Hi Bill. S-13 is NOT dead, although there are many who wish that it would be. Unless the current Session is proroqued it WILL be debated when Parliament resumes sitting after the Summer recess. It WILL be debated, and it WILL receive second reading. The only question is WHEN this will happen. While Private Member Bills might 'die' after one hour of debate because they have not been deemed 'votable', the same thing does not happen with a Government Bill. A Government Bill will either be passed, or will be defeated, but it will not 'die'. Should the Liberal Cabinet 'direct' the vote on Bill S-13 it will most certainly be passed -- warts and all. That is why we must do everything we can to ensure that there is a 'free' vote and that amendments we seek are proposed and hopefully passed. I have recently become aware that amendments cannot be proposed during second reading of a Bill. They can only be proposed after second reading -- either during deliberation during Committee proceedings should the Bill be referred to Committee, during the Report stage where the Committee refers the Bill back to the House, or during third reading in the House. Bill S-13 was introduced because the government would not simply direct the Chief Statistician to obey existing legislation in the form of the Privacy Act and Regulation 6(d) that provides that personal information collected by Census would be made available to 'any person or body, for purposes of research' 92 years after collection. They accepted the unprovable 'promise' of never-ending confidentiality made by the Chief Statistician and supported by the Privacy Commissioner. They have chosen to ignore the desire of those who are concerned with the issue that access to these vital records should be unrestricted, as have been 240 years of records up to now 1906. As much as the Chief Statistician has denigraded the concept of retroactively changing legislation from 1905/06, Bill S-13 does exactly this in imposing its restrictions upon the release of the 1911 and 1916 Census records. As much as we wish to see a successful conclusion to our efforts we are happy to see that S-13 has not been rushed through and passed without a thorough debate in the House. This gives us the summer to meet with our elected representative and convince them of the need to remove the conditions and restrictions imposed by Bill S-13 Happy Hunting. Gordon ----- Original Message ----- From: "theoldmedic" <[email protected]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, June 12, 2003 4:40 PM Subject: [CCC] Bill S-13 Is it possible that bill S-13 is dead? Wouldn't that be the best thing that could possibly happen to it? It doesn't seem to have a very high priority in the House of Commons. They are spending their time arguing about whether or not the Minister should be able to rescind a persons Citizenship without a Court hearing; the travel expenses of the Privacy Commissioner, "Mad Cow" disease, and what's going on with SARS. Each of those things is a lot more important than bill S-13, and have justifiably dropped that bill right to the bottom of the priority list. Really, wouldn't it be much better if that bill were to just sit there and die? Every obnoxious part of it would die along with the rest. The courts will force the government to release the 1911 and 1916 censuses, so they will NOT be impacted by this bill. Then, next year when there is a new P.M., with different Ministers, maybe we can get something that is appropriate. Something simple, like a bill that clearly states that census records are to be turned over to the archives after 70 years, or 92, or whatever, with no restrictions. I'm just an old retired medico, who likes to putter around with genealogy. I could never understand why Bill S-13 was introduced. I'm happy to see that it is not being debated, and isn't getting a Second Reading. May it R.I.P. Bill ==== CANADA-CENSUS-CAMPAIGN Mailing List ==== How to unsubscribe from Digest Mode. Send a message to [email protected] that contains (in the Subject line and body of the message) the command -- unsubscribe -- and no additional text.