Mr. Speaker, they would experience, sitting on a city council or municipal council, that often when petitioning a street people are divided on the same topic. They could get 100 people signing the petition, signing yes. Yet on the same street people would be signing on the no side.
How do we verify the correctness of the signature or the age of the people? Who does all of that? What kinds of expenses would we get involved in trying to make sure that every signature was bona fide, that every person signing was of age, that every person signing was not half drunk, or that we are not getting a bunch of loonies or bigots constantly signing petitions who do not believe in the proper process?
We have seen in the case of the member from Markham that people are banding together like lynch mobs in a village trying to hang someone without due process.
Maybe lynching was good in the thirties or sixties of the 19th century in Alabama. In Canada this is not what we want. We are not made up of bigots.