIES FOR YOUTH PROGRAM-REQUEST THAT PERSONS EMPLOYED BE ALLOWED TO CONTRIBUTE TO UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE FUND
Mr. Max Saltsman (Waterloo):: Mr. Speaker, I would like to direct a question to the Secretary of State. In view of the discouraging employment figures for the young and the projections that unemployment will continue to be a serious problem for them, is the minister giving consideration to permitting young people working under the Opportunities for Youth program to pay into the unemployment insurance fund so they can collect unemployment insurance benefits when their projects no longer exist?


Gérard Pelletier: Mr. Speaker, the people whose projects are subsidized within the framework of the Opportunities for Youth program must be compared to independent entrepreneurs. They are involved in carrying out a task for which they receive a grant. As far as the provincial laws, the minimum wage or other matters are concerned, they are dealt with by the promoters of these projects and have nothing to do with the program itself.


Max Saltsman: As a supplementary-


Mr. Speaker:: Order, please. Perhaps we might spend the last two minutes of the question period on supplementar-ies. We will reach the end of the question period very soon.


Max Saltsman: In view of the fact the government is paying these young people salaries, is the Secretary of State now prepared to remove their designation as selfemployed, which is a legal fiction?


Mr. Speaker:: Order. The hon. member for Oxford.
June 14, 1972


OPPORTUNITIES FOR YOUTH AND LOCAL INCENTIVE PROGRAMS-ACTION IN THE EVENT MONEYS EXPENDED NOT ACCOUNTED FOR
Mr. W. B. Nesbitt (Oxford):: Mr. Speaker, I wish to direct a supplementary question to the Secretary of State and also the Minister of Manpower and Immigration. With respect to the Opportunities for Youth program and the LIP program, is it necessary that those in charge of the various projects keep accounts, keep track of the moneys that are expended, and if the moneys cannot be accounted for what happens to the people concerned?


Mr. Speaker:: Order, please. That question, it seems to me, should be placed on the order paper.


REGIONAL ECONOMIC EXPANSION
Mr. James A. McGrath (St. lohn's East):: Mr. Speaker, I wish to direct a question to the Minister of Regional Economic Expansion. What action is he taking on the recommendations put forward in a special study commissioned by the Atlantic Development Council on the failure of the Regional Development Incentives Act in Newfoundland and how to make Newfoundland more attractive under that act? This question is particularly appropriate in view of the fact the recent unemployment figures for May show that the province of Newfoundland still lagging behind the rest of the country-


Mr. Speaker:: Order, please. The hon. member has asked a question and the minister might be allowed to reply.


Hon. lean Marchand (Minister of Regional Economic Expansion):: Mr. Speaker, I am just back from Newfoundland. I have been in the Burin peninsula and the programs of my department there were very successful.


Some hon. Members:: Hear, hear!


James Aloysius McGrath: Has the minister received this study from the Atlantic Development Council, and what action does he propose to take on the recommendations contained in the study?


Jean Marchand: Mr. Speaker, I have received the report. There are some parts of the report with which we agree and some with which we do not agree, and we are acting on it.


David Samuel Horne MacDonald: I have a supplementary to the previous question.


Mr. Speaker:: Order, please. Perhaps the House will allow the hon. member for Egmont to ask a supplementary but we have reached the end of the question period. I must apologize to hon. members who have not had a chance to ask their questions today.
Inquiries of the Ministry YOUTH


OPPORTUNITIES FOR YOUTH PROGRAM-POSSIBILITY OF FURTHER FUNDING
David Samuel Horne MacDonald: Mr. Speaker, yesterday I put questions to the Prime Minister in terms of possible further funding of these special programs in view of the high rate of youth unemployment, and the Prime Minister said it was a constructive suggestion and was under consideration. Could the Secretary of State say whether in fact this matter is being seriously considered, and in view of the shortness of time whether there might be an announcement in the next few days?


Gérard Pelletier: Mr. Speaker, this is obviously a matter that does not fall within the purview of my department, but of the government as a whole.


David Samuel Horne MacDonald: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker, the question was directly with regard to the special program known as Opportunities for Youth for which the minister does have responsibility. Perhaps he did not fully understand my question. It was with regard to possible potential further funding in view of the very high rate of youth unemployment.


Gérard Pelletier: Mr. Speaker, that is what I said, that potential higher funding is in the hands of the government, not of the Secretary of State.


Mr. Speaker:: Orders of the day.


Mr. Baldwin:: Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. At considerable personal self-sacrifice I have had consultations with the other House leaders and it has been suggested that we might cut down the length of speeches on the supply motion today to 20 minutes each for the mover of the motion and the first speaker on the government side and 15 minutes for all other speeches. I think there is a general disposition to accept that. It might add to the quality of the debate and provide more opportunities for hon. members.


Stanley Howard Knowles: Yes, Mr. Speaker, we agree.


Mr. Lambert (Bellechasse):: Mr. Speaker, we all agree. [English]


Mr. Speaker:: Is this agreed?


Some hon. Members:: Agreed.


Mr. Speaker:: As there is unanimous agreement it will be so ordered.

June 14, 1972
Information on Government Business



GOVERNMENT ORDERS


Gerald William Baldwin: This House, conscious of the failure of the Government to keep the Canadian people and Parliament adequately informed, urges that steps be taken by legislation and otherwise to provide clear rules for freedom of information with regard to public business.
He said: Mr. Speaker, because of the lack of time I shall deprive myself of the opportunity of giving by chapter and verse the many situations where the government has failed to provide to members of this House the information to which they are entitled. The lacklustre and sorry performance today of hon. gentlemen opposite, from the chief offender down, gives undoubted corroboration to the motion I have put before the House.


Some hon. Members:: Hear, hear!


Gerald William Baldwin: Mr. Speaker, if one looks at the written questions, one will find that a large percentage of them are questions which have been on the order paper for more than two months. If one looks at the requests for production of documents, one will find that many of them have been on the order paper for three months or more. If one listens to the questions asked by hon. members in the opposition and hears the alleged answers given by hon. members in the cabinet, the most objective, independent and impartial observer must conclude that there is a great need for this motion.
Today, Mr. Speaker, the hon. member for Wellington (Mr. Hales) placed before the Secretary of State (Mr. Pelletier) an oral question with a preamble which I think illustrated my point. In the preamble, the hon. member stated that somebody in the department had followed the instructions given to him. Following a request that the name of the program co-ordinator for an Opportunities for Youth program be made available the hon. member was told, and the House must accept this, that instructions were given by a very high source that such information was not to be given to a member of this House, acting either for himself or the people of his constituency. This is the kind of performance, Mr. Speaker, which makes it essential to put this motion.
In addition, I have in my hand a copy of an Order in Council dated May 4,1972 which reads as follows:
His Excellency the Governor General in Council, on the recommendation of the Prime Minister, pursuant to section 34 of the Broadcasting Act, is pleased hereby to appoint Mr. Laurent Augustin Picard to be President of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, to hold office during good behaviour for a term of seven years, effective August 1, 1972, and to fix his salary at the rate set out in the schedule hereto.
The schedule is attached and provides for an annual salary of $60,000 but in front of that Order in Council there appears the following statement:
The Specific Salary of any person named in the attached Order in 
Council is Confidential information. It must not be divulged to unauthorized personnel. Please attach a copy of this notice to any duplicate which you may make of the Order in Council.
Is this the kind of freedom of information we are going to have in this country, under which mundane matters such as the salary of an official of a public corporation is to be considered an official secret, bound by the provisions of the Official Secrets Act? We have come to a sorry pass in this democratic country if not only members of this House but the public who pay the taxes from which is derived the salary of the President of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation or the head of any public body, are not allowed this information. This is a pretty sad state of affairs and it is something which must be examined.


Some hon. Members:: Hear, hear!


Gerald William Baldwin: Mr. Speaker, the very fact that I found it necessary to put this motion is proof that need exists; the very fact that the public is unable to secure the information it wants; the very fact that hundreds of written questions are not answered or are not answered adequately; the very fact that oral questions are not answered adequately or properly or are stone-walled by a minister's answer, these examples are all proof that something must be done. The performance of the Prime Minister (Mr. Trudeau) and members of his cabinet with regard to providing information to the public is shoddy and discreditable. Accepting this assumption, what I seek to do by this motion, and by steps I have taken on behalf of this party in the past, is to reverse the existing process.
Today, anyone seeking information from the government must go, hat in hand, saying "Please, kind sirs, will you provide these facts to us?" If the government thinks it is right to do so it will say "Yes, you are good boys and we will let you have this particular fact or produce this particular document for you." What I seek, Mr. Speaker, is to reverse that process and show that there is and must be at all times an obligation upon the government to furnish to the people of Canada, to the media, to members of this House and the other place, information which they request as well as documents.


Some hon. Members:: Hear, hear!


Gerald William Baldwin: I will be the first to admit that there must be exceptions to this. Obviously, in cases involving such things as national security where the statutes provide that certain information or documents shall be exempt-and a government always has this remedy, to pass a statute to exempt information-or where an investigation with regard to a criminal offence is taking place or in income tax matters, I readily accept the proposition that these should be exempt. Having said that, Mr. Speaker, I contend that there is still ample room for an act on the statute books of this country to provide for the right of the public to information concerning public business.
Two years ago I proposed a private members public bill. I put it back on the order paper this session in order to question members of the government, from the Prime Minister to the Minister of Finance (Mr. Turner) and the Minister of Justice (Mr. Lang) with regard to a bill of this kind. The bill is simple. Clause 3 reads as follows:
June 14, 1972

Any Canadian, or any person not being a Canadian who resides in Canada, may apply to the government for a record made in the course of public business and the government shall, within a reasonable time thereafter, provide a copy of such record to any person who so applies or make such record available for inspection by him.
The bill provides for exceptions and there is a further provision that if the document is not made available a member of the public could apply to a court for an order that the document be furnished. On a hearing, it would be competent for the government to plead that such a document fell within the exceptions. I am not taking the position that these details are things which are absolutely essential. Any bill which may be passed must conform strictly to this general principle but, of course, there is room for change. Before this debate is concluded I should like to hear from some member on the government side that they are prepared to consider that a measure of this kind or a white paper or the subject matter, should be referred to a committee for consideration.
As I said, I simply propose to change the burden of proof. Responsibility must fall on the government to justify its refusal to furnish any information or document. Surely all members can accept this. Important people in various organizations have accepted this proposition.
I noticed the following statement which appeared in Volume 1 of the Report of the Task Force on Government Information:
There were two other conclusions or, rather, principles that were basic to our thinking, and we suggest them as the very cornerstone of a new policy on information. They are that, the Government has an obligation to provide full, objective and timely information; and that the citizens have a right to such information.
Do any hon. members opposite disagree with that proposition? If so, before the debate ends I hope they will stand up and say so.
I have before me an excerpt from something a distinguished Canadian wrote in 1964. In part, it reads:
Democratic progress requires the ready availability of true and complete information. In this way people can objectively evaluate their government's policies. To act otherwise is to give way to despotic secrecy-
I am sorry the Prime Minister (Mr. Trudeau) was not listening. He was closely involved with the writing of those words. Would he like me to repeat them?


Pierre Elliott Trudeau: Yes, read that again.


Gerald William Baldwin: If he identifies these words, he may claim to be their author. I repeat what was said in 1964 by this distinguished Canadian who had not yet risen to his present position in this House:
Domestic progress requires the ready availability of true and complete information. In this way people can objectively evaluate their government's policies. To act otherwise is to give way to despotic secrecy-


Pierre Elliott Trudeau: That is why we created Information Canada.


George Harris Hees: But the government has given way to despotic secrecy.
Information on Government Business


Gerald William Baldwin: Ah, Mr. Speaker, how the author of those words has been seduced by four years in power as Prime Minister!


George Harris Hees: Hear, hear!


Pierre Elliott Trudeau: We set up Information Canada, did we not?


Gerald William Baldwin: I will now refer to a speech made on May 21, 1970 by the previous minister of justice who now has been promoted-a term I use with trepidation-to the position of Minister of Finance (Mr. Turner). Speaking to the Conference on Computers, Privacy and Freedom of Information, held at Queen's University from May 21, to May 24, 1970, the hon. gentleman said:
-the right to know is fundamental to any participation in democracy. The public cannot be expected to dialogue-still less decide- meaningfully if it is refused the very information which would make such a dialogue and decision-making possible.
What is necessary, then, is a Freedom of Information Act entitling the individual to information which the government authority has arbitrarily seen fit to withhold.
The minister said later in that speech, "... the criteria for non-disclosure should be set forth publicly in the statute ... ".
I tried to take the minister's advice. I brought forward a bill which incorporated views and thoughts I had held and expressed publicly in this House, hoping the then minister of justice would support my bill and that the Prime Minister would forget partisan politics and say, "Yes, this is a good bill; we will support it and adopt it as a government bill."


Pierre Elliott Trudeau: It was badly drafted. The hon. member should go back to the drafting table.


Gerald William Baldwin: I questioned members of the government about this matter. On June 28, 1971, following the report which had been made by the Science Council of Canada, I directed the following question to the Prime Minister:
In light of the charges made in the report by the Science Council of Canada to the effect that the Canadian people are being deprived of access to certain information, will the Prime Minister ensure that that information is made public and certainly available to the Science Council of Canada?
The right hon. gentleman said he was not aware of the charge and would look into it. I then asked the Minister of Justice of the day if he would support the principle of Bill C-250, the bill I mentioned just now. The minister said:
I share the objective of the hon. member, as he knows, Mr. Speaker. I should like to thank him again for his help on the Statutory Instruments Act-
That act had nothing to do with my question. This shows in what manner, when we attempt to bring before members of cabinet legitimate and proper proposals, we are sloughed off, as it were.
Earlier that year, on September 27, 1971, I directed the following question to the then Minister of Justice:
In light of the very strong recommendation in the report of the Economic Council of Canada that the government should proceed as quickly as possible to clarify the rights of the public to access to public information without bureaucratic or political strings, is the government planning to bring in a bill to this effect?

June 14, 1972
Information on Government Business
There was no answer at all. In light of these facts and this record, it is high time this question was considered by this House, by the country and by the media. We need legislation in this field. The Official Secrets Act ought to be modified. I have lost hope for this government, the members of which were spawned in a bureaucratic muskeg. This is a government of bureaucrats, run by bureaucrats for bureaucrats. So far as we are concerned, it will take an election and a new government to rectify the matter.


Some hon. Members:: Hear, hear!


Gerald William Baldwin: The right hon. gentleman said something about Information Canada. Mr. Speaker, Information Canada has been set up. I point out that there are some gems to be found in the report of the task force which ultimately was instrumental in the development and establishment of Information Canada. This organization was conceived in an establishment orgy of confusion and dissimulation. It was born in an atmosphere of political controversy and double talk. There is no hope for Information Canada. Even the Secretary of State for External Affairs (Mr. Sharp) who can usually, quite successfully surround, envelop and ultimately swallow issues of this kind was compelled to admit, under strong pressure, that Information Canada is not as valuable as it ought to be. That is strong language for that hon. gentleman. Consider, also, the Phillips report which was leaked. Mr. Phillips, the deputy director general of Information Canada, in the report said more or less what I have said: that, so far as Information Canada is concerned, it ought to go.
I see my time has about gone. May I address this question to hon. members of this House: in the light of what I have indicated, in the light of facts of which the government is well aware, does the government not think it is high time that, for the benefit of this House and the people of Canada who pay for the gathering of information, there should be embodied in the statute books of this land and in the practises of this House some rule, some law, which would enable the people of Canada to receive the information to which they are entitled and which is gathered for their benefit?


Barry Mather: Mr. Speaker, we, of the New Democratic Party, support the motion of the official opposition, for two reasons. First, we believe the people of Canada are entitled to full and clear information on how their business is being conducted by government. We do not think they are being given that full and clear information at the moment. Second, we believe that the methods the present government uses to disseminate government information are ineffective, costly, duplicative and carry with them this danger: They permit the government to give the public information about government, that is, information the government wants to give, rather than information the public would like to be given. No wonder the people of Canada and their representatives in this House are concerned about not obtaining full and clear information about the way their business, government business, is conducted by the federal administration. Consider the money involved alone, Mr. Speaker. In this place, we are the trustees of the spending of the public's $15 billion or $16 billion of tax dollars a year. The 
public is into a variety of enterprises and services ranging from the delivery of mail, the rubber business, the mining business, housing, highways and even movies and television.
There is one item that was approved in this House a few years ago. I refer to the decision to construct a National Arts Centre. That one decision cost every Canadian, man, woman and child, approximately $2.20. I am sure that most members of this place, as well as Canadians generally, approve of that decision, but I bring it up now to point out how one little item of government information can be of real interest to the taxpayers of this country.
The reason I am speaking for our party at this time is probably that I have a bill on the order paper, Bill C-98, which deals with secrecy and how to avoid it. The bill standing in my name relates to public access to government information. Aside from that, I am also very much interested in government information as a whole and the individual information services. I will say something about that a little later in my remarks. It sometimes seems to me that government information and government secrecy are interchangeable terms.
The present government has been spending millions of dollars getting out government information. For the most part, as far as I can judge, it is publicity about the government. It spends this money through various departments and agencies of government, many of which are staffed by good friends of mine. They are good fellows, former newpaper and public relations people. I know that in every case they Eire anxious to do a good job in their fashion, but they have to operate in line with today's set up of government information services.
A few years ago we received a report of a task force on government information. I want to emphasize that this was not a report by an opposition group or committee. This was a report by a government committee set up by the government. That report, as the hon. member for Peace River (Mr. Baldwin) has already indicated, strongly criticized the government for its failure to provide the information sought by Members of Parliament as representatives of the people of Canada.
It is a fact that at this moment there are many motions for the production of papers on the order paper. We are all familiar with the set phrases used by spokesmen for the government in denying members of this House information they seek on behalf of the public. The aim of the motions which we and other members put forward is to gain access to information which will reveal some very interesting facts to the voters and taxpayers of this country. It would reveal the basis of the decision of the government on matters of vital interest to the Canadian public because these decisions and the manner in which they are arrived at affect the lives and dollars of a great many of our people. To the extent we are denied that information, there is government secrecy.
At this point I wish to quote the explanatory note of the bill covering this area which I put forward on behalf of my party:
This bill is in aid of the public's right to know in what manner a government is administering the public duties entrusted and dele-
June 14, 1972

gated to it by the people: save for exceptions that are in the public interest the bill enacts Benthara's basic parliamentary Rule that public affairs must be conducted publicly.
I will not go into the details of the bill. My time is even more limited than that of the official spokesman for the official opposition. However, we have a bill which, if enacted or even sent to committee for approval, will result in a great gain with regard to opening the gates of government information to the representatives of the people here and the public. I wish to again refer to the task force report which was very critical of the government on this point. It pointed out that while the government was spending an estimated $3 million a week to provide publicity, largely to say how good the government and its agencies were, it withheld the basic facts that many people wanted to get at in the way of data and information which determines government decisions.
When Information Canada was established, it was set up partly to co-ordinate and improve the efforts of existing information sections in the various departments of government. The idea was that the cost of these services could be reduced and co-ordinated. In fact, Information Canada has become another layer of costly information while the departmental information sections remain in business and have actually increased their numbers and, in some cases, their costs. The situation is rather like that of a metropolitan council being set up in an area where there are a number of municipalities to co-ordinate and reduce the costs and do better planning for the whole area. In actual fact, with regard to Information Canada we have had another level of government information established. Actually, the costs of the various individual departmental and government information services have been increased rather than reduced since Information Canada came into being. Not many months ago, one of the officials of Information Canada indicated that unless Information Canada could find something useful to do, it would have difficulty justifying its expenditures.
In February, 1971, the government replied to some questions of mine with data which indicated that, despite the creation of Information Canada, most government departments were continuing to increase their staffs and salaries of their particular information branches. The government departments and agencies have increased their information staffs to 992. This is the individual sections of the individual departments. That was up from 900. They gained about 10 per cent since the advent of Information Canada. The staff of Information Canada in 1971 numbered 381. Today, the comparable figures are as follows. The staff members of individual information department sections have increased from a figure of 900 before Information Canada came into being to 1,091 today. The staff of Information Canada has jumped from 381 people in February, 1971, to 516 at this time.
When the second top official of Information Canada stated in a memo that that body had better find something to justify its existence, I asked the minister reporting for Information Canada what was the situation and what he proposed doing. He replied at that time, as I recall, that there was an overall look being taken toward improvement and organization. I see the minister is here today. He can correct me if I am mistaken. I said then, and I am still of the same opinion, that unless Information Canada and,
Information on Government Business
indeed, some of the information agencies in the individual sections of those departments, can be straightened out, and I refer now to Information Canada, they should be wound up.
Without any thought of boasting, Mr. Speaker, I want to say this. As a former newspaper person, a man with some knowledge of advertising and publicity and perhaps a little knowledge now of politics, I can undertake to consult with anyone on the government side who is interested in saving the public of Canada a good many millions of dollars a year through an improvement in the coordination of Information Canada and its services and, without the loss of any essential information now being provided, perhaps even increased information going out to the people. Mr. Speaker, the function of handling government information or publicity is not being any better administered now than it was last year or, in my view, before Information Canada was established. The cost of Information Canada runs into many millions of dollars, and I am sure a good many of these millions could be saved without the public suffering any real loss in terms of the information available to them.
In conclusion, I wish to urge, first, that the government make available to the public, and in particular to the representatives of the public here in this house, the information which is really desired by them. I have indicated what kind of information this is. Second, the government should either wind up or straighten up Information Canada, and improve the effectiveness of the publicity sections now attached to the individual departments. Third, I urge the government to concur in the appointment of a committee, headed by an opposition member, to which representatives of Information Canada and of the various departmental information agencies could report from time to time. This would, I am sure, result in the public being far better served, and at a cost far less than they are presently paying for the information they are entitled to get.


Gilbert F. Rondeau: Mr. Speaker, the motion submitted today by the official opposition reads as follows:
This House, conscious of the failure of the Government to keep the Canadian people and Parliament adequately informed, urges that steps be taken by legislation and otherwise to provide clear rules for freedom of information with regard to public business.
Mr. Speaker, this resolution is curiously similar to the statements we have heard in this House and from the public before Information Canada was created. If we judge only from this motion, we are led to conclude that Information Canada is a failure since this resolution urges the government to take new measures to give the people free access to information.
However, before the creation of Information Canada, one could read for insance in Le Meunier quebecois of December 1970 this editorial by Mr. Rene Blanchard, and I quote:

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-information is a public interest service.
In a sound democracy information must escape from . .. the claws of a partisan politic power and from the powers of money represented by pressure groups.
Information is a right as are education and health. It is also a major branch of continued education.
I think that this editorial which was quite appropriate two years ago is still so today. And I quote again:
Through the written and spoken media each of us is in a position to keep up with the profound changes taking place throughout the world. Our newspaper is window on the world. It is therefore important that its panes be kept clear.
And God knows how often the panes are not so clear in our newspapers and news agencies.
But what can we do if information is to escape from monetary powers and political parties? ... means should be taken to prevent information from being treated as a commodity that is sold for profit or used to magnify prejudices and hatreds, to sustain personal or collective selfishness, to cultivate chauvimism, r acism or class struggle. Every newspapers has a duty to be free, whatever the community it is intended for and it should be responsible for stating out the facts and events, explaining social trends, taking position against prejudices and demystifying them by unveiling to the public's eyes the mechanisms that are used to perpetuate them.
If the world today is at a loss and the old political recipes are still rehashed-
-and we in this corner of the House understand each other when we speak of old recipes-
-without relevance to contemporary problems ... It is surely because too many people are not free, free to act and, above all, to express their thoughts since they are prisoners of mercantile interests and government constraints.
We, of the Social Credit party, have repeatedly noted that information has, for a long time, been biased and this is why the government has set up a commission of inquiry which has published the first volume of a task force report on government information, has made a recommendations and instigated the creation of Information Canada. And no doubt it is to ensure that Canadians obtain a better quality of information that the government-to which we grant once more the benefit of the doubt-has established this agency.
But for the past two years, before analyzing the work of this new agency, Information Canada, we could also read an editorial of CFTM-TV, channel 10, Montreal, dated Monday, March 2, 1970, where the lack of information in Canada was denounced, and I quote:
-information within the federal government leaves to be desired from the viewpoint of efficiency; incoherence of information distributed among the numerous ministries, departments, and agencies of the government; overlapping in the use of personnel and material; blocking of communications in the various information services following the inevitable bureaucratic inertia ... Undeniably, citizens must be made aware of available services and told where and how to obtain them. So, it is desirable that Information Canada should address itself directly to the public-
I could say now that certain doubts that we had before the establishment of this agency, more than two years ago, have proved justified.

I keep on with the quotation:
However, on account of the measures Mr. Trudeau's government intends to take to that effect, people are somewhat mistrustful.
In order to inform the Canadian people-
-the government wishes to proceed by way of public opinion polls, which obviously implies questions provided by the government, which also prompts us to ask ourselves whether the government wishes to comment or to provide the information. It is not for any agency like Information Canada to represent the Canadian people or to hold a dialogue with them. It is up to the Parliament members to do that. Such an agency should look after the needs of the public in as far as information is concerned and not ask them by means of inevitably biased questions, their opinion on anticipated policies.
Mr. Speaker, the distrust we felt on March 2, 1970, proves justified two years later. Nevertheless, the task force that studied the information problem in Canada did worthwhile work. In fact, one can read at page 21 of the report about:
-the mess in government information.
All that to say that following an inquiry and the publication of the report, following the disclosure of the lack of coherence in government information, we are no further ahead today than we were before. There is still the same lack of coherence in the various departments, we can also note that during the last two years, Information Canada has been used in many circumstances. And I have not enough time to try to sell the government's program to the Canadian people.
I quote from Chapter V of the report of the Task Force on Government Information:
Twelve Easy Steps to a Quick Understanding oe the Mess in Government Information
The failure of successive governments to establish general information policy; the lack of interdepartmental coordination of information services; the triumph of departmental sectionalism in the information field; the confusion as to whom each division is addressing; the variations, department by department, in everything from morale to accounting methods; the absence of a central set of standards by which ISOS might measure their own achievements. Such inconsistencies and failings have all contributed to an atmosphere that has tolerated bungling, nurtured professional lassitude, lent security to the incompetent, and allowed supreme disorder.
That, Mr. Speaker, is one of the paragraphs of the report of the task force that was appointed to make a survey on information in Canada. Two years after the setting up of Information Canada, results enable us to state today that there has been no change, and this text applies very well in 1972, just as it applied before the establishment of Information Canada, which has a budget of more than $7 million a year.
At page 31 of the report, one can read the following:
Some business leaders claimed that DBS figures were frequently so late that their usefulness was doubtful. One businessman stated, "We are still (January 9, 1969) awaiting the publication of the DBS report on 1966 operations of the pulp and paper industry,-
Three years before, they had not yet received the statistical data on the operations of the pulp and paper plants. I resume my quotation:
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-although the figures it will contain were made available to us for one of our publications six months ago ... The last updated catalogue came out in 1964." DBS works so slowly in some fields that a financial writer says he frequently gets his figures somewhere else.
One must refer to private enterprises to get federal government statistics. Even through Statistics Canada, the federal government is unable to supply the business community with firsthand data on manpower or other subjects justifying the existence of that federal agency whose cost is supported by the Canadian taxpayers.
And the report goes on to say:
DBS works so slowly in some fields that a financial writer-
-as I have just said,-
-says he frequently gets his figures somewhere else and then, when DBS does report them, he writes in his column,-
Mr. Speaker, while we are discussing Statistics Canada, I should like to object to the figures concerning manpower in order to show that that agency, to me, at least, is totally inefficient. In the past this House had opportunities of studying official data published by Statistics Canada. The whole thing spells obsolescence. Statistics Canada does surveys concerning unemployment; it hires from three to six people per constituency, all over Canada, one week a month. They visit country parishes, especially during winter, when unemployment is less acute than in the cities. Investigators are sent into the cities during the summer when unemployment is less severe.
Mr. Speaker, I could speak for an hour on the very bad methods used to establish the so-called statistics on unemployment in Canada. In fact, investigators are told to call during six successive months at the same house, on the same farmer, to ask him: Sir, are you unemployed? During how many hours have you worked last week? And the good farmer answers: My situation is the same as it was last month. This is the fifth time that you have called, I still have the same herd of cows, I still must work the same number of hours during the week. Yet, the investigator returns-


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Laniel):: Order. I am sorry to have to interrupt the hon. member, but the time allowed to him has now expired.


Gilbert F. Rondeau: Mr. Speaker, with your permission I should like to know whether the House would agree to my going on with the interesting remarks I have to make on Statistics Canada.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Laniel):: Order. To my mind, a decision was made about the length of speeches and, unless I am mistaken, it was understood that hon. members would not ask for additional time. However, it is up to the House to decide.

Does the House consent to let the hon. member complete his remarks?


Some hon. Members:: Agreed.


Some hon. Members:: No.
Information on Government Business [Translation]
There is not unanimous consent to allow the hon. member to finish his speech.


Abram Ernest Epp: Mr. Speaker, I was interested in the comments made by the hon. member. I think that we in this House, as well as the country generally, agree that the informed judgment of citizens is indeed the basis of a well functioning democracy. A citizen must have information in order to participate, to present his own interests in light of the facts of a given situation. He must be informed in order to present the interests of groups with whom he freely associates and to present his view of the public interest to government as he sees and expresses it.
Therefore, access to information, which lies at the root of a well functioning democracy, is a continuing obligation of government, and this access must be improved and maximized. I will go further and say that, if we think about it for a moment, we are today experiencing extremely rapid change, social, economic and political. Changes in the development of technology, particularly in communications media, result in a steady bombardment of facts and opinions, often conflicting. In these circumstances the citizen frequently feels bewildered by the flow of information, and it is therefore incumbent upon government to come to his support. I think there are at least two ways in which a review of information flows ought to be made at this time and, indeed, are under way. One would be in the more legal and complex fields of information, by defining more precisely than hitherto the boundaries between factual information and more confidential or secret information, with the objective of establishing a base for the fullest possible disclosure.
We have a tradition here of parliamentary responsibility and we also have secrecy. What we can ana ought to do is undertake a more precise definition of the distinctions to be made between that which is factual and that which is confidential. I do not think we will make much progress in the objective we all share to increase the flow of reliable and objective information unless we get down to the business of defining in more specific terms the boundaries between different kinds of classified information. I think all in this House would agree that with respect to the public service, the information often sought in this House which has been obtained through the advice and recommendation of public servants must be kept confidential in order to have good government.
The other step to which I would refer is already underway. One of the most recent moves, two years ago, was the establishment of Information Canada. The object was to relate the government more closely to the needs and interests of citizens for information. I should just like to indicate a few ways in which this agency is undertaking to fulfil that function. Perhaps I should first say, as categorically as I can, that there is no intention to follow the contradictory advice of some members of the opposition to disband Information Canada. This agency is only at the beginning of its experience, and only at the beginning of its usefulness to Canadians. I want to affirm in the most

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positive way possible my own and the government's commitment to expand its functions in the service of Canadians.
First, let me point out some of the characteristics of Information Canada which are not always fully recognized. This agency inherited two existing major functions of government. One was the Canadian Expositions Commission, which is a highly skilled, technical group of persons who create and develop exhibits throughout Canada and, indeed, throughout the world, on behalf of every department of government. Exhibits convey departmental messages and services to Canadians and people around the world. In addition, Information Canada as a department inherited the Queen's Printer bookstores, of which there are now six across Canada and, hopefully before this year is out, there will be some 10; that is to say one in each of the capital or major cities of the provinces.
Some 70 per cent, if my memory is correct, or two-thirds to three-quarters of the staff or personnel of Information Canada is composed of those persons who are working in these agencies, the Expositions Commission and the Queen's Printer bookstores. Other small agencies were also taken on, for example the still photo division of the National Film Board. The other personnel are obviously those persons who have been recruited to fulfil other functions of Information Canada. One of those functions is to expand the bookstore service to include an inquiry service. We hope to have each of the major centres incorporate an inquiry system. We are already active in a number of centres so that our personnel there can respond in useful ways to the inquiries of citizens. The staff will not have all the information about all the services and programs of government at their fingertips, but Information Canada is developing a data bank which will make it possible over a period of time to respond, through its own inquiry officers, to many of the questions that come forward.
However, the main function will be to refer those questions to the appropriate government departments and, indeed, to the appropriate persons in the various government departments so that citizens will not get what they frequently think is a runaround, getting lost in a system that is very large and complex. Through this service they will be able to tap into the various services of government and be referred to other levels of government, if that is the appropriate agency to respond.
In addition to those activities, I should like to refer to another service within Information Canada which was in the original mandate and recommended by the Task Force on Information, and that was to assist the information divisions of various government departments to evaluate and improve their services. A division has been established within Information Canada to perform that function. One of the recent activities of that division was to assist various departments, which do not have well developed information services, to provide information to the public; sometimes to a special public and sometimes to the general public.
A typical example of that kind of support activity provided by experts in communication within Information Canada was in connection with the special employment programs during the past winter, including LIP. With its

support service, Information Canada officers helped to coordinate the information activities of four or five different government departments. Thus, one of the ongoing functions is coordination and supplying expert personnel to various departments participating in that combined program. They assisted them to gear up to an extraordinary demand on their information services. Information Canada is prepared and has undertaken to evaluate programs and to look at the effectiveness of advertising programs. It is prepared to advise departments and to provide them with the highly skilled and expert personnel which it would not make sense for each department of government to recruit and maintain within its own services. In this sense, it is acting as a central agency in respect of other departments.
It may be of interest to some hon. members to look at some of the more practical and down to earth efforts of the officers of Information Canada and the personnel recruited by them to do a job for Canadians in the day to day information activity. I refer to two Information Canada officers who are currently working in southwestern Nova Scotia on a summer project. The objective there is to bring to the people in that area the kind of information they need.
In this connection one begins the community, one does not begin with government brochures or existing information services, delivering them to the community. What we are trying to do is find out the needs of various communities, the attitude structures that exist and the impediments to the flow of information. We are trying to find out how Information Canada can advise the various departments, while in no sense taking over their information services, on how better to serve the needs of such communities.
Briefly, these are some of the things these two information officers discovered last week in this particular community, and some of the activities they undertook. They arranged a meeting to tell unemployed students about the student manpower centre in Yarmouth, and about various openings for students. One might say it is up the citizen to find out about these various services of government, but research reveals that people do not know that services exist for their benefit. What we are doing in Information Canada is getting out in the field where the people are, finding out their needs and trying to help the departments respond to them.
In all this, we will not take over the information function. We will assist other government departments to do their job better. In a survey of 26 grade 8 students it was found, for example, in one community that only four reported that their families took a newspaper of any kind. One man thanked these officers for having pointed out that there was an unemployment insurance office in a certain community. He did not know of its existence.
Let me say also that last summer, in an effort to look into the nature of the communication problem- and I may say I was disappointed in the remarks of the mover of the resolution because although he had an opportunity he did not lay out some of the problems-Information Canada commissioned eight information studies in more isolated parts of Canada such as southern Nova Scotia,
June 14, 1972

Labrador, Gloucester county in New Brunswick, Scheff-erville, Quebec and Riverdale in Toronto. Riverdale is not exactly an isolated part, but it had some special characteristics in which information problems existed. These studies were also commissioned in St. Boniface, Manitoba, the Crowsnest pass area and the sugar beet fields of southern Alberta.
Graduate students and others, in teams of two, one of whom was familiar with the neighbourhood, went into these communities. We did not sit here in Ottawa and cogitate about the problems. Information Canada took the initiative and went to these communities. Five reports have been released and the others are in the final stage of publication. They will be released shortly. I noted that in a radio interview this morning an hon. member opposite suggested that the reports had been leaked. This is not the case. These reports are being released. Even though the officials of Information Canada may not always agree with what is contained in the reports, these reports are released because the idea behind the research is important.
First, as I indicated, these projects started with the communities themselves. Second, the reports went to Members of Parliament, local officials and federal government departments involved in the communities as well as to many of the people who live there. These people have been asked to comment on the reports. The hope is that this will result in more meaningful communication between the federal government and the people it serves. We will not always agree on the findings in the reports. Not all communication between government and people can start at the local level. The researchers may have been wrong in some of their conclusions. But if the experiment succeeds even in part, the federal government will be in a better position to fulfil its first information priority of distributing information which people need more widely and more effectively.
I wish to assure hon. members that Information Canada and other departments are now actively following up on these and other information studies. How then can one respond to the suggestion of opposition members that Information Canada be abandoned? Are they not interested in the needs of people for information such as is being discovered here? If we discover that things are not as well as we like, are we to run to cover or try to improve the situation? Surely, the latter Information Canada officers are working in Nova Scotia and are also following up the results of the study in Manitoba. This summer there is a mobile information office working with the Indian people in Alberta's sugar beet fields. This is a direct result of the research conducted by Information Canada. This is in addition to the function of the central office of supplying information, answering inquiries and assisting various departments.
I see, Mr. Speaker, that my time is running out and we must all observe the 20-minute rule. If I might, I should like to comment very briefly on information statutes. We know there are information statutes in various countries. It is being proposed that there should be such a statute here. This matter is under study by Information Canada. I would be less than frank, however, if I did not say I am not persuaded that a statute is the right way to go about
Information on Government Business
the question of accessibility to information. We could look at other countries which have information statutes such as the United States, for example. We might look at the problems the citizens there run into in respect of obtaining information even though there is a statute which grants access to information. Freedom of Information statutes of necessity have many exceptions to the general rule which we all wish to support. There are so many exceptions that we find governments hiding behind the exceptions rather than coming forward with information.
The exceptions become statutory and subject to very wide interpretations. Legal suits result from them. I would recommend or suggest that hon. members also look at the Swedish approach where for some 200 years there has been a statute on the books concerning access to information. The experience there I believe is no better than the experience in other countries, and certainly no better than the experience in Canada.
I shall conclude simply by saying that Information Canada as an agency is dedicated to the proposition of co-ordinating and assisting government departments to do a better job. We should not deceive ourselves that, as a result of some sleight of hand, this will cost less money. It cannot. Government programs grow in scale and we are all involved in developing new programs and policies to meet the needs of people. They grow in complexity. This complexity must be explained to people. We would only deceive ourselves if we thought this would cost less money rather than more. We will evaluate the progress made thus far and do our best as a central agency to assist departments to obtain greater productivity for funds spent.
We will continue on in this way. We will not sit in our major inquiry centres but will try to move out to where people are in order to distribute printed and other forms of information to them and to provide them access to government through our enquiry service. We will not remain in Ottawa but will establish centres in the regions of Canada so that there can be appropriate responses given to special regional needs for information. We are looking at the question of mobile information offices and are testing this concept. We are considering a host of other interesting and challenging developments in information services. Information Canada, Mr. Speaker, is only at the beginning of its useful service career in Canada.


Barry Mather: Mr. Speaker, I wonder whether the minister would permit a question before he resumes his seat?


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Laniel):: Order, please. There is a difficulty. The hon. member knows there has been a limitation placed on time. The minister's time has expired. A question can be asked only if there is unanimous consent. Is there unanimous consent.


Mr. Bell:: Mr. Speaker, I am afraid we have to be very strict about this. If the hon. member should have an extremely interesting question, the minister conceivably could take more than 20 minutes in replying to it.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Laniel):: Order, please. It is the right of hon. members to refuse to give consent. I now call upon the hon. member for Fundy-Royal (Mr. Fairweath-er).

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Mr.  R. Gordon L. Fairweather@Fundy-Royal: Mr. Speaker, may I say, with very great respect to the minister, that I was disappointed because his speech was discouraging to those of us who believe there should be accessibility of information and much less secrecy. In the few minutes I have, I propose to discuss the matter of government leaks, confidentiality, administrative secrecy, and finally and briefly, the kind of scrutiny that sort of died a'borning and in respect of which nothing apparently has been done. Then, if I have a minute, I will end with a plea for plain language and frankness in dealing with an increasingly frustrated public.
While members and the public find it difficult to get information necessary for the performance of their roles, there has been no shortage of information leaked to the press and the public. It might be interesting, Mr. Speaker, to have a list of these leaks since 1969. One, in 1969 a research study for the bilingual and bicultural commission was leaked to La Presse; two, in 1969, sections of the study of the Housing Task Force was leaked to Time magazine; three, June, 1970: excerpts from recommendations of the Le Dain Commission were leaked to Time magazine; four, in 1971, four staff members of the Special Senate Committee on Poverty left the staff and published a conflicting report, using in part information gathered during their official tenure; five, in 1971, draft portion of the Gray Report on Foreign Ownership; six, in 1971, a record of a cabinet decision in reference to the Gray Report; seven, December 23, 1971: details of two 1970 cabinet documents relating to law and order and possible use of the War Measures Act, suggesting the use of the act was contemplated before the October crisis of 1970, leaked to the Globe and Mail; eight, December 30, 1971: excerpts from two 1971 cabinet documents relating to the government's northern development policy for the next ten years, again leaked to the Globe and Mail; nine, February 2, 1972: cabinet document on aid to the publishing industry in Canada; ten, February, 1972: cabinet document on foreign ownership, and official documents, although not cabinet documents, all classified; eleven, document on low income housing; twelve, Anton Sobokha file-an abortive espionage case; thirteen, report on collective bargaining in the public service; fourteen, confidential evaluation of summer work programs of 1971.
While there is no complete certainty as to who is responsible for the individual leaks, the possibilities have been narrowed down in every case, except for the Senate Committee on Poverty, to those engaged in the service of the government, either permanent, full-time public servants, temporary public servants, or those engaged only for specific projects. I suggest that they resort to leaking because of prohibitive, restrictive and quite ridiculous rules about secrecy.
In a speech in St. John's, Newfoundland, on June 6 of this year, Gordon Robertson, Clerk of the Privy Council and Secretary to the Cabinet, attacked those individuals who had leaked information contrary to their oath of secrecy. He deplored the lack of public complaint about the reprehensible conduct of individuals who had provided confidential government information to the public. He justified his attack on the basis that the governments need
[The Acting Speaker (Mr. Laniel).]
to keep much information confidential. I quote him as follows:
In short, the collective executive that is the heart of our parliamentary system must have secrecy: it cannot work without it.
I suggest that this is a sacred cow, and that it is time this sacred cow was put to rest once and for all. No one would argue that secrecy is often crucial to the success of an executive and of a government. However, Mr. Robertson, I suggest fails to broach the problem that too much government material is labled confidential unnecessarily, and that information that should go to the public as a matter of course is withheld-hence, the leaks. Most of the leaks of the past few years fall into this category. None can be said to involve information risking national security, and none really risked the privacy of individuals, something that we would all want to protect.
Kildare Dobbs, a well-known Canadian writer, who spent a short time working for the Secretary of State (Mr. Pelletier), summed up well the stupidity of confidentiality procedures in the federal government. He said:
I could never quite understand by what alchemy the words rattling loose inside my head became confidential the moment I wrote them down. But that was what happened. A few strokes of the borrowed ball point and presto! I was spinning state secrets out of my own innards.
And further:
With superfluous caution, they put up a smokescreen of security, mindlessly stamping everything on their desks Top Secret, Eyes Only, Secret, Confidential. As if anybody cared. Not only where these documents unreadable; many of them, on close inspection, proved meaningless.
These words are contained in a statement he made to Macleans magazine in September last year. The government has not yet managed to balance well its need for secrecy against the public's need for information. I do not deny this need when secrets of state and the privacy of individuals are concerned. But otherwise, I think it is pure nonsense to believe there should be so much secrecy.
To understand whether a minister has chosen a proper course or whether a department is operating efficiently, Parliament must know what information is available and on what basis a decision was taken. Francis E. Rourke makes an important point that should not be overlooked: The fact that a policy is convenient or saves embarrassment is not necessarily an admission that it contributes to administrative efficiency ... Responsiveness no less than competence is the hallmark of a successfully functioning democratic bureaucracy.
The tendency in recent decades has been for the executive to interpret the public interest more in terms of its own efficiency than in terms of popular control. The experience of the United States when President Kennedy cut back drastically on the use of the doctrine of executive privilege to withhold information from Congress indicates that the passionate prophecies about the destruction of good government are greatly exaggerated. With great respect, Mr. Speaker, I wish that Mr. Robertson had read Francis Rourke's book "Secrecy and Publicity" before he made his speech last week in Newfoundland.
There are additional reasons for the growth of secrecy in recent decades. The impact of the cold war did much to heighten secrecy in connection with the security of the state. The Report of the Royal Commission on Security,
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abridged, interestingly enough, in 1969 did not hold out much hope to those who favoured greater access to administrative records. The report did say that there were many complaints made about over-classification, but found it impossible to suggest any "very sweeping changes in present procedures." In defence of this position, the Commission offered the standpat observation that:
The present system is reasonably well understood and established, and it would appear to us that very compelling arguments would need to be advanced for major changes.
I am sure that my hon. friend, the member for Peace River (Mr. Baldwin) who moved this motion feels, as I do, that there are compelling reasons, and I hope that today's debate will bring some of them forward.
The present classification categories were admittedly vague, but the Commission felt that it could do no better. It could not endorse a general approach to declassification, which should involve primarily departmental judgment, although the departments should be constantly reminded of the value of downgrading documents. More attention should be paid to the "need-to-know" principle, that is, the dissemination of security information only so far as is necessary for the conduct of business as determined by the proposed security secretariat.
In the Commission's view the Canadian Official Secrets Act is "an unwieldy statute, couched in very broad and ambiguous language." The poor construction of certain sections of the act, along with the "extraordinarily onerous" evidence requirements contained in the act have led officials to rely for prosecutions mainly upon the conspiracy sections of the Criminal Code. I know that in the few minutes remaining to me I cannot go into an exhaustive discussion of the Official Secrets Act, but I am quite certain that a committee of this Parliament should take a look at the whole matter of secrecy, as well as the right to know, and a system for declassifying documents should be very much before that committee.


Gerald William Baldwin: As they did in England in the Biafra case.


Mr. Fairweather:: Exactly. My hon. friend says this subject has been dealt with in the United Kingdom Parliament just recently.
We could have had a weapon or Parliament thought it had a weapon to deal with one other aspect of the public's right to have scrutinized for it some of the administrative decisions of government in the form of regulations, in the excellent report of the Special Committee on Statutory Instruments. I should like to give this short chronology of events. The committee was appointed on September 30, 1968, its membership decided upon on November 8 of that year and it reported to Parliament on October 22, 1969. There followed some eloquent statements by the then Minister of Justice, Mr. Turner. He said that the idea was long overdue and went on to say:
We have allowed, by enabling powers and statutes, legislation to be delegated to the cabinet, to ministers, to boards, to commissions by way of regulations ... beyond the control of Parliament, beyond the power of Parliament to review and revise, and thereby beyond the power of the people to challenge.
Information on Government Business
What has been the result of this eloquence, Mr. Speaker? On both the Senate and the House of Commons side, we have had a special committee. The House of Commons members on that Committee were named on March 22 this year, yet three months have gone by and that special committee on scrutiny has not been activated. I think it is fair to ask about the reluctance of the government. There should be a staff. We are well on our way to an adjournment, possibly even, to an election, and many valuable months will be lost before this committee reports. It was launched with such eloquence and such a resounding hosanna of trumpets but now, Mr. Speaker, the trumpet sound is uncertain indeed.
I have been interested and moved by a most eloquent letter from a person living in Claremont, Ontario, not in my constituency, who is opposed to the decision of the government to locate a new international airport at Pickering. I am not entering the debate about the location of the site at this point. This lady says that she is sick of receiving government form letters; she is tired of standardized replies and she is sick of being told that she has a right as a citizen to participate. She is sick of the cliches about participatory democracy and then having all these cliches set aside because the decision is taken before there is any opportunity for useful participation. I think we all bear a responsibility for the cynicism of the public with regard to government. Other members have spoken of the twin uglies, dehumanization and depersonalization. Because of those uglies, I think it is more important than ever that the public have access to information and that we, as Members of Parliament, stop treating citizens as some sort of receptacle for pieces of legislation that are almost incomprehensible. We must deal with the public in plain language, free of cliche and, if possible for parliamentarians, without resort to the usual puffery that seems to be endemic when politicians exchange letters with the public.


Mr. Grant Deachman (Vancouver Quadra):: Mr. Speaker, the motion of the hon. member for Peace River (Mr. Baldwin) which is before the House today opens wide opportunities for debate on a subject on which many members of this chamber have very strong feelings, and with which they have considerable familiarity. The wording of the resolution makes it possible for members to consider not only the failure of the government to keep the Canadian people adequately informed but Parliament as well. So, there are two aspects to the resolution. The aspect I want to talk about for a few minutes deals with some of the steps that the government has taken in order to bring about better communication with Parliament and the way in which Parliament has come to recognize what government is doing.
Many members in the chamber this afternoon will remember how bills and estimates were dealt with in committee of the whole under the old rules. The chairman of committees would sit at the head of the table and call out the estimates item by item. We would go through the chant of approving millions and billions of dollars without having the opportunity to examine any public servants on the issues and programs. We remember how the minister used to carry bills through this House in committee of the whole. A public servant would come into the chamber and

June 14, 1972
Information on Government Business sit at a little table in front of the minister. Every time a question was asked in committee regarding a clause of the bill there would be a whispered conversation between the public servant and the minister, then the minister would get to his feet and parrot what the public servant had told him. It was often the case that a good minister knew as much about the bill as the public servant and could carry the bill through the committee with adequate explanation, adequate at least for the House on that day.
Let us consider what takes place under the new rules and the way the problem is tackled today. Bills are no longer dealt with on the floor of the House in committee of the whole but are referred to a committee where the public can attend and where witnesses can be called. Public servants who may have played a role in the development of a particular bill can be called and questioned on every aspect of it. Let us also consider what takes place now when the estimates are automatically referred to committees of the House instead of being dealt with in committee of the whole House without the benefit of any examination of departmental officials.
I can recall that when we went into committees for the first time there was some contact between the public servant and the members. I remember how nervous the public servants were in those days in case members would bully them and push them around. I remember that the ministers would often still attempt to play the old role in committee that they had played in committee of the whole of having the public servant give the information to them and then they would relate it to the committee. Bit by bit, an aura of confidence grew between the public servants and the Members of Parliament when dealing with estimates in committee and examining various government programs. Public servants began to talk to members telling them about the hopes and aspirations of the programs of particular interest to an area which a member represented. For the first time, public servants were expressing themselves to Parliament in a way in which they had never been able to do before. For his part, the member was able to do what only ministers had been able to do heretofore, to question a public servant in detail in regard to a particular program.
I want to mention some other ways in which we have learned to communicate with government and acquire a better idea of what the government has done. I refer to some of the things that our committees have learned to do over the years. Consider, for example, the defence committee, which was first established in its present form in 1963. As time went on it became one of the standing committees of the House. Consider the way in which that committee set about examining the affairs of an extremely complex department, which it then was, as hon. members will remember.
The Defence Department spent a quarter of all our tax dollars and Members of Parliament had no idea how it did that. We did not truly comprehend how on earth that department spent a quarter of our tax dollars, or $1.5 billion which increased to $1.8 billion. We learned. The members of this House gained a comprehensive idea as to how that department spent its money. We know what happened to us. We, of this chamber, became more expert
[Mr. Deachman.l
on what went on in the Department of Defence and how that department spent its money, than the press. At that time, the press printed boloney every day, which we accepted and used in debates in this chamber. That was one way we learned to use our committees differently, and to benefit from them.
I want to speak for a moment about the committees which are doing excellent work in moving around the country and meeting the people. The transport committee and the agricultural committee have travelled most, I think. In their travels they have heard what members of the public have had to say about the important subjects of concern to those committees. This process has evolved in the past few years and has enabled Parliament to keep in touch not only with Crown corporations and departments of government but, as well, with people who are affected by what those Crown corporations and government departments do.
I now want to mention the growing use of expertise in our committees, and I will speak particularly of the work of the Finance Committee in its examination of the tax bill and in its examination of extremely complex subjects such as the revision of the Bank Act, the Bretton Woods agreement and the anti-dumping duty legislation. The members of that committee of the House became expert in these areas. The Committee employed experts, which enabled members to deal with these subjects more adequately and to understand them more fully.
I also want to speak of the work of the Public Accounts Committee in its investigative role, and of the effectiveness with which it has carried out that role. As hon. members know, the chairman of that committee is chosen from the opposition. That chairman, I am glad to see, is in the House and listening to my remarks. I think we all want to compliment that committee, and its chairman, on the effective role it played, for instance, in the investigation of the refitting of the Bonaventure.


Thomas Miller Bell: Please! Not too loud!


Grant Deachman: That was a classic case to be investigated by a Canadian parliamentary committee. Not only did that chairman and that committee carry out that investigation effectively, but the leader in the investigation, and I am talking of those Members of Parliament who were on that committee and took part in that work, was a member from the government side rather than from the opposition side. So, we can see the way committees have expanded and carried out their investigative roles, roles in which they have met the people and roles through which they had developed their own expertise and judgment. Mr. Speaker, Parliament is evolving and, in recent years, it has been evolving quickly.
Hon. members who spoke earlier told us that, as a Parliament, we lack some capability. An hon. member suggested that we have not fully carried out our role in overseeing what government departments and the public service do. I cannot accept the words of the hon. member for Peace River (Mr. Baldwin) who believes we have failed. I do not believe we have failed. I believe we have made giant strides in this Parliament and have become more expert than many in some fields, no mean achieve-
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ment in an age when technology and complexities of all kinds increase every day.


Thomas Miller Bell: Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to follow the chief government whip. I must say that he struggled along much more adequately than did the Minister of Labour (Mr. O'Connell) who replied officially on behalf of the government. The speech of the Minister of Labour was so weak, so irrelevant that, if Information Canada had anything to do with the preparation of the speech, I would be willing to agree that that body should be disbanded immediately, here and now.


Some hon. Members:: Hear, hear!


Thomas Miller Bell: There are two aspects to this matter, Mr. Speaker and they are slightly different from those mentioned by the last speaker. They have, first, to do with the evolution of Information Canada, and, second, the government's responsibility to inform itself.
We all recall the early days of Information Canada. The Prime Minister (Mr. Trudeau), still under the aura of the just society, decided to set up a task force on information. That task force has been referred to, and from it came the recommendation for creating Information Canada. That sounded like a grandiose idea. All the same, I think members of the House on both sides were afraid that the management of news, which was implied in the setting up of Information Canada, would be a serious matter for us all.
We know Information Canada failed. Everyone knows why it failed. Many have said publicly why it failed, both inside and outside Parliament. It failed, first, because Information Canada was not answerable to Parliament. Its activities were to be referred to one of our committees, and I will deal with the success of our committees later. The second, unsurmountable reason behind the failure was this: The government appointed as Director General of Information Canada a Liberal hack, a man who had been a full time, professional Liberal politician in Quebec. Mr. Speaker, professional, Liberal politicians in Quebec are just about as bad as you can find, if you exclude some I know of in New Brunswick. That man was appointed to head this body. Its duties were delicate, and we all know what happened. We watched the mistakes it made. Hon. members no doubt remember the photographs of nudes that came out, with the Canadian flag draped in the background of the picture. Unlike the nudes you see in Playboy Magazine, these nudes apparently were unidentifiable.


Some hon. Members:: Shame.


Thomas Miller Bell: I doubt if any hon. member of this House will stand up and say that Information Canada has been of appreciable help to our committees. I have never heard anyone claim that it has been of assistance. I know that these flat pins, or whatever you can call them, are given out to members and they may be in great favour. Much depends on the area of Canada from which you come. The whole thing has been a failure, as recent reports indicate. Information Canada, "Misinformation Canada", or "Manipulation Canada"-whatever you want to call it-is a lame duck, just like the Vancouver hockey team which
Information on Government Business
the government whip knows about. The team was of no use for the last part of this season, at least.


An hon. Member:: Do not cast aspersions.


Thomas Miller Bell: It is a lame duck, just like this parliament, and I doubt if it will be possible to bring about any recovery.
The other aspect I mentioned was the responsibility of the government to inform itself. We all know that old adage, "Public affairs must be conducted publicly.". Of course, Parliament is the forum to which the government of the people of Canada is responsible and it must see that correct information is brought forward. The task force was not asked to deal with government responsibility but, very bravely, it said:
In keeping with the principles of participation and freedom of access to information, the government provide more informative replies to questions raised in Parliament than has been the tradition.
That, Mr. Speaker, was quite a while ago. We all know the question period that we have here and the type of answers we receive. My thoughts go back to the days when well-known Parliamentarians were in previous governments. I will mention their names; Messrs. Martin, Pickersgill and Chevrier. When a question was asked by the opposition, they never failed to give an answer in this House. They prided themselves on the fact that each day they would stand up and give an answer. It might have been a lengthy one or all the facts might not have been correct, but at least they gave information. We know what we get today. We do not even get the ministers to their feet half the time, if we can even get them in the House.
The other day I did a random check of the attendance of ministers. I am not trying to be a schoolteacher and check everyone's position. As far as the attendance goes on both * sides of the House, there is no difference. It is not good. I am talking about the members of the treasury benches who have a responsibility in this Parliament. For a three week period in May, there were four, five or six ministers away each day when, under the famous roster system, they should have been here.
Mention was made by the chief government whip of the success of committees. I do not think that committees are all bad. We had to make moves toward a professional committee system. Some of these moves were good. We are now receiving expert advice and we are travelling; that is good. However, you will have to do a lot of talking to convince me that the system we are now using in dealing with estimates has any value. It embarrasses me to no end to sit in this House, as I will do in a few days, and have billions of dollars pass through in two or three seconds under the eyes of the press gallery and the Canadian public. Under the old method, we had a chance to confront the minister and the civil servants. We could threaten to hold up the estimates, to not pass them and make ministers do without their money if they did not provide the correct answers. Now, we still have the whispering back and forth in committee, but the civil servants are not giving us the type of answers that I feel we should be getting.
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I remember the days when civil servants attended the opposition caucus and gave us their thoughts. There was not a press man around. They told us what they thought about different policies and the like. Do you get that now? They are scared to death. You never see a civil servant talking to the opposition. Everything is too big now. I do not think there is the slightest improvement in so far as the committee system of dealing with estimates.
Mention was made a few moments ago by the chief government whip of the Auditor General and the Bona-venture. We know what we have been through with the Auditor General. Hopefully the Minister of Industry, Trade and Commerce (Mr. Pepin) gave us the facts and information the other day about items to which the Auditor General had referred in his department. How about the President of the Treasury Board (Mr. Drury)? There is the one man in this whole House who is an authority on the Bonaventure. We recall how he got up and said that under the new system we were going to use there would never be another situation like the Bonaventure. We now have another such situation in the making in the DDH program.
If you want to talk about the Bonaventure, there may be some credit in that for the Committee. The membership was bipartisan, there is no question about that. However, there has never been any ministerial responsibility fixed for the Bonaventure matter; questions asked in this House are not answered and attendance under the roster system is poor.


Some hon. Members:: Hear, hear!


Thomas Miller Bell: I said that there were two related matters, the failure of Information Canada and the responsibility that has traditionally existed on the government from time immemorial to inform. Everybody wants to take part in our democracy. They want to have their views passed on to the right people. They want them accepted. They want to know what is coming back. However, so far as Information Canada is concerned, which apparently is on its death bed and this was certainly confirmed by the speech today by the Minister of Labour, the grandiose plans of this method of informing Parliament and the people have all been washed out. Responsibility now rests and can only rest with the government. They must see that their policy of evading questions is changed. A policy of giving better answers to tabled questions must be followed. I have taken a random look at the order paper. I find that as of today, 42 questions have been on the order paper since February; 53 since March; 35 since April and 63 since May. Where is the responsibility of the government? They are suppressing reports. The general attitude of condemning Parliament by these just society boys has to stop, if it is not now too late.
As stated in the motion of the hon. member for Peace River, which I had the honour to second, our concern is with people and Parliament. The responsibility in our democracy rests with the government through our political process to see that this leadership is shown here. This was borne out in the task force report. There must be greater access to information for all members. As the mover of this motion stated the onus has to go back to the government. They can have their exceptions, but the

responsibility to inform has to be transferred back, not to Information Canada, the opposition or the people outside, but to this Parliament and, in particular, the cabinet, the members of the treasury benches.


Some hon. Members:: Hear, hear!


Mr. Herb Breau (Gloucester):: Mr. Speaker, I am honoured to follow my colleague from New Brunswick, the hon. member for Saint John-Lancaster (Mr. Bell). For one reason or another, I do not agree with many of the things he said. He talked about the importance of providing proper and impartial information to the people of this country. I agree with that in principle, but being a good politician, as he is, his speech today illustrates the strength of our political system. On the other hand, with regard to elements of the political system such as the opposition putting across their point of view, they give one biased opinion. If we want our system to work, the government has to respond to the statements of the opposition in the same way.
The hon. member for Saint John-Lancaster talked about the government giving information. As far as I am concerned, there are two functions of information that are of importance. The hon. member referred to the question period. I think the hon. member for Peace River (Mr. Baldwin) also mentioned that. I have to smile when I hear the opposition being touchy about the government responding in what we might call a political way to questions asked during the question period. They seem to take the attitude that their questions are impartial, looking for the facts and asked without any ulterior motive. I do not have anything against them having these motives. I think this is essential in our political system. Their role in the question period is not only to obtain information, but to make political points.


Gerald William Baldwin: We are sure successful.


Herb Breau: I think you are successful. I hope that some day I will have the chance to answer some of your questions. I would succeed in scoring political points, too. I think ministers tend to try to be too impartial and nonpolitical when they answer questions. The function of the opposition in this context is not primarily to gather information, because that would imply they were impartial; they are not out to get facts but, rather, to make political points. I admit at once that this is an important function in our political system; on the other hand, the opposition should not, for example, ask leading questions and then say, when a reply in political terms is given, that the government is not supplying impartial information, and relate all this to Information Canada.
The hon. member for Saint John-Lancaster is, as we know, an experienced member and I do not believe he would wish to lead the House into the error of believing that Information Canada has done nothing positive. I should like to refer him to the study conducted in my constituency, one which brings out some very pertinent facts. It was undertaken last year by a group of students with the sponsorship of Information Canada. Again, I wish to emphasize the difference between information
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which, of necessity, will be biased because the government is asked biased questions, and factual information given in response to a public need.
The hon. member for Saint John-Laneaster would agree, I am sure, that it is a function of government to explain its actions in a political way. On the other hand, there is the function of providing information to people who, for one reason or another, cannot get the facts they need out of the political system or the House of Commons. The study to which I have referred deals with that situation and I again refer the hon. member to this report which was commissioned by the planning services of Information Canada and carried out by two students, Helen Sinclair and Pierre Tremblay. It is a very good study and I will send a copy of it to the hon. member. Once he has read it, I doubt he will again tell the House that Information Canada has done nothing.
In my view, we are only now beginning to realize what the role of Information Canada should be. If there was one error which was made it was, it seems to me, in calling this organization Information Canada. We should not have called it that, because in our political context, the context of the House of Commons, I think it implies information which is biased because of the very nature of our political system, as I have explained. How can one expect a minister to get up and answer a question in a scrupulously non-partisan way when a member such as the hon. member for Saint John-Lancaster, for example, has put the question to him? If I were the minister concerned there would be no chance of my answering him in a non-political way-maybe I would do so in my constituency, but not in any other forum. When that opposition member asks a question, a minister would be foolish to answer in a non-partisan way because the member is smart enough politically to load his question. To appreciate the role of Information Canada in this context, we must admit that possibly the name is wrong. It is true that in terms of semantics, information is the correct word but possibly we should call it a centre of resources-


An hon. Member:: What?


Herb Breau: Or, possibly, an animation centre-


Stanley Howard Knowles: Or, Propaganda Canada.


Herb Breau: Perhaps the hon. member for Winnipeg North Centre (Mr. Knowles) was not listening when I explained the difference between propaganda and information. I said there was a need for propaganda in the present system because members like the hon. member for Saint John-Lancaster and the hon. member for Winnipeg North Centre are experienced politicians, and when they ask questions a minister would be foolish to answer them in any other way than by propaganda. That is because their role here is purely a political role. Their role is to try to lead the public into believing what they believe. I do not think this is anything to be ashamed of.


Mr. McCutcheon:: I am rising on a point of order, Mr. Speaker. It seems to me that the hon. member who has the floor is imputing motives to various members over here and saying that ministers have to reply with propaganda.
Information on Government Business
I do not think he has the right to impute motives to my hon. friend from Saint John-Lancaster.


Mr. Speaker:: Perhaps it might be better if I said nothing about the hon. member's point of order.


Herb Breau: You know, Mr. Speaker, sometimes one can impute motives which are bad motives, but there is nothing wrong about imputing good motives.


Stanley Howard Knowles: The rule does not make that distinction.


Herb Breau: I said I agreed that this was an important function of the opposition in our political system. I would never try to play down the importance of that aspect of our political system. However, I am pointing out that an organization like Information Canada should also be a centre of assistance to citizens-a citizenship development centre or an animation centre.
Citizens groups are forming across the country. Those who were responsible for the study to which I have referred sought to evaluate the way in which an ordinary citizen in a constituency such as mine, which might be called a disadvantaged area where many problems arise, cultural, social and political, derives information about government programs and governmental decisions which directly concern them. Does he get his information through the civil service, or through political channels or by other means? How is this man being reached by governments whether at federal, provincial or municipal level? And, when contact was made, was he supplied with facts, arrived at impartially, or with propaganda? In other words, does he get information by reading in the newspapers that some member of the opposition had posed a political question and been answered in a political way, or did he have access to the real facts? I will go further, Mr. Speaker. What these people need is not only facts but a means of obtaining advice as to methods of implementing intentions they may have in mind-ways of putting into practice projects they have conceived. This study deals with all these matters. It is a most pertinent one and has been well carried out. I believe it shows that in this context Information Canada has an important role to play in our political system and in our society generally.
As I say, more and more citizens' groups are forming in this country, calling themselves poor people's groups, animation groups and so on. We all agree with the concept. Those who join them and organize them find they need facts on the basis of which to counter propaganda and biased information. It is of great importance that those we are trying to help should have access to impartial information, to non-partisan information outside political channels. As long as this can be done, organizations like Information Canada have a pertinent function to perform. In the absence of such facilities, people are apt to mislead by the role played by opposition parties in the House of Commons, or in legislative assemblies.
As I have explained, it is not always possible for governments, which are politically motivated, to give completely unbiased information. What is the situation with regard to animation programs carried out through the Department of Regional Economic Expansion and other branches of the federal government? Provincial governments have
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experienced difficulties in this direction, also. I think the role played by Information Canada is an important one. It is the sort of thing that makes the political system in this country work. If we want to change the name, then let us go ahead and change it. But if the information that Information Canada gives is interpreted as biased information or as propaganda, then it is not functioning properly.
Another function of Information Canada is to collect resource information on behalf of the people of Canada. For some reason or other, it has not been able to fulfil this role or to implement what it conceives to be its role in the political system, be it municipal, provincial or federal. I suggest that an agency like Information Canada will stop the trend that has led these groups in Canada to allege they are being given propaganda or biased information. Hon. members opposite say that they are being put in the position of giving biased information to the people they represent because of the infrastructure that collects such information. They include in this infrastructure the media, big business, the big labour organizations-anything that is big. They claim that the little man has no access to information. It seems to me that a role Information Canada can play is to try to find ways to help these groups get not only the facts but any information they need to fulfil their aims.


Alfred Dryden Hales: Mr. Speaker, at the outset I should like to compliment the mover of the motion, the hon. member for Peace River (Mr. Baldwin), for presenting a motion that is not only important to the members of the opposition but to every member of the House. Information should be provided when requested. At no time should there be concealment of information.
Before proceeding with my very brief remarks, I would be remiss were I not to say thank you to the chief government whip, the hon. member for Vancouver Quadra (Mr. Deachman), for paying some very glowing tributes to me as chairman of the public accounts committee and to members of the committee generally. I can only say that this committee could not function as it does were it not for the co-operation of government members as well as other members of the committee. I see that my right hand man on the committee, the former vice-chairman, the hon. member for Pontiac (Mr. Lefebvre), is in his seat and I should like him to know that I appreciate the work on the committee that he has contributed down through the years. I also include the hon. member for Halton (Mr. Whiting), the present vice-chairman of the committee.


Mr. Levebvre:: That is a good place to stop now.


Alfred Dryden Hales: Yes, I will stop while I am ahead. We on the committee have achieved results because we have tried to be as non-partisan as we could. Sometimes it is a little difficult, but most times it works very well.
The motion before the House states that the government has failed to keep the Canadian people and Parliament adequately informed. I am prompted to speak to it because of something that occurred no later than this morning. I telephoned the Department of the Secretary of State asking if I could be provided with the name and address of the area project co-ordinator for an Opportuni-

ty for Youth program. I am sure that many members of this House have programs in their areas about which they would like to know a little more or in regard to which they may have received complaints, as I have about projects in my area. Many complaints have been made by parents to the effect that they could not locate the person in charge of this particular program. They were given a name, an address and telephone number, but they could get no answer either to their telephone calls or to their letters. These parents wanted to enrol their children for a canoe trip program for which the person in charge was provided with $7,162.
Naturally, I wanted to know what could be done about this so I telephoned the Ottawa superintendent responsible for projects in Ontario, Mr. Izlesias. He relayed my inquiry to the co-ordinator for the province of Ontario, and it is his telephone number that the minister told me today was available. However, when I got down to the grass roots and attempted to talk to this person, I was refused his name, his address and his telephone number. I say this is concealment of information. Every elected member in this House is entitled to have this person's name and address, and I see no reason whatsoever why I or any other member should be unable to talk to him. He is the on-the-job man, and I should like to tell him that I am receiving complaints about the project and to ask him to look into them. Why does the minister not want to disclose this man's name and address? The only reason I can think of is that he is afraid his area representative will get him into trouble or will tell us too much, or something of that kind. But the point is that information is being concealed which every member of the House has a right to have. As I said, we are the elected representatives of the people and are entitled to this kind of information.
While on the Opportunity for Youth program, I learned today that there is going to be a lot of concealment of financial information regarding programs. I am told that this year only projects costing $15,000 and up are going to be audited. Just imagine, Mr. Speaker, any project worth only $6,000, $8,000 or $10,000 is not going to be audited; the people in charge will be home free! Last year there was a floor of $25,000 and up, and only those projects were audited. The taxpayers' money is being used to finance projects that are not even audited. This again is concealment of information. There is no access to information here. I am told that the Secretary of State's department asked the Department of Supply and Services audit services bureau to audit only those projects costing $15,000 and up and said that they should forget about the others. This is ridiculous and I was unaware that this sort of thing was happening today. Certainly spot audits should be made of projects.
Last year I refused to deliver the cheque for a project because a U.S. draft dodger was in charge of it. However, the government forwarded the cheque to him and as a result I asked some questions about the project. Let me give you two answers I received. I was told it was not the policy of the department to divulge publicly either the name or the place of residence of each employee of a project. Why are we not entitled to that information? I asked whether an audited statement was available, and from whom. I was told that the audited statement would be prepared by the Department of Supply and Services,
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but this statement constituted an internal document for the use of the department and other government agencies only. How often do we hear that answer? We cannot get the information because it is for the use of the government. I suggest this is concealment of information.
Why was I not told on that occasion that only projects involving $25,000 and more were audited? I understand this particular one was audited because I asked that question. When I put the question on the order paper, I sent a copy to members of the civil service who knew what I was doing. That is the reason this particular one was looked into. Because those answers were not satisfactory, I followed up this year with more questions about the same project. These questions have been on the order paper since March 16, but I have not received an answer from that date to this. I am sure this is another example of concealment of information, or the curtailment of freedom of information.
We are happy to have these programs in our area, and we hope that in most cases they will work out all right. Out of a total of some $80,000 to be spent on these projects in our area, only those involving a total expenditure of some $60,000 will be audited. I will enlarge on this subject later on at the proper time and place. When we realize that the Opportunities for Youth program involves the expenditure of $34 million this year, with only a small percentage of that expenditure audited, it is time some serious thought was given to steps to correct the situation.
Another matter which has been brought to my attention is the fact that the National Harbours Board annual statement for 1971 has not yet been tabled. According to the law passed by Parliament, that statement should have been tabled by March 31, 1972, yet some three months later this report has still not been tabled. This is a violation of the regulations of this House. This is concealment of information. I am told the reason it has not been tabled is that the Auditor General cannot certify the financial statement contained in the National Harbours Board report.


Gerald William Baldwin: What about the Northern Canada Power Commission?


Alfred Dryden Hales: That is another matter for concern. This involves an attempt to conceal information, hide the facts or sweep them under the carpet, and it is not right. It is contrary to the rules and regulations of Parliament. I could go on with other examples, but I do not wish to take the time of the House to do so. I could talk about contingency vote No. 5.


Gerald William Baldwin: What about Deputy Minister's salaries?


Alfred Dryden Hales: We cannot find out what a deputy minister is paid today. We can find out within a certain range but we cannot pin it down exactly. There is no difficulty in finding out what Members of Parliament are paid. That information is published all across the country so everyone will know. Deputy ministers are paid more than Members of Parliament, but we cannot find out how much they are paid.
Information on Government Business
In connection with contingencies votes, at the end of the year the reserve for retroactive salaries, or the balance thereof, is transferred to the reserve account. I think the last amount was $100 million. Once that amount gets into that reserve account, there is no accounting for it. This is a very complicated matter and I will not take the time of the House to go into it further.
Those are a few of the things that have come to my attention. My participation in this debate was brought about by the refusal to divulge information to which every member of this House should be entitled. For that and other reasons I was happy to take part in the debate.


James Alexander Jerome: Mr. Speaker in entering this debate I will adhere to the 15-minute rule we agreed upon earlier in the day. The terms of the motion indicate that this House, conscious of the failure of the government to keep Canadian people and Parliament adequately informed, urges that steps be taken by legislation and otherwise to provide clear rules for freedom of information with regard to public business. I would submit that, therefore, the most meaningful step to be taken is an examination to understand the rules and procedures of the House as they exist now in affording opposition members the opportunity to get information from the government through Parliament. I am dealing specifically with the area of the motion which concerns itself with the criticism of this government in respect of information given to Parliament.
In that respect, it is appropriate to point out at the very beginning the rules and procedures of this House which accrue to the benefit of opposition members in their appointed task of getting information from the government. To begin with, in the number of days which make up each session there is now allotted a fixed number of opposition days, divided into trimesters. There are, in addition, certain days set aside for debate on the Speech From the Throne and for the budget debate. It is well known that on all of those days the input in the debate of this House is controlled by the opposition. It is a time when opposition members are entitled to deal with a wide range of subjects. On these days hon. members seek information on a wide variety of subjects. In addition to that, on each day, as Your Honour has pointed out on many occasions in the past, it has become the practice of opposition members to misuse Standing Order 43, taking up several minutes each day seeking the unanimous consent of the House to debate a motion of the opposition's choosing, or individual member's choosing.


Gerald William Baldwin: Like the hon. member for Fraser Valley East (Mr. Pringle).


James Alexander Jerome: Although rule changes in the first years of this Parliament did much to reduce the abuse of Standing Order 26, applications under that Standing Order are still made from time to time. We have a question period during which it has become the habit of the Chair to recognize in very great majority, if not exclusively, opposition members. This is not the proper time to decide whether that is the right way to conduct a question period, but the fact of the matter is that is what is done. The merits can be discussed at another time. I submit it is a significant

June 14, 1972
Information on Government Business
factor in debating this motion today that this is in fact the case. The question period is devoted almost exclusively, or certainly the majority of the time, to opposition members.
Three questions from the daily question period can be set aside, if the opposition so chooses, for discussion on the late show or adjournment debate. The private members' hour involves four hours per week. This combination of events, procedures and regulations of this House, I submit, gives opposition members in their quest for information through Parliament at least 75 per cent of the debating time on the floor of this House and 75 per cent of the questioning time. Three out of every four minutes and three out of every four questions as well; three out of every four hours, three out of every four days and three out of every four weeks is devoted to the opposition's occupation of the time of this House. This is something I suggest the opposition might very well reflect upon. This motion does not go into the effectiveness of the opposition in the use of the considerable regulatory provisions which benefit it in its search for information. It suggests instead, by legislation or otherwise, that further changes be made which would permit it to have greater access to information in this Parliament.
Nothing could be more ridiculous than to suggest that the opposition should have more opportunity, more facility and more access to debate and to the time of this House than it has already. Twenty-eight days out of every session are now being used by the opposition in an excessively wasteful manner to the extent that the opposition now confesses, in its most candid moments, that it has too many days on which to suggest a subject matter for debate in this House. Perhaps if the motions of the opposition are no more effective than the one today, the rule should be changed so that such days could be devoted to some other pursuit of information on the part of the opposition members because they have certainly not distinguished themselves in their search for information on these days.
In addition to that, we might consider the performance of opposition members in committees. One of the most important rule changes in the first year of this Parliament was to shift to the committees a tremendous responsibility for the consideration of legislation, for the examination of estimates and for dealing with other subjects and problems which might arise from time to time. If one wants to examine what has been done in committees, one need only examine the respective attendance of opposition members as opposed to government members. Of course, there is a vested interest on the part of government members in attending committees. They must respect the need for a quorum and the need to carry on government business. Members of the opposition have the ministers present before them. They can ask questions and pursue points. They have the opportunity to summon other officials under the minister whom they are able to question and from whom they can seek information.
Members of the opposition do not do those things they ought to do. They could take an active part by developing team work and a concerted effort in seeking the information they want. It is significant that the procedures of the

House permit any member to attend a committee whether or not he be a member of the committee. The rules give him the right to attend any committee hearing of his choice. Not only that, but he can participate if he so desires in the questioning of witnesses. That is the privilege of every member of this House, whether or not he be a member of the committee. He is prevented only from voting on a motion. In their quest for information, all members of the House, including all members of the opposition, are at liberty to attend any committee meeting.
We have gone one step further recently. We have established a set of committee schedules which was the result of a very systematic and extensive study in an effort to try, on the basis of past performance of attendance, to accommodate that solid group of members from all parties which does attend committees by reducing to the minimum the conflict of interest in respect of committees. Even this system has not accomplished anything in upgrading attendance of members of the opposition at committees where they could seek information on any subject. Every minister of the government must attend committee meetings in order to have his estimates approved. He must attend at one time or another and this is obviously an opportunity for members of the oppositon to seek information. Opposition members could attend and exert the kind of keen effort which is required in order to obtain the information they seek.
On the subject of providing information to this Parliament through the rules of this House, I would refer to the number of questions and statistics that are readily available to all members. It is interesting to compare the written questions placed on the order paper during the years of Parliament from 1957-58 through 1962-63 when the party of the mover of the motion was in power and in the years since that time. The number of questions dealt with by parliament in the period 1957-58 was 437. In the first year after their defeat in 1963, when a Liberal government came in, 1,906 questions were dealt with. In any year since this administration came to power the same kind of comparison can be made. I am safe in saying it has dealt with three or four times as many questions, and three or four times as frequently as the previous administration which put forward this motion of criticism of the supply of information to Parliament.
The record stands to show, in addition to that, that at the present time we are maintaining a 70 per cent rate of answering written questions in this House. One should bear in mind that at any given time the two or three out of ten questions which remain unanswered fall in a category which would be embarrassing to members of the opposition because of vagueness, irregularity and impossibility of answering, if not for the terrible complexity in respect of the number of man hours and expense required in answering some questions. I could read some questions from a list I have. Every one knows, however, that many of these questions require that many hundreds of man hours be spent by staff members in tabulating answers. In such cases the expense to the taxpayer would be out of all proportion to the importance of the question, even if it were possible to provide an answer which should be given in this House. At the present time seven out of every ten written questions placed on the order paper in this session
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of Parliament are answered and dealt with. This is a record this government can be proud of and which every member of the Canadian public would accept as an exceptional performance by this government in supplying information to Parliament.
The last point with which I want to deal is a most telling one. Before moving on to it, however, there is another category of questions which remain unanswered in that 30 per cent. There is a list from which I could read of questions tabled which require information that has already been provided in answers given earlier in this session or in other sessions of this same Parliament, which again indicates that there are mitigating circumstances in respect of the remaining questions which are unanswered at the present time.
But the last, and I think most telling area in the disastrous use of the facilities of this House by opposition members in respect of their quest for information, came with the provision in 1969 of research funds to opposition parties in order to assist them in their understanding of parliamentary affairs, in order to upgrade their quest for information, and their ability to criticize government legislation and government policy. Mr. Speaker, I am going to quote from a document which is in front of me:
In 1969 for the first time in the parliamentary system, the Canadian House of Commons allocated $195,000 to be spent on research assistance for opposition members-
Most governments can find more deserving people on whom to spend $200,000 than their obvious political foes. The government of Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau was something of an exception. For many years, opposition members of all parties had complained about their obvious inability to compete with the expertise, inside knowledge, and extensive bureaucratic research resources available to the government.
This fund was provided to offset that. But the question is: how has it been used? How effective have opposition members been in their use of it? This document discusses the problems which beset the opposition, in particular the Conservative party, in its use of these facilities. The conclusion that is reached is a most telling one and, Mr. Speaker, I will quote it to you right now in closing. I submit it is most interesting because the document is a paper prepared and delivered to the Institute of Political Science by the man who was the first director of the research unit for the Conservative party, Edwin R. Black, of Queen's University. I quote:
The Opposition Leader's personal staff, including his chief political advisor, underwent considerable change during this period, change that had serious consequences for the research office. One was the shifting of responsibility for question period from the leader's personal staff to the research office. The present Opposition Leader has been trying to change the parliamentary question period from the essential free-for-all that it was under his predecessor to a major instrument of parliamentary control.
Never, however, would the opposition caucus agree on a set of basic priorities. Tory members remained a gaggle of political private enterprisers who selfishly preferred to pursue their separate ways to the electoral gallows rather than hang together and work as a united opposition. Under such circumstances it was impossible for the research office to discontinue the plethora of daily services provided to the members in favour of concentrated effort on a few party-determined issues.
I will close by simply saying-
Information on Government Business


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Boulanger):: Order. I regret that the time of the hon. member has expired.


Mr. Robert C. Coates (Cumberland-Colchester North):: Mr. Speaker, I listened with interest to the remarks of the Parliamentary secretary who has a great deal of responsibility for the answering of questions placed on the order paper, questions that are not political but that seek information from the government. I have used that facility a great deal for many years in an effort to secure information that is useful in making a determination of how the government operates, and in making a determination of how it spends the taxpayers' dollars.
It was wonderful to listen to the parliamentary secretary. It is amazing that he did not need medical attention before he sat down, because I am sure I heard his arm break as he was patting himself so strongly on the back. I cannot agree with him on the effectiveness of the government in answering questions. There is a lot of evidence available to indicate that when the parliamentary secretary talks about three outstanding questions not being answered he, in effect, is admitting that any question that has any detrimental overtones for the government is delayed, delayed and delayed before being answered. No better example comes to my mind than when I endeavoured to determine how much the Prime Minister was using aircraft for which the taxpayers of Canada were paying. I waited through two sessions of Parliament, some 18 months, before I could secure the answer. Then, instead of getting the type of information that had been requested, I was given very minimal information so that is was impossible, without asking another series of questions, to determine exactly what use was being made of the aircraft by the Prime Minister, whether on government business, political business, or monkey business.
I had to wait 18 months for an answer, yet all that was necessary was to take the logs of the aircraft and provide the information from them. But on top of that, I never did receive information on the persons who were flying in those aircraft with the Prime Minister. I was given the number but nothing else. Apparently nobody has a right to know why or how the Prime Minister selects his company when he is flying around this country or other countries, and what are their purposes in being on the aircraft. That is none of our business. We pay the bills, but who the Prime Minister decides to carry around is none of our business.
Another example which I used in debating in this chamber on Tuesday relates to Information Canada and the number of public relations employees in the various government departments. I asked for this information. It should not be difficult to answer that question. First of all, the estimates of Information Canada could quickly supply the number of personnel in it on the date I placed the question on the order paper, February 18. And it should not have been difficult to get the number of public relations people associated with the various departments of government. It took four months to provide that information, Mr. Speaker. If you call that speed and efficiency, then I would not want to see the government start to slow down. Right now there are dozens and dozens of questions on the order paper unanswered. The hon. member for Saint John-Lancaster (Mr. Bell) gave some examples. I

June 14, 1972
Information on Government Business will repeat them just in case the parliamentary secretary did not hear the hon. member. Some 42 questions have been on the order paper since February; 53 since March; 35 since April, and 63 since May. This is certainly not an example of efficiency in the answering of questions.
These questions seek information and nothing more. The Speaker of the House will not allow questions to go on the order paper that do anything more than seek information. In many instances the questions asked could be answered within a week, if the government wanted to put its mind to it, and information could be provided in a really effective way. But all too often the government does not want Members of Parliament to get information, because just as soon as they get it they are able to point out how the government is wasting the taxpayers' money. That is why we do not get the answers when we should get them.
I would like to turn from that to talk about the roster system. This is another one of the effective ways in which the government has made Parliament more efficient. On September 25, 1968 when the Prime Minister (Mr. Trudeau) announced the roster system for ministerial attendance during the question period, he recognized the importance of members being able to question ministers of the Crown and promised that the roster would be varied only in very exceptional circumstances.
Let us look at the figures for three weeks beginning May 1, May 8 and May 15. During the week of May 1 there were 18 ministerial absences, that is if absences are measured against the roster sheet. During the week of May 8, there were 25 such absences; on one day only 11 ministers were present and nine were absent. During the week of May 15, there were 19 absences, making a total for the three weeks of 62. The exceptional circumstances mentioned by the Prime Minister may have been the assumed approach of an election. Whatever they were, there was scant opportunity for members to question ministers.
The mover of this motion, when the Prime Minister announced the roster system, made the following statement which appears at page 801 of Hansard, on October 4, 1968. He said:
I believe that the statement and the plan constitute a calculated contempt and an infringement of the privileges of this House, of all members of this House, including all the members of the opposition and government backbenchers, in so far as both tradition and the Standing Orders of the House are concerned.
The hon. member for Peace River said a great deal more, but that pretty well sums up what happened. The roster system has done one thing very effectively; it has prevented members of the opposition from getting the facts.
There have been many areas that the government could look at to see what happens when a government endeavours to stop the public from having information. It could be done by the roster system or by not answering questions but when it is, other people step in. This government knows better than any government in Canadian history just how effectively other people can step in and what happens when they do. Government leaks happen. At one point in this Parliament the leaks became a flood
[Mr. Coates.l
because people in the public service who felt that the public should know about certain things and who knew that Members of Parliament could not secure the information from the government, provided the information themselves.
Let me give a list of the leaks that have occurred since 1969: 1969, a research study prepared for the B & B commission was leaked to La Presse; sections of the study of the Housing Task Force were leaked to Time magazine; June, 1970, excerpts from the recommendations of the Le Dain commission were leaked to Time magazine; 1971, four staff members of the Special Committee on Poverty left the staff, published a conflicting report using, in part, information gathered during their official tenure; 1971, draft portions of the Gray report on foreign ownership; 1971, record of cabinet decision in reference to the Gray report; December 23, 1971, details of two 1970 cabinet documents relating to law and order and possible use of the War Measures Act, suggesting the use of the act was contemplated before the October crisis 1970, to the Globe and Mail; December 30, 1971, excerpts from two 1971 cabinet documents relating to the government's northern development policy for the next ten years, to the Globe and Mail; February 2, 1972, cabinet document on foreign ownership; 1972, official documents, not cabinet, but all classified including a document on low income housing; the Anton Sobokha file, an abortive espionage case; report on collective bargaining in the Public Service and a confidential evaluation of summer works programs, 1971, that was the Francophone university program.
These are all examples of information that was leaked. When the opposition endeavoured to get the information, they could not get it from the government and people involved in high places felt that the information should be made available to the public. The Clerk of the Privy Council and Secretary to the Cabinet, Mr. Gordon Robertson made a speech recently in St. John's, Newfoundland regarding government leaks. He justified his attack on the basis of the government's need to keep much information confidential and he said:
In short, the collective executive that is the heart of our parliamentary system must have secrecy: it cannot work without it.
Mr. Speaker, if things are secret and should be secret, I have no argument with what Mr. Robertson says. But all too often our government considers things secret because it is politically expedient to do so and there is no justification for them being so classified. That is the problem we face in this Parliament and the thing we complain about so publicly and so often. It is the reason for this motion before us today.
Kildare Dobbs, a well-known Canadian writer, who spent a short time working for the Secretary of State (Mr. Pelletier) summed up the stupidity of confidentiality procedures in the federal government in an article which appeared in the Maclean's magazine in September, 1971, when he said:
I could never quite understand by what alchemy the words rattling loose inside my head became Confidential the moment I wrote them down. But that was what happened. A few strokes of the borrowed ballpoint and presto! I was spinning state secrets out of my own innards.
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And later:
With superfluous caution, they put up a smoke screen of security, mindlessly stamping everything on their desks Top Secret, Eyes Only, Secret, Confidential. As if anybody cared. Not only were these documents unreadable: many of them, on close inspection, proved meaningless.
Those are the facts surrounding the great secrecy about so much of what is happening in government today, most of which should be out in the open where it could be examined by the public. If we could get that kind of information we would not be so concerned that we would move the motion before us. However, we have moved it because we believe that this government feels it in their interests to prevent us from getting information.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Boulanger):: The hon. member for Wellington-Grey-Dufferin-Waterloo (Mr. Howe).


Mr. Howe:: Mr. Speaker-


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Boulanger):: Order, please. Is the hon. member getting up to speak or to ask a question?


Stanley Howard Knowles: Believe it or not, Mr. Speaker, I rose to speak.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Boulanger):: Order, please. In all fairness, I think I should recognize the hon. member for Winnipeg North Centre (Mr. Knowles).


Stanley Howard Knowles: Mr. Speaker, in view of the generosity of my friend in yielding to me I shall try to say what is mainly on my mind in five minutes and leave three or four minutes for him to make his speech.
I should like to say that I believe this has been one of those debates in which good speeches have been made on both sides of the House. I have no hesitation in saying that even though he was speaking in a political vein, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Privy Council (Mr. Jerome) scored some very strong points. I should also like to commend the hon. member for Gloucester (Mr. Breau) on his speech. I thought his analysis of information of various kinds was good, and I thought his description of the daily question period was one to which we should pay some attention. On this side of the House, the hon. member for Peace River (Mr. Baldwin) introduced the debate with a very constructive speech. I believe my friend and colleague, the hon. member for Surrey-White Rock (Mr. Mather), also made some very valuable and very helpful suggestions. I also think one of the highlights of this afternoon was the speech made by the hon. member for Fundy-Royal (Mr. Fairweather). I could go further, but I think I have gone far enough to demonstrate my point that good speeches have been made by members on both sides of this House.
S0)
I could go into this matter at length but I have agreed to be short, so may I concentrate on two areas in which I think we could make a real effort to improve things. Both relate to the question of information being provided to Parliament.
Information on Government Business
First, may I support the hon. member for Saint John-Lancaster (Mr. Bell) and other hon. members who suggested that the roster system is for the birds. It is not so much the non-attendance in this House of ministers on a certain day when members want an answer to a particular question that bothers me, but, rather, the downgrading of the question period which is produced by the nonattendance of a third of the ministers every day, and frequently by the non-attendance of half the ministers.
I think we ought to accept the criticism of the hon. member for Gloucester who suggested that opposition members do not always ask the brightest questions. I suggest, however, that upgrading the question period is a responsibility that must be shared on both sides of this House; and, just as the questions of hon. members on this side ought to be good and sharp, and aimed at advancing good ideas and at getting information as well as at advancing political points, so the government should take the question period seriously. That means that all the ministers ought to be here almost every day. If it does not happen in this Parliament, then, in the next Parliament I hope this roster will be torn in shreds; I hope we will return to the old system and that all ministers will be prepared to answer questions every day the House sits.


Some hon. Members:: Hear, hear.


Stanley Howard Knowles: That is a simple request, Mr. Speaker, and merely needs the exercise of the will to achieve it.
My other point is this: We should take a really good, hard look at how we handle estimates. I agree with hon. members on the other side who suggested we have improved the parliamentary process with respect to legislation. I think the committee arrangements and report stage arrangements we have made are good. I also agree that committees do good investigative work, and are to be commended. I think those processes are good. But the process by which we handle estimates, to put it mildly, leaves a great deal to be desired.
Let us not deal with this matter by suggesting that the government is all right and that the opposition is all wrong, or vice versa, or that we should keep this system or go back to the old system, although the old system was better for its time. I think that, somehow, members of parliament must become involved in the whole process in relation to the estimates. We may even need to modify the sacred concept of government responsibility and make provision for members to become involved in the preparation of estimates. The blue book of estimates is a big one, Mr. Speaker. The President of the Treasury Board (Mr. Drury) has told us he has given us more information than we can possibly digest. Yet the book really does not tell us how departments of government build up their lists of expenditures and how the decisions are made that determine how the taxpayer's money is spent. Mr. Speaker, I am not defending the present system or the old system; I am trying not to be partisan; I am merely asking for a new study of the whole question of how we vote the money for which Parliament is responsible. Perhaps we shall need to examine estimates on a two-year basis, instead of a one-year basis. Possibly, we should go for an examination of the estimates of each department once every three or four
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Information on Government Business years. Perhaps we shall have to tear up the whole system we now have with respect to estimates and come up with a brand new technique. I hope that somewhere, somehow, we can do this, and we should get at it very soon. I could continue, Mr. Speaker, but my hon. friend from Welling-ton-Grey-Dufferin-Waterloo (Mr. Howe) is seeking the floor, so I yield to him.


William Marvin Howe: Mr. Speaker, I am sorry I was instrumental in curtailing the speech of the hon. member for Winnipeg North Centre. I wish to talk about a request, I placed on the order paper, with respect to which I was not given adequate replies. In three and a half minutes it will be somewhat difficult to put my case on record. The matter has to do with the second international airport for Toronto.
Some weeks ago, I put on the order paper the following notice of motion for the production of papers:
Than an humble Address be presented to His Excellency praying that he will cause to be laid before this House a copy of all correspondence, memoranda, special study reports between the Government of Canada or any department thereof and the Government of the Province of Ontario relating to the question of the second international airport in the Province of Ontario.
The notice of motion is dated April 13. After I prodded the minister a great deal, he said he was willing to accede to my request and to make that information available to this House. Not until May 24, did I obtain that reply.
The reply disturbed me, Mr. Speaker. After all, considering that the studies were said to have extended over months and even years, since the second airport would be a most expensive proposition running into the billions of dollars, I expected more than was given to me. I was told that the studies had gone on for a long time, yet what did I obtain? The minister's return consisted of a neat package of press releases, ministerial letters, and so on. For
instance, consider this release headed, "Transport Minister Don Jamieson discusses Toronto's second international airport with area Members of Parliament". It reads:
Transport Minister Don Jamieson met last Friday with Norman Cafik, M.P., Ontario (riding), Barnett Danson, M.P., York-North and John Roberts, M.P., York-Simcoe to discuss aspects of the Federal Government's plan for the development of a second Toronto international airport-
That is playing politics. Those members represent constituencies in the area. I asked several times for a complete study of the matter and suggested that the Standing Committee on Transport and Communications should sit down with the people in the areas concerned and discuss with them a project as big as this. That did not happen. However, according to the press release, the minister discussed the matter with three hon. members representing affected constituencies.
Consider the following headline carried in a Toronto newspaper, Mr. Speaker: "High-priced advice taken on airport, McKeough asserts". Mr. McKeough tabled some documents in the Ontario Legislature, in Toronto. He provided more information than the minister. According to the post office scale, the package the minister provided weighs two pounds four ounces, whereas the documents Mr. McKeough tabled weighed five pounds. Mr. Speaker, I feel that information that ought to have been made available was not made available with respect to a decision as important as the one involving the new Toronto international airport on which we will spend possibly billions of dollars.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Boulanger)::