Honourable senators, I would like to share my thoughts about the message that we received from the other place and about some of the amendments that were rejected.

A lot of fuss has been made about the large number of amendments that our Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications proposed and about the intransigence of Minister Marc Garneau, who stated numerous times that he did not want to see any amendments.

Of course, the reality is not as black and white. Many amendments were part of the same proposal. For example, I proposed five amendments that addressed two specific issues, which is why I would prefer if they were referred to as my “two amendments.”

Despite his original position, in the end, the minister approved some amendments and changed others. The exchange that took place between the two chambers is to be commended. We can say that Bill C-49 is better today than it was when the committee began studying it.

However, I want to talk about some of the amendments proposed by our committee that were rejected by the other place, particularly because they were not debated in the Senate at second or third reading.

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Of the two amendments I proposed and that our committee adopted, the first related to protecting the privacy of railway employees. I worked on that amendment with the Honourable Senator Pratte, who shared a number of my concerns.

Bill C-49 includes measures to improve rail safety, and it is well-intended. For one thing, it mandates the installation of locomotive voice and video recorders. Anytime an incident or accident occurs that must be reported to the Transportation Safety Board, rail companies can access those recordings to see and hear what happened inside the locomotive. In that specific context, invasion of workers’ privacy seems justifiable.

[English]

Bill C-49, however, goes further. It does not only give rail companies access to audit and video recordings related to an incident or accident but also to randomly selected recordings that are not linked to any incident or accident.

Witnesses were unable to justify why this additional access was necessary. My amendment thus sought to remove the access to these random recordings. The real effect of granting such broad access to the rail companies is to tell rail workers that they are being watched at all times, even when there are no incidents to report.

[Translation]

I thought then as I do now that, if the goal is to improve rail companies’ practices and make them safer, it is perfectly reasonable to limit access to recordings related to incidents and accidents. That should be all the material rail companies need to improve their practices.

In its message, the House of Commons rejected that argument. The problem is that we will never know if that additional invasion of workers’ privacy was justified.

We can expect rail companies to improve their safety practices, but will any improvements be due to reviews of recordings related to incidents and accidents, as I believe should be the case, or to random recordings?

We will never know. It will be extremely difficult to backtrack and do a better job of defending privacy rights. This issue is especially thorny because, as we heard from rail company representatives and the President of the Transportation Safety Board, rail companies have often taken an approach based on discipline rather than prevention.

[English]

We can thus expect a decrease in rail incidents and accidents. Will this be due to the study of footage linked to incidents or accidents, or of randomly selected footage that is not linked to any incident? We can logically assume that it is because of the former, but we will never actually know and will, thus, find it very hard to scale back the surveillance and better protect workers’ privacy rights.

[Translation]

To be perfectly frank and transparent, it’s unclear whether this provision, which my amendment sought to delete, would be ruled unconstitutional by the courts. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that there is an unjustified Charter violation. But it was my responsibility, as a senator, to try to tilt the balance more towards privacy. It’s disappointing that my effort was unsuccessful.

The second amendment I proposed was to maintain the right of third parties, especially consumer protection groups, to file a complaint with the Canadian Transportation Agency about any violations of passengers’ Charter rights. The existing law allows third parties to file complaints in relation to air transportation. Last January, after Bill C-49 was passed by the other place, the Supreme Court even recognized the importance of complaints filed by public interest groups.

In Delta Air Lines Inc. v. Lukács, the Supreme Court ruled that it was unreasonable for the Canadian Transportation Agency to reject a complaint solely because the plaintiff had not been personally affected. The court felt that such an interpretation was contrary to the scheme of the act, since Parliament saw fit to grant the agency broad remedial authority. The court added that it would be unreasonable to interpret the agency’s discretion in a manner that would preclude it from ever hearing a complaint from a public interest group.

Yet if Bill C-49 is passed as drafted, Parliament would be altering the remedial scheme of the act, the very scheme that the Supreme Court recognized and sought to protect in its recent Delta Air Lines Inc. ruling. This limitation is also contrary to the spirit of the bill itself, since its stated goal is to strengthen, not weaken, the air passenger rights protection regime.

At the end of the day, it’s the passengers, especially those most vulnerable, who will be penalized by such a restrictive approach, given that complaints filed by consumer advocacy groups have led to major and historic advances for the benefit of the travelling public. While the bill expands and clarifies the scope of passengers’ rights, sections 17 and 18 simultaneously limit the exercise of those rights.

Once again, I don’t think the courts will be in a position to declare this new limitation inoperative. In the Delta Air Lines Inc. case, the Supreme Court found that the Transportation Agency had misinterpreted its discretionary power to hear from third parties. With Bill C-49, the government is simply leaving very little to chance as regards the role of public interest groups in the enforcement of a potential air passenger bill of rights. There will be no room for such groups there. Thus, no one is breaking the law, but the spirit of a law which was meant to be remedial is being distorted.

As a senator, I felt it was important to remove this new unjustified limitation from the bill. We must be especially vigilant when the most vulnerable groups of people risk being affected by new legislation. The other place also expressed its disagreement with that amendment.

The House of Commons also opposed another amendment, the Honourable Senator Cormier’s amendment, which was very simple. It stated that when the Transportation Agency begins its consultations to develop, by regulation, the air passenger bill of rights, it must also address the airlines’ linguistic obligations. The amendment did not create any new linguistic obligations. It left it up to the agency to examine and address the issue. The amendment was simply intended to ensure that the question of official languages was not forgotten, as is unfortunately too often the case.

Honourable colleagues, this chamber has a clear responsibility to protect our official language communities. Senator Cormier’s amendment, which the other place rejected, fully reflected the role that senators and our chamber must play.

It is therefore with some confusion that I read the message we received with Bill C-49. There is no question that the approved amendments improved the bill.

[English]

The Honourable Senator Don Plett’s amendment on interswitching was a necessary one for the agricultural industry, and Senator Diane Griffin’s amendment on soybeans will support a growing industry in Manitoba and elsewhere.

[Translation]

The other place listened to reason on some matters of public policy and maintained its position on others. It rejected every amendment that had anything to do with protecting the constitutional rights of minorities and more vulnerable segments of the population.

[English]

Honourable colleagues, I think it is time to adopt Bill C-49 as there is a certain urgency to some of its aspects. As well, I don’t think that by refusing certain amendments, including my own, the other place has proposed a bill that is clearly unconstitutional or that unduly harms one region or minority. However, I do want to reiterate my deception regarding the response received on the amendments that were proposed by the Senate, and that were tabled and adopted specifically within the purview of our complementary role.