Mr. Speaker, I find it regrettable, given the support that I thought existed, at least in the mind of the House leader for the official opposition, that no one in his party rose to speak to the motion either in support or in opposition, or even to comment on this case.
I thank the parliamentary secretary for his remarks, although I do not agree with them, but at least the government has made some contribution to the debate on this issue.
The Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice just said that there was other circumstantial evidence that justified the extradition. Since we are able to talk about the evidence that in retrospect was not sufficient, why was the parliamentary secretary not able to tell us more about this alleged circumstantial evidence?
The parliamentary secretary also did not respond in any way to the conclusion that Justice Kaufman reached when he said that had the testimony of Ms. Poor Bear not been present at the extradition hearings he was convinced that the extradition likely would not have taken place.
It seems to me that the parliamentary secretary, although he had what appears to be a rather fulsome response, did not respond to that element of the argument that I made or, for that matter, that Justice Kaufman made about the nature of the extradition hearing. Those were a couple of inadequacies in the government's presentation.
It is not enough just to say “circumstantial evidence”. We need to hear more about what that evidence was. If we are supposed to be persuaded by this and drop the case, it is not enough just to get up and say that there was circumstantial evidence. We need to know more about that so we can pass some kind of judgment on whether or not we found it compelling or not.
Secondly, the parliamentary secretary did not deal with the observation made by Justice Kaufman.
I hope that some day justice will be done in this case. I regret, as I said before, that not enough members of Parliament were interested enough in this to make up the whole hour of debate. It is a rather sad statement about our parliament and about the interest that hon. members show in issues having to do with aboriginal justice, both in this country and in the North American context.
I cannot say that I am overly encouraged by my experience in this particular hour of parliamentary debate. In fact I might say that I am rather discouraged. I would much rather have had people get up and disagree with me. At least that would have been taking the issue somewhat more seriously than simply, which seems to be the case, that people regarded it as not worthy of being commented on. I find that rather disheartening.