I'm going to take a bit of a different approach to this. I think it's really important that as we're speaking here, people understand who we are, where we come from and what our values are. It basically impacts how each of us performs in this place and who we represent.
First and foremost, I'm a Christian. I love my faith. I depend on my faith. I teach my faith to my children, and my husband and I are of one accord on that faith. We have an incredible privilege in this country that makes it so attractive to so many different people, even now, as it did back when my grandparents came to Canada under duress from where they had to leave. You can come here and know that you have the opportunity to be yourself and have the right to express yourself and discuss, debate and talk in the public square about your faith. This is something that every person who comes to Canada has the opportunity to do, and it's been abused extensively over the last decade.
I had the opportunity to go to India with my husband. I need to go again. We need to go everywhere in the world at least three or four times, which we don't have a lifetime to do. We went to the Lotus Temple, where Mr. Gandhi is buried, and inside at that time, every book of faith was displayed. The idea with that, of course, is that every religion has its opportunity and its right to exist.
Our Bible was sitting there, and you could look at it, but honestly, when my husband, who is a pastor, looked at it, it couldn't have been open to a more ambiguous portion of what this book represents than what was on the page. My husband, being who he is, said to the individual overseeing and protecting, “Could I please change what page our scripture is showing?” Of course, he wasn't able to do that.
The point is that for a politician to stand up in this place as the leader of a committee and declare that a portion or segment of this holy book is hateful, which means whoever reads it out loud or shares about it should go to prison, is unacceptable. It is unacceptable to everyone in this place, and I'll tell you why.
In the House of Commons, when I was standing in my place and speaking, I was asked a question, but it wasn't a question. It came from a Bloc member who said to me that I had no right to bring my faith into this place. Note that I'm just repeating what I was told. My response simply was that we all have faith. As I told the Speaker, that individual has faith. It's just a question of where we put our faith.
The government is treading on various dangerous ground by going in this direction, and I think the government has been made aware of that fact. I can assure everyone in this room who is studying these issues that you have opened up an incredible can of worms that you do not want to deal with. That's not a threat; that's just a reality. There isn't a single faith in this country that hasn't risen up in arms against this, because it is inappropriate for our government to be once again trying to control the lives of Canadians.
When it comes to family decisions about parental rights, this government has challenged that. Confiscating the firearms of law-abiding firearms owners, freezing Canadians' finances and now attacking our faith are inappropriate.
I have had many people come to me who came here years ago under duress seeking freedom and the opportunity to worship God. What this generation of the hundreds of thousands of immigrants who have ended up in Canada is saying to us is, “This is not what we expected. We want to leave. We want to go somewhere else. This is no different from where I came from.”
That is a huge statement against our country. It needs to be dealt with. The very fact that this is before this committee now, I think in ways that it wasn't expected that Bill C-9 would be dealt with, says that this has to be removed. You've heard that from people from all over this nation. You've heard that from people with authority within faith, from everyday Canadians and from people from all different kinds of civil liberties groups. This government has opened up, for a second time, the hearts and minds of Canadians and those who are calling this place home to say, “Not on my watch.”
It has happened before. During that time, I was also subject to this government's overreach. I was not allowed to exercise my responsibilities as a member of Parliament, because the government was telling me what I could and could not do. It was unacceptable. As a result, there was a swelling across this whole nation that grew all the way to this capital.
In that group of people, that huge group of people, do you know what? Every people group was represented. It was not what the prime minister of the time and others said was representative of our nation. It was abusive. It did not reflect the incredible pride of every group of people represented, from indigenous to Indian to European—you name it. Every faith was represented.
Here we are again today, in a situation where Canadians are coming together to say no and to say that this bill in its entirety needs to be scrapped, let alone what's come forward since in the amendment that was brought forward that basically attacks our faith. I've been here for a decade. This began in my first year here with the shutting down of the office of religious freedom. That's what this government did. They brought in Motion No. 103 to divide. We tried to amend it to include every faith in this country. They denied it. They did not support it.
Our personal autonomy has basically been abused. This is moral injury. I think the government doesn't understand it in the same way they don't at the veterans affairs committee, where I've served for a decade. I'm the old matron on the team. Its makeup has changed every time there's been an election, with many different leaders on both sides of the floor, but having been there, I've heard stories over and over again about moral injury. What our veterans have experienced has caused them to become dismayed, despondent and discouraged.
We have just finished a study. Many of them are seeking suicide. They cannot cope anymore. At the same time, they're being encouraged to do it in another way. What we have learned at that committee, which I find astounding, from three different organizations, one of them being Mr. Roméo Dallaire's, is that we cannot solve these kinds of problems when they're moral injuries by just treating the body and mind with pharmaceuticals. We have this third part that's the pinnacle of the triangle, and that is your soul. Until you deal with the reality of the soul, you can never fully heal.
What this bill is doing is trying to disrupt Canadians' health, as has been constantly done in so many other ways. My riding has been so engaged on every level since I became a member of Parliament that they become exhausted in trying to respond to this government. Here they are again, rising to the surface and saying, “This is wrong. This is inappropriate. This cannot happen.” As a result of the divisiveness that's happening in our nation, the level of hate is real. It's been encouraged. I'm sorry, but it's been encouraged, and divisiveness is causing that.
I'll just say one thing here. People of faith and faith leaders have been writing to the Prime Minister and expressing their deep concern about the removal of religious freedom exemptions from the Criminal Code. Do you know why? It's because they also know it will not make Canadians safer and certainly will not protect any people of any faith from hate. It's spin when you say we're trying to protect people of faith from hate and then you turn around and are creating the hate. This has to end.
Witnesses have told you at this committee that the religious text defence is narrow and does not offer blanket immunity, as the Liberals are trying to suggest. As they're saying, trying to veto or shut down faith text is not going to bring safety to Canadians. The good-faith religious defence protects minorities and those with sincerely held religious beliefs.
The separation of church and state is being used inappropriately because Thomas Jefferson wrote one letter in 1802 to a Baptist group that was concerned about the freedoms they had. In it, he said they did not need to worry, because separation of church and state, which he was referring to, meant not protection of the state from the church but protection of the church from the state.
Those are the circumstances that we find ourselves in today, first of all with the shutdown of the office of religious freedom, and then with trying to pit one faith group against another and removing charities. Canadians are seeing all of these things, and they are not foolish. They are not fooled. They know that this is inappropriate.
Religious communities, including Jews, Christians, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus and Buddhists, hold a vast range of beliefs on religion, morality, sexuality, politics and culture. I go by my faith in the word of God. It is not the government's job to dictate what people believe. Every person has the free will to make those decisions on their own, and it is not the government that should be controlling the free will of people.
Though some may find different beliefs objectionable, I don't agree. I love to debate with people of other faiths. We should have that confidence. My husband is a pastor who has told young people all their lives, “If your faith is true and you know and understand it, you can talk with anyone else about their faith and what they believe.” We are not there to threaten each other. We are there to have reasonable conversations, because every person in this place, every person in the world, has a soul. That shows in the extent of faith and belief across the world, including secularism. I'm sorry; that is faith. That is a religion.
My religion happens to be a relationship. It's not me trying to figure out how to get to God; God has come to me. That's my faith in a nutshell.
Some of these beliefs we may find objectionable, old-fashioned or even hateful. A free country does not criminalize the expression of sincerely held religious doctrines. We have laws in place that this government has refused to use. Obviously, then, I'm sorry, but you have to ask the question of why that is.
If you have an opportunity to deal with hate, why would you not be dealing with it? What is preventing you from doing that? The courts have been clear that violence and calls to violence are not and never have been protected as free expression and are not done in good faith as the defence requires. That's why we have laws.
I would encourage this government to get back to.... I will not bring forward a motion, but the reality is that the depth of darkness in crime and everything going on in this country that is negative is due to this government not doing its job in those areas.
The bail reform bill needs to be dealt with. It is not the fault of the people here today representing Canadians on Bill C-9 and on this particular amendment that has roused the angst of Canadians. It is the responsibility of this government to deal with that, to get it out of the way, to remove it and to get back to dealing with the issues around crime in this country and around having jail, not bail.
Thank you.
