Should MPs have the right to know all secrets?

That's the question that I ask in today's National Post. Here's the full text of my Op-Ed, with a few minor editorial changes:

Should any group of back-bench MPs have the right to know every secret in Canada? Not just diplomatic and military secrets about Afghanistan, but any other secrets they might be curious about, from your tax returns to your medical records? And should MPs have the power to force people to tell him those secrets, even if that would break the law, like the Official Secrets Act?

Those are not hypothetical questions. Parliament’s senior lawyer, Robert Walsh, has made those demands in a flurry of letters he sent to the government last week. Walsh was writing on behalf of Ujjal Dosanjh, the former NDP premier who now sits as a Liberal MP. Dosanjh and other opposition MPs are outraged that they cannot see confidential information about the Afghanistan war, including about detained Taliban terrorists.

Canada’s laws about secrets are clear: the Security of Information Act (the successor law to the Official Secrets Act) makes it illegal for a Canadian diplomat, soldier or spy to tell a state secret, even to a curious MP.

Part of it is the constitutional separation of powers in a democracy: the legislative branch of passes the laws, the executive branch implements them, and the judiciary clarifies them if need be. Each branch checks the power of the others.

But there’s a common sense reason, too: not all MPs can keep a secret. Just a few weeks ago, Dosanjh himself was caught publicly broadcasting his thoughts on Twitter, from his BlackBerry, while in a supposedly confidential committee meeting. No state secrets were spilled, but it shows the difference between a chatty MP and a professional diplomat, soldier or CSIS agent.

Dosanjh’s minor indiscretion pales next to the 2007 incident of the NDP’s Dawn Black, who revealed that Canada was in secret negotiations with the United Arab Emirates, to get that country to send troops to Afghanistan. Black’s exposure of those sensitive discussions caused the Emirates to backpedal.

And though it’s traditional to call MPs “honourable members”, it’s worth remembering that there is no security clearance required to sit in Parliament – not even a criminal record check.

There are plenty of other reasons why merely being an MP shouldn’t be enough to look at every secret in the country. Take Omar Alghabra, the Saudi-born former Liberal MP who was barred from entering the U.S. after 9/11, and who publicly called for the abolition of Canada’s anti-terrorism laws; or Borys Wrzesnewskyj, the Liberal MP who flew to Lebanon to meet with the terrorist group Hezbollah, and called for their decriminalization in Canada. And then there’s the case of Hakim Faqiryar, a former Liberal candidate who was part of Afghanistan’s mujahedeen army, and then was a military policeman in the Russian puppet regime there, before he immigrated to Canada.

The subject matter doesn’t have to be as dramatic as terrorism; should Gilles Duceppes really have unfettered access to Canada’s contingency plans for a separation referendum?

The opposition says yes. In their letter to the Department of Justice last Friday, they demanded that MPs should have the power to compel anyone to spill the beans about anything, even if they “are under a general statutory obligation not to disclose the information.” They say that while the rest of Canadians – let’s call them the little people – have to obey privacy laws, MPs will “determine how the provisions [of those laws] apply” and exempt themselves if they choose.

On any given afternoon, a handful of backbenchers in a committee could simply order someone to reveal a confidential battle plan, the identity of a secret intelligence agent, or the private messages of a foreign diplomat.

That’s nuts.

The opposition is arguing that they’re lawmakers, so they should be able to add loopholes as they see fit. And they can – if those loopholes win a vote three times in the full House of Commons, and then three times in the full Senate. But the opposition doesn’t want to go to that trouble – they want to be able to bend the rules on the fly.

They claim the doctrine of parliamentary privilege gives them that right, but that ancient privilege was designed as a shield to protect MPs from interference from other forces, such as a vindictive king. It was not intended as a sword, through which MPs could compel individuals to make forced disclosures in a political Star Chamber.

The final flourish in the opposition letter is their accusation that when the government insists military secrets be kept secret, it is making an “indirect attempt to intimidate Government officials”. How Orwellian: enforcing the secrets act is intimidation, but forcing people to divulge secrets to a group of MPs is not?

There may be room for debate about whether revealing any particular state secret would actually harm Canada. But the opposition MPs’ demand is more than that: they do not believe in any secrets at all. Their letter can mean only one thing: they believe their partisan interests trump national security every time.

The opposition would turn MPs into omnipotent snoops, destroying privacy in every field from military affairs to international trade to criminal convictions.

The Parliamentary Press Gallery loves it, for obvious reasons.  But the rest of us should be very scared.