I see one of the members of the Canadian Alliance immediately interjected, but I can assure you, Madam Speaker, that I was not thinking about them in any context. But returning, because it is an important point.
If a creature does not have a brain and it does not have a sense of presence, it does not have the ability to suffer.
The justice department officials, in their arguments in defence of the broad definition, suggested that science was still examining whether creatures had the capacity to feel pain. It is a complete misreading of the science on the issue. The science on the issue is really about what creatures have the capacity to suffer, because every creature has the capacity to feel pain if it reacts to hot and cold, to things that cause it discomfort, to things that injure it.
It was, as the member for Scarborough Southwest said, a very, very difficult journey for those of us who objected to that definition and could see the very negative consequences that must flow from it.
I even went to the extent to do access to information requests on where this definition came from, where was the policy developed in the Department of Justice. You would be interested to know, Madam Speaker, that in getting answers to those questions, what I discovered was that the majority of organizations and other people who were consulted on this animal cruelty legislation and on what definition would be appropriate said that it should be applied only to animals that could be defined as vertebrates, other than human beings.
It was only the radical animal rights organizations that suggested the definition should be extended to all creatures that have the capacity to feel pain, including the International Fund for Animal Welfare, for example, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and the Animal Alliance. These are organizations that are at the extreme end of the debate on what constitutes cruelty to animals.
I was disappointed to see that the justice department officials, the policy makers, chose to take this very, very broad definition instead of the definition of the more respected organizations. I could never explain it. I still do not understand why this happened.
One of the difficulties in the legislation now is the Access to Information Act does not permit members of Parliament and people in the public, ordinary Canadians, to ask the Department of Justice officials to explain the rationale because they claim solicitor-client privilege in their advice to ministers. I would very dearly love to have seen what it was, what the actual advice was to the minister on the definition of animal. We will not see that.
The important thing to bear in mind is, however, that in the end, I think the correction has been made. It has been done by the Senate instead of by the government in the process of the bill through the House of Commons.
I think it gives great credit to the Senate. It does show that the other place has an important role to play in our parliamentary life. Because it is true that sometimes no matter how hard we work on this side of the House, both on the government benches and the opposition benches, when we try to raise red flags about aspects of legislation that may have vast, unintended consequences, often, I regret to say, we are not heard here. This is a fine instance of where the Senate has intervened and has done, in my view, the right thing.
I would add one final point, that this is the second time this week that I have spoken in praise of the Senate because it has amended legislation that it has received from the House.
Ironically, the legislation that the Senate amended that we debated was an amendment to the Lobbyists Registration Act, Bill C-15. Again the Senate did an improvement that was not originally on the government agenda.
I refer you to the point, Madam Speaker, that I had mentioned earlier in my speeches, that there is evidence, or there is the suggestion at least that policy on the definition of animal may have been unduly influenced, in my view, by the tremendous lobbying that was done by very powerful animal rights organizations using professional lobbyists.
Unfortunately, in my research using the Access to Information Act and the Lobbyists Registration Act, I was never able to make the connection between the organizations that were lobbying for this huge, broad definition of animal and who they were lobbying. It will remain unknown, I think now forever and it is gone now, who it was in the bureaucracy that paid such heed to those who sought the broadest possible definition of animal and turned a deaf ear to those very, very fine organizations, very credible organizations, that suggested the definition of animal should be simply a vertebrate other than a human being, which is the definition that the Senate has given us and that the government has now, at this late date, finally accepted.