Bill No. 278 - Non-Disclosure Agreement Prohibition Act - 2nd reading

CLAUDIA CHENDER « » : As with many of the things we discuss in this Chamber today things have taken a turn for the real. We've heard a lot of abstraction these days I would say in Question Period and in debates in the Chamber, statistics and numbers and I think actually today is really helpful to remind us that we are talking about human beings, and we are talking about their trauma, and we are talking about how we can make that easier.

I think we can't lose sight of that, so when we talk about doing our due diligence, jurisdictional scans, all things that have come up, what we're actually talking about is delaying acting to stop the trauma that is being inflicted upon women in particular all the time. I want that to form the context for my comments today.

Just to kind of zoom back out for a moment, I think it's worth noting, having been in this Chamber for some time, that our Premier built his brand on transparency, quite literally. I have sat somewhere around this seat for probably longer than I would have liked to and while I have been here I had the opportunity to watch the Premier, as an Opposition member and then as an Opposition Leader and then as a candidate, talk about the need for transparency, talk about order-making powers for the Information and Privacy Commissioner. He sued the government over a $1 million management contract, the same person who has spent $1.4 billion in appropriations that have no oversight, but I digress.

We were talking about what is the opposite of transparency - opacity, this was the word that we came up with. It's kind of a mouthful - thank you, very astute thesaurus over here. What's another word for opacity? Secrecy is the opposite of transparency.

I think what we have seen, and I am leading up here, since this government has taken office is, given the context, a shocking commitment to secrecy. We've seen task forces that operate with no transparency. Nobody knows what happens or when it happens or who is there or what decisions get made. We've seen independent and public boards fired. We have seen partisans hired. We have seen arm's-length bodies that make transparent decisions systematically eliminated from the workings of government.

What we are hearing from the government around the use of NDAs is not surprising; it is part of a pattern. The pattern that this government has established is that it is easier, it is more expedient to operate in the dark.

I should say they are not wrong. It is easier, of course it's easier, it's much easier to do things when you are not subject to criticism all the time, when you are not tied up with pesky people and their opinions, and other orders of government, and what they might think about something. It's much easier, and it's easier to go faster. Of course, it's easier to go faster, but it's not democratic.

I think that what we're talking about today in the Chamber really brings us back to what we mean, why we talk about transparency, because as my colleague has often said, transparency is a bit of a technocratic term, we discuss this and lots of people in the public might tune out transparency, blah, blah, blah - am I getting what I need?

Today this topic reminds us of why transparency is important - because terrible things can happen in the dark. Those terrible things could be a bad development deal, they could be a waste of government money, or they could be the ruination of someone's life. Therefore, we tend to, in parliamentary democracy, adopt as a tenet, that transparency is better than secrecy. We've agreed on that generally, and yet we are not seeing that from this government.

Today and yesterday, as we talk about the inaction on legislating the misuse of non-disclosure agreements, we see the outer limit of how bad that is. Again I want to remind people that non-disclosure agreements were developed for trade secrets. They are now routinely used to cover up incidents of sometimes criminal wrongdoing, including sexual assault, sexual harassment, abuse. They are used all the time, so by definition, every day that this government chooses not to legislate, chooses to be behind the times, more people are being abused, more people are being violated, and more people are being doubly traumatized by then being unable to speak about it. For that the government should be truly ashamed.

My colleagues have gone through, at length, the jurisdictions that have legislated this. Our legislation - I know we are talking about my colleagues' legislation, and I will get to that - we introduced legislation in April 2022 and our legislation is model legislation. It was developed by Dr. Julie Macfarlane from the Can't Buy My Silence campaign, who was referenced earlier, who herself left her distinguished law professor position in disgust when she was going to be forced to sign something.

This is model legislation. It has been enforced in P.E.I. for quite some time. There are 17 states - even New Jersey, as my colleague said; Ireland. Almost every time where there has been action on this, it has come as a result of public outcry when abuse is discovered.

In Prince Edward Island, there were terrible things happening at the University of Prince Edward Island and they were protected by non-disclosure agreements, and people knew about them. When that hit the wires, so to speak, there was public appetite to do something about it, because they could see - it was transparent, it was in the light of day, they could see how egregious the behaviour was. In Ireland, it was about the homes for children who had been taken away from their mothers, when unwed mothers went - and they were all forced to sign non-disclosure agreements, and terrible things happened. When the Irish public discovered that, they were so disgusted that they said to their Parliament: Somebody should do something about this.

We thought Hockey Canada was going to be it here. We thought Hockey Canada would be it. When it was discovered that the money that the government gives to Hockey Canada was being used to pay settlements for the wrongdoing of coaches to vulnerable players over years and years, that protected those coaches and that ruined the lives of so many of those players, we thought that would be it. Not yet. When the 2022 World Junior Hockey Championship came here, we thought: This is our moment. Surely the government will act, but they haven't.

My colleague introduced a bill today that deals with this specifically when it comes to political parties. We do things in this House in roughly the same way we did them about 200 years ago, but 200 years ago, there were no women here. Two hundred years ago, women couldn't elect the people who sat here, but, surely, 200 years ago, women experienced the same abuse, the same secrecy, the same silencing that they experience today, but now we can change that. Times have changed. It's been 200 years. We are more than able to do something about it.

To conclude, I want to put a very fine point on what is happening here. This government has the opportunity to quite literally do the right thing. It is simply not true that the delay is a jurisdictional scan. We filed a Freedom of Information request that showed that non-disclosure agreement legislation is not in the government's Legislative plan for 2023 to 2025. It is not there. The Minister of Justice has said it's not a priority, the documents that we discovered show that it's not a priority, and we have yet to hear a single compelling argument about why. Or the truth. The truth may or may not be compelling, but we haven't heard anything.

There have been some serious accusations levelled in the Chamber today. I don't have a comment on those other than to say with or without these allegations, the only appropriate course of action for this government is to pass legislation immediately banning the misuse of non-disclosure agreements. Anything else is something that surely every member of the government will have to live with and explain for the rest of their lives.