Madam Speaker, I hope I will not be ruled out of order if I begin my speech by discussing principles. We do not hear much about them in this place. Sometimes we seem to forget that they are important. They are a road map for us. As Yogi Berra once said, if you do not know where you are going, you may end up someplace else.
As the Auditor General recently said somewhat less famously but no less accurately, if you do not have a clear idea what a program, law or policy is for and a clear set of criteria for evaluating it, you will not know if it has worked. Of course the Auditor General had in mind primarily the bonfire of the taxpayers, known as the federal budget. I see no less reason to apply his thoughts to the subject before us, Bill C-18.
Electoral boundaries, boy, there is a riveting topic. Bill C-18, electoral boundary reform, clause 19(2)(b)(i), there is a topic to put the manufacturers of sleeping pills into a panic. It may also seem like a topic that leaves no room for principle. It may seem like a topic to be settled in a smokefree backroom.
I take Mr. Berra's observations very seriously. I think that someone who claims not to have a political philosophy to be a
pragmatist is either a socialist trying to cover his tracks or is simply unaware of the ideas that motivate him or her.
Let us consider if electoral boundaries and in particular the provision of this act which says that in drawing those boundaries the various electoral boundary commissions shall consider "a community of interest". That is clause 19(2)(b)(i) as noted above.
Why is it in here? It is in here because of the implicit or explicit assumptions of my colleagues on the opposite bench about government. It is in here because of their assumptions about democracy. It is in here because of their assumptions about politics. It all comes down to the idea that the purpose of electoral politics is precisely to hold H.L. Mencken's famous advance auction on stolen property.
The purpose of creating ridings with a community of interest is to put people together who would have a natural tendency to combine together, to take from their fellow citizens through the political process. It is to create so to speak a level playing field for political plunder.
While this bill was being prepared I know that the members on this side of the House fought hard to get the government to change its formal definition of a community of interest. If we look at clause 19(4), we will find that the enumerated list of the elements of a community of interest is reasonably harmless by contemporary standards. Gone are the references to race and ethnicity.
By the way I certainly hope that the idea of gender segregated Senate elections is dead and buried for all time. I am not as sure as I would like to be that these ideas are gone. They may have taken out the words about ethnically or racially segregated ridings without abandoning the idea. It certainly concerns me that what we find in clause 19(4) is not exhaustive list. The commissions will consider these but they may also consider others.
There is a real danger that commissions will in practice try to create districts that are for instance overwhelmingly Indo-Canadian or overwhelmingly Chinese Canadian or whatever. I really hope they will not. I am really horrified by the idea that people can only be represented by people who look like them. I hope that no one believes that any of my colleagues are either more or less suited to represent their constituents because of the ancestry either of the members or of the constituents.
The idea that Sikhs, Indians, Chinese or Anglo-Saxons should all be segregated into one riding so as better to seize property for Sikhs, Indians, Chinese or Anglo-Saxons perhaps by electing a Sikh, Indian, Chinese or Anglo-Saxon as a member of Parliament is the most offensive particular manifestation of the notion that parliamentary ridings in principle ought to be united by people with a common interest so that they can elect someone like themselves. This suggests that people should be united in groups with people like themselves so that they can act to elect someone like themselves and really dive into the pork barrel. That is not what I think democracy is all about. That is not what I think politics is all about. And it is not how I think electoral boundaries should be drawn.
In my view the purpose of government is to protect the lives, liberties and property of its citizens. If we do not have a government that can fend off Atilla, we have nothing. The problem is, any government strong enough to protect our life, liberty and property from others is also strong enough to threaten them itself. This is the paradox of government and it is the solution of that paradox that has preoccupied serious political philosophers throughout time.
One of the devices that has evolved in British practice and in the Anglo-American political philosophy is voting for public officers. This is the vital point. Voting is a device for preventing government from getting too big, not a way of legitimizing what it does. The reason this is its purpose is that all citizens have the same fundamental interest: a government that respects their rights.
Canadians do not, or at least they should not step into the ballot box to commit an act of larceny against their fellow citizens. They step into the ballot box to render judgment on how well the government has protected their rights.
Back in 1964 in an apparently quixotic campaign for the U.S. presidency, Senator Barry Goldwater spoke to this issue. He would not, he said, engage in the politics of plunder. "If I am attacked for neglecting the interests of my constituents" he said, "I will reply that I understood their interests to be liberty, and in that cause I am doing all that I can".
I regard the interest of my constituents, whoever they are, as being fundamentally the same as the interests of all Canadians: a government that protects them from force and fraud and otherwise leaves them free to conduct their business as they see fit. For that, we need not communities of interest but ridings that treat all citizens as equals. That is why on behalf of my constituents and liberty I will be voting against this bill.