Hold it, let us go back one more. Let us talk about the Portuguese Canadians. Interestingly, Portuguese Canadians do not rank at the same income level as Japanese Canadians, but guess what? They are not visible minorities because their skin is not a different colour. They are curse of curses, shame of shames, white. Therefore, they do not qualify under the statute. Does that make any sense whatsoever? That is the fallacy of creating legislation in a free and democratic society based on race, colour, creed or gender. There is no place for it.
What we should be doing in our society is making sure the human rights commission works so that when people are discriminated against for any reason, regardless of their sexual orientation, regardless of their colour, regardless of their gender, they have a place to go.
Let us talk about useless legislation in our country. Right here in the precincts of Parliament Hill there is 10 years and $100 million of reconstruction going on. A woman was working on the construction site but she was fired because she was a woman and one of the men did not want to be working with her. She went to the human rights commission and was turned around and sent to the provincial human rights commission.
If we want to do something, we should get our act together and get a human rights commission with teeth. We should get some semblance of uniformity between human rights laws federally, provincially, municipally and human rights legislation in the workplace.
We could be doing something worthwhile. If somebody is discriminated against in this country, what do they do? They are absolutely lost. They go to these commissions and get in line. There is a line-up that takes six months to a year to get through. That is where we should be putting our effort. We could be educating people about why it is wrong to discriminate for any reason. We do not have to legislate this sort of thing.
Then we have to make sure that people who are discriminated against for any reason have redress. They presently have no redress. It is not criminal. People can discriminate against anybody they want to; it is not a criminal offence. What one has to do is go through hoops in order to get some kind of satisfaction. We should be making that easy instead of doing this. It is ridiculous.
Since the human rights commission is the agency charged with the responsibility of enforcing this, how much money is going to the commission to enable it to do the job? What is being done to enable Mr. Yalden and the Canadian Human Rights Commission to do the job? Make a complaint to the Canadian Human Rights Commission today and see how long it takes to get satisfaction. Dump this responsibility on it and how long is it going to take to get from point A to point B?
Let us think about it. Think about the last bit of employment equity legislation that came through the House and see what has been done anywhere in the country to ensure that it has been done. Absolutely nothing has been done. What happens when persons who feel they have been discriminated against go to the human rights commission? They grow barnacles. Nothing happens there. Therefore, what do we do? We bring in more legislation to do nothing. The Liberals are just giving lip service so that they can further consolidate their position by saying: "We looked after all of these target groups. We are their great benefactors". The Liberals are not their great benefactors.