—and to get them off of the hook on something that's awkward, where the Quebec members and the members outside of Quebec will be driven to vote on different sides of the same issue, an issue that is inherently awkward, and we have members of all three of the parties here, both from Quebec and outside of Quebec.
There is a simple solution to this. I invite the Liberals to think about this. Allow a free vote of your members in the House of Commons and, presto, you've resolved the matter very tidily. Killing this is not the right way to do it.
A final note regarding deference is that this is a matter where what we're trying to do is to not go outside our legitimate authority. Surely the decision as to whether or not something would clearly violate the Charter of Rights as determined by the courts—which means the Supreme Court in the end—is not something where we ought to be prejudging the Supreme Court and anticipating what they might do by saying, “No, you guys, you don't even get the chance to do this because we've decided that we know what you will say yes and no to.”
Now, if something is really clearly unconstitutional, if there is a reason that a reasonable person would accept where we would say that we can reasonably be certain that the Supreme Court would never accept this, then we're not wasting the court's time or, for that matter, the House's time, but no argument to that effect has been presented. It's been only arguments that are like the arguments I would give in the House of Commons if I were presenting a speech as to why I'm voting against this bill and urging my colleagues to do the same thing. On that basis, I simply disagree with Mr. Bittle and a number of the other Liberal speakers.
The final thing I want to say about this is that what's important here is not ultimately how we vote on this piece of legislation, on this yes-or-no vote. What is important is that we should not be in the position of inventing arguments as to unconstitutionality as a way of killing items of private members' business that are difficult for us to deal with. By definition, the things that are difficult for us to deal with are the hard questions that are the most important for us to deal with: language rights, other constitutional rights....
Just go through all of the things that have been hard during your career, Mr. Christopherson.