MESSAGES FROM THE HOUSE OF COMMONS — Making Life More Affordable for Canadians Bill

Thank you, Your Honour. I also wish to remind us that the Senate amendment was at three years from when this bill will take effect. Three years from now, the government must have come up with a way of protecting the personal and private information of Canadians held by federal political parties.

There was a study topic before the Ethics Committee of the House of Commons back in 2018 entitled “Breach of Personal Information Involving Cambridge Analytica and Facebook.” During that study, they pointed to the need to protect the personal information of Canadians held by federal political parties.

In closing, I want it to be on the record that in voting to support this bill, yes, we are expressing our concern for the affordability crisis in this country, but, in addition to that, Senator Housakos, we are setting back 26 years of the invasion of privacy and the lack of protection of privacy for the sole benefit of political parties in this country. I want that on the record. I’m not relitigating. I am just stating on the record what is actually included in this bill.

Honourable senators, I would like to add some comments with regard to the message in light of the debate around the amendments.

I listened closely during third reading debate on this bill. I also sit as a member of the Legal Committee, which studied the infamous Part 4 of Bill C-4. Core questions arising from our debate were not just whether we pass Part 4 — we move it or amend it — but they also included certain foundational questions, such as, “What is our role? What is our constitutional duty?”

Since our vote on Part 4, many have weighed in from outside this chamber. Minister MacKinnon, for instance, made his views clear in a March 3 iPolitics article entitled “MacKinnon says C-4 amendment under consideration but Senate should be deferential on changing elections laws.”

Of course, now, in the present moment, we are seized with this message from the other place. While I understand that position generally, I would like to also point out a few things. The first one is the fact that not a single question was posed to Treasury Board officials in committee on Part 4 of Bill C-4.

Second, the minister responsible for the Canada Elections Act, Minister MacKinnon, never appeared on this matter, since the minister responsible on paper is Minister Champagne, as this is ostensibly an affordability act plus another measure.

Third, I would also say, as a lawyer, that if the judge, prosecution and defence counsel in a case all have a vested interest in a certain outcome, they would all be in conflict. In this case, every elected member of Parliament belongs to a political party affected by this bill. These political parties have made it very clear that these are the changes they want. They said so in their letter as part of their ongoing appeal in the B.C. court case that led to this legislation in the first place.

At times, there are moments when an unelected chamber not relying on a political party for nominations, electoral support and war chests must weigh in. Yes, Canada is a democracy, so there are notions of restraint and deference to the elected house built into our role, but this restraint must have limits.

We recently heard the Pratte doctrine summarized aptly by Senator Colin Deacon. It was about when the Senate should insist on the House adopting Senate amendments, which:

. . . should be reserved for relatively rare cases where the issue is of special importance related to our constitutional role, where we are prepared to lead a serious fight and see its completion, when a significant part of public opinion is or could be on our side, although there could be exceptions, and where there are realistic prospects of convincing or forcing the government to change its mind.

This is precisely the moment when sober second thought of an independent house is necessary. Election by plurality should not allow the major political parties to go over the heads of the public will and the public interest.

Last week, a so-called expense scandal came to light, which I believe epitomizes one side of public perception of our role. The Senate is using our relatively small hospitality budget to build ties and relationships with our communities and the regions we represent. The National Post and the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, or CTF, looked at the cumulative amounts spent between 2019 and present.

Let me be clear: I feel that this is a manufactured scandal, especially when you consider that many of the amounts were cumulative over six years or extremely reasonable when broken down into a per-person amount. The article notes that hospitality expenses have risen by 67% starting in 2019.

I would note in response that former prime minister Justin Trudeau appointed over 100 senators since launching the independent appointment process in 2016. Keep in mind as well that many of us were organizing events to present King Charles III’s Coronation Medals, which would have incurred higher-than-normal usage of hospitality allowances.

All of this raised an interesting statement from the CTF Federal Director Franco Terrazzano, who said, “. . . I bet most Canadians don’t think the Senate is providing 67 per cent more value.”

What do we do in light of this criticism? Well, as I see it, we could either shrink from the public view, spend significantly less on hospitality expenses and, thus, engage with stakeholders and community members less. Or we could refuse to allow the public’s impression of us to browbeat us into obscurity. We could, instead, continue to consistently and proudly do our jobs. We could exercise sober second thought and use our positions to communicate what we see as threats to the public interest.

Honourable senators, I think the true value of the Senate is precisely what is at issue today. This is a time to show how an unelected and independent Senate can protect the interests of Canadians. Under the Rules of the Senate, we have precedents and we have options.

Senator Downe rightly referenced John A. Macdonald when he pointed out:

There would be no use of an Upper House, if it did not exercise, when it thought proper, the right of opposing or amending or postponing the legislation of the Lower House. It would be of no value whatever were it a mere chamber for registering the decrees of the Lower House.

This is not a power to be wielded lightly, but it would be an abdication of responsibility to say that it should never be wielded at all. Senator Downe gave many examples of when and how it has been properly wielded before, and I believe this should be added to the list. During the Thirty-ninth Parliament, on November 23, 2006, Bill C-2, An Act providing for conflict of interest rules, restrictions on election financing and measures respecting administrative transparency, oversight and accountability, was referred to the Standing Senate Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs and given a report-back date of December 7, 2006.

That advice proved useful in guiding how the Senate moved forward with that bill.

Colleagues, I have sat in this chamber when we have argued over language in bills that have forgotten to mandate that reports should be tabled in both houses of Parliament. If we want to be treated as equal and assert ourselves, does it strengthen our case to simply be deferential while naming it “self-restraint” when the Senate is, as we have so thoroughly debated here, uniquely positioned to meet this moment?

It’s important to be clear what’s at stake when we are dealing with the privacy rights of Canadians. With the advent of social media, privacy rights have faced a reckoning in recent years because we have realized how fundamentally valuable our personal information is. When our behavioural patterns and preferences can be weaponized with algorithms to change our beliefs and behaviour, we lose our personal and political agency.

The beneficiaries of this power are now calling on us to let them regulate themselves by allowing them to write their own privacy policies, leaving us with a potential patchwork of policies that have little to no minimum requirements or guardrails.

Time and time again, the Senate has identified issues in bills that were not contemplated by the other place because they were not studied. Time and time again, we have suggested changes and improvements to bills based on considered study and debate. Time and time again, the government has responded, “Thank you, but no thank you,” along with platitudes that eventually they will do something later on — later, but not now.

Time and time again, there has been radio silence from the government after we acquiesce. We hold firm in our beliefs until the eventual letter or promise is relayed and, once again, the loyal institutionalists call for restraint before we defer.

I ask my colleagues: Is this the role we are meant to play?

That is why, on principle, I will insist on our amendment, and I will vote to that effect. Wela’lioq. Thank you.

Would Senator Prosper consider taking a question?

Yes, I would.

Thank you, Senator Prosper. I so appreciated your speech. I have a very specific question. Some of you may know that I spent some time in prisons last year talking about prisoners’ right to vote. Many of you probably know that prisoners cannot vote from the prison that they are in. They can’t use that address. They must use the address where they lived before committing the crime and before serving their sentence. In other words, they can’t vote from where they may have lived for a long period of time: the prison. They can’t then impact local elections and have access to local candidates.

My question to you follows up Senator Dasko’s question to Senator Dalphond about the Canada Elections Act. What if a senator — maybe me — might want to propose an amendment to the Canada Elections Act to bring in the right for a prisoner to vote from where they actually reside, their prison? Would you consider that type of amendment to be properly discussed in this Senate Chamber and in a Senate process? Would you think that that’s appropriate?

Thank you so much for the question. I certainly believe it is within our constitutional duty to consider such a question, especially in light of what Senator Dasko has mentioned and the research provided by Senator McPhedran as well. I certainly do believe it is within our constitutional competence to do such an amendment.

Honourable senators, I want to thank colleagues, starting with Senator Moreau and, most recently, my colleague Senator Prosper, for their speeches on this bill.

Colleagues, I want to just read the last part of the message:

 . . . a long tradition of the Senate deferring to the House of Commons on amendments to the Canada Elections Act, particularly those which have unanimous support of all recognized parties in the House and which govern the operations of candidates representing political parties seeking election to the House of Commons.

I don’t see us as a thorn in the side of the House of Commons. We have a distinct constitutional role to represent voices that are not heard in the House of Commons, and on Part 4 of Bill C-4, that is particularly important because it was not studied in committee in the House. Those voices were not heard. They were ignored in the House. So, to me, that fact makes it more important than ever that we did our job in the Senate, and I challenge that last part of the sentence as, in my mind, not being appropriate.

Moreover, I have always respected Senator Tannas’s observation that our role is not to be an off-Broadway version of the House of Commons. We have a distinct role that is separate from the House, and it is to make sure that voices are heard and that, as Parliament overall, we make a fulsome and clear-eyed decision on legislation. I think we did that job here, and I’m very proud of the job that we did here.

Additionally, I am concerned that the House historically has not prioritized the passage of privacy bills. I will just cite Bill C-11 in 2020, Bill C-27 in 2021 and Bill C-65 in 2021. That makes our work even more important because the work has not been done in the House.

As well, I still have no idea how Canadians benefit from Part 4 of Bill C-4. It was important that we looked at it to see whether or not there were benefits or problems. The witnesses showed us that there were very serious concerns. It was not that we were stepping out of our lane; we were very much in our lane. All of those concerns related to the issue of privacy.

I want to recognize the fact that the three political parties and the government have committed to bringing forward privacy provisions to the Canada Elections Act in this Parliament. I want to agree with Senator Dalphond that that’s a win for us.

That’s not where we were at. We were fighting to get time to appropriately study this bill. In the end, it was six hours in one day. Senator Moreau, thank you for working with this chamber to make sure we had the opportunity to do our job. When we did our job, even the witnesses who were supporting Part 4, the lawyers from the political parties, did an excellent job of arguing for our concerns, which we then put back to the House. They actually undermined their own position with the testimony, and I think that was, again, reflected.

I remain concerned that there is a lack of appreciation of the fact that Canadians are completely unprotected as it relates to the growing risk around privacy and cybersecurity. Minister MacKinnon’s recent assurances in iPolitics that the Liberal Party “. . . essentially comply with PIPEDA. . .” don’t reflect the prioritization of this issue in our debates and our comments to the House. So I’m really hoping that that has been internalized in ways that are not evident in the message.

The other part that was really troubling to me was the fact that the lawyers testifying in the Legal Committee dismissed the issues raised by other witnesses by saying that they were “bogeyman” issues. That shows a level of disregard toward facts and toward reality that, again, is concerning. However, I hope that the parties have internalized our concerns and those raised by witnesses in committee in ways that are not necessarily evident in the message from the House.

There is another element that I think is perhaps evidence that the House did not understand the severity of this issue: They did not even hear from officers of Parliament whose job it is to manage the Canada Elections Act and our privacy policies in this country, the Chief Electoral Officer and the Privacy Commissioner. They did not even hear from those parliamentary experts; we did, and what we heard was very concerning.

So, we were not a thorn in the side of the House of Commons; we were doing our job. It is a job that I think should have been done in the House. If they had done it in the House and heard those things, we would have needed less time to look at this bill because we would have understood that the decision had been made clear-eyed. When they made the votes that Senator Housakos spoke of, I don’t know that it was.

The point has been made by others that there were unanimous votes in the House. But when MPs in the House had their chance to look at this issue on their own in 2018, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics a report that talked about threats to democracy from the misuse of privacy, the lack of privacy controls or restraints and the cybersecurity risks in a modern world. We are six years on from that. Our Legal Committee heard from a former information and privacy commissioner of the U.K. Again, I hope that these facts have been internalized by the three parties and by the government because I think that reality is troubling. I don’t get a sense, again, from this message that is necessarily the case, but I will trust that it is.

I will wrap up by saying that in anticipation of the bill that has been promised in this Parliament, I’m hoping it will be a stand-alone bill. I hope we’re not put in the same situation of it being tagged onto the end of a making life more affordable for Canadians act. The reality is we should have the opportunity to study this bill properly. But in advance of that, I hope that our Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee will consider taking up the issue of studying political party privacy regimes around the world and hearing from the presidents and privacy officers of the political parties on why political party privacy regimes should be different. Let’s understand their assertion.

We have heard from Minister MacKinnon that there are effectively no differences, but there is resistance to putting in place a PIPEDA-like regime. We have heard they are actually already operating in that manner. Well, let’s hear more about that. Certainly, there is a lot of muddle in communication around this issue. I expect and believe that our political parties want to see Canadians as protected as voters in any other democracy around the world.

The last thing I will say is that I believe we saw great progress in Budget 2025 in terms of the omnibus element of that bill. There were a lot fewer kitchen sinks put in Bill C-15 than we’ve seen in other bills in my time in the Senate. That was great progress, and I commend the government on that. Unfortunately, that has been undermined by what was done in Bill C-4. I hope we are making our point — that we have a constitutional role to properly study legislation — and when you get something like Part 4 slipped into something like Bill C-4, it really undermines our ability to do our job. In the future, I think we will be a little more of a stick-in-the-mud on this sort of issue because of how difficult it was to do our job in this situation.

I will leave it there. Personally, I have come to the conclusion that I will be accepting this message from the House. I feel that we had a win here. I don’t think we would be at this point had we not done our job. That’s good for Canadians. I think we are doing a proper job in the Senate. I think the very strategic amendment that we sent to them delivered what they wanted, and it delivered what we needed: privacy rights for Canadians. That is now coming back in a promise from the House. I trust they have internalized what we’ve all learned through this process and look forward to seeing an excellent piece of legislation come back to us within the next three years. Thank you, colleagues.

I say — with a quiver in my voice — yes.

Thank you, Senator Simons, for your always thoughtful questions. In this situation, I go to my experience around this particular issue, be it two or three years ago — with Bill C-47 — or now. I have not met a Canadian who was initially aware that they do not have privacy protections as it relates to their voter data. They are horrified when they learn that if they have any knowledge of the risks related to the issue of privacy. There are a lot of people who don’t care about it. They don’t necessarily understand how they are putting themselves at risk and don’t care. But I’ve not met anybody, period, who has understood this to be the case and been comfortable with it being the case.

I have not heard from anyone like that, other than the three lawyers in our Legal Committee when I watched the proceedings on TV. They are the only three people whom I have come across who firmly believe everything is just A-okay with it being as it is.

So we are in a different world with an independent Senate. I think it is great that the government is bringing forward a review. I commend Senator Moreau and the Government Representative’s Office, or GRO, for doing that and looking at us 10 years on. But I think there is a place for us in this. There are a lot of traditions in Parliament that have not changed since 1867. One of them is how we vote in this chamber. It is the same as it was at Confederation.

I think there are parliamentary traditions that need to evolve, but they need to be debated as they evolve. Personally, I don’t think Canadians understand the realities of this issue. That, to me, suggests that this issue could end up undermining our political parties and our democracy if it is not managed more transparently in the future.

So, for me, yes, I think there is a role for us. But we may have to fight for that role. Thank you.

Honourable senators, thank you for all of the excellent debate and interventions we’ve heard on the issues before us today.

I rise today to share a brief comment with my thoughts on the message that we’ve received from the House of Commons relating to the amendment to Bill C-4, Part 4. The message we received from the other place states, “. . . Parliament should be the body that decides the rules that govern communication by federal parties with Canadians . . . .” However, the other place should remember that Parliament includes the Senate and not just the House of Commons.

The received message also says:

. . . there is a long tradition of the Senate deferring to the House of Commons on amendments to the Canada Elections Act . . . .

While that may or may not be so, given what we have heard from Senator McPhedran and Senator Dasko, it does not negate the legislative powers that the Senate has.

It is emphasized in the message from the House of Commons that Part 4 of Bill C-4 received the unanimous support of all recognized parties in the House. Well, that is no surprise because it protects them from the rigour of rules like PIPEDA, the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, which all other organizations, businesses and not-for-profits must adhere to in the use of personal data. I believe there is a clear conflict of interest that members of Parliament belonging to political parties are legislating themselves out of a court case and out of the more rigorous oversight that everyone else must follow. In my opinion, the case of unanimous consent does not hold as strong of an argument when it comes to a perceived conflict like this.

As mentioned in the message received from the House of Commons, additional privacy provisions are coming in this parliamentary session. If I trust the government that they will bring forward privacy provisions in legislative changes to the Canada Elections Act in this Parliament, then I firmly believe that the sunset clause amendment we sent to the House is actually complementary to that. It does not constitute a reversal of the principle of the bill. It is just a fail-safe to ensure the government actually does what they say they intend to do.

My comments today do relate specifically to the message received from the House of Commons on the amendment that we made to Part 4 of Bill C-4 and reflect what I believe to be my duty of working in the best interest of Canada and Canadians. Thank you.

Is it your pleasure, honourable senators, to adopt the motion?

Some Hon. Senators: Agreed.

An Hon. Senator: On division.

(Motion agreed to, on division.)