Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to participate in this debate as well.
Most of the debate has focused on the sexual orientation aspect of section 718.2. I too have received a strong response from my riding and from various Canadians across the country on this. Their main concern seems to be that the term is not defined and that the consequences of it being in the bill remain unknown.
Arguments against including the phrase have been presented at great length. I would like to focus more on the effect of having greater sentences for some crimes versus others. In this bill it is based on hate, which is an emotional or human response.
Another concern I have is the categorizing of conditions. I do not really think I have to be anything as far as religion or whatever is concerned. If someone assaults me I should have the right under law to extract a sentence on that.
I would also like to look at the reason we are having such difficulty with crime in this country. We all agree that we have a crime problem and that we have various groups that are making life very difficult for us. I would like to try to figure out what has happened. What happened to our justice system that has turned things around?
This brings me to a philosophical concept. Over the past 30-odd years we have seen a gradual erosion of the concept of law. In moral philosophy there are two opposing ways of looking at a situation. One school of thought is represented by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant in his Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals . Kant argued that actions should be based on the intent of a person doing the action and not the consequences of the action. Kant himself said: ``An action done from duty has as its moral worth of that action not in the purpose that is to be attained by it but in the maxim according to which the action is determined''. Again that is an implication of intent. He is basically saying that it does not really matter what the result is of what you do; what matters is why you wanted to do it in the first place.
The opposing view is presented by the British philosopher John Stuart Mill in his work Utilitarianism , where he argued that actions of individuals should be based on the consequences of the action. He was more concerned with the consequences of an individual's action than he was with the intent behind the action.
An easy way to get a better understanding of that concept would be the example of one person striking another one. Kant would want to know why that person struck another, what motivated him to take that action, whereas Mill would come up with the fact that the person was indeed struck and that in itself is the offence.
One might ask what all this has to do with the bill today. I firmly believe that the intent of the Canadian justice system has changed from addressing the action involved and the result of the action to now trying to address intent and be psychologists and psychiatrists in the court system.
We also have come into other problems that could very well relate to this switch in the philosophical approach to how we view our justice system. We talk about criminals getting more rights than victims, for example. Well that follows my argument that if we are looking at why somebody does something we are not looking at the person who is dead, the victim.
There are a number of things that have happened in our system that bring me to think there has been a definite switch in philosophical views or actions in our society and we have switched from the Mill concept to the Kant concept and are stressing more and more the intent aspect.
This first started to erode when we looked at the state of mind component from the point of view of mental illness and people who were involved in some sort of crime who were mentally ill. We tended to forgive their crime to a certain degree because they knew not what they did. From there it gradually evolved to where we even got into debates involving drug abuse, for example: I take drugs or I drink and because I am in that state from the inducement of drugs I am not responsible for what I do.
I see this intent business getting totally out of hand. The point is that it does not really matter what your emotional state of mind is, when you kill somebody they are dead and that is the end of it.
We have to try to create situations where people who need help and who can be harmful to others or themselves can be treated before they end up in our courts so we do not have those kinds of situations.