Mr. Speaker, the hon. member in his usual folksy and entertaining way has made a speech in which, of course, he has managed for the most part to stay away from the subject matter before the House today, Bill C-45. He has ranged over the Young Offenders Act, MPs pensions, his travels throughout the country, but what has he really talked about? Has he really addressed the issues of Bill C-45?
The reason I am up is that yesterday the hon. member visited the very nice community of Scarborough of which I am privileged to be one of the five members of Parliament. Five hundred and fifty thousand people live in the city of Scarborough. I hope we made the hon. member feel welcome as a member of Parliament and that he had the opportunity to express his point of view which in a democracy everybody is entitled to do.
I want to talk about Bill C-45 and ask the hon. member a question. He talked about gobbledegook. He talked about how laws are written in gobbledegook. That may be if one is not a lawyer.
What we do in the House is write and pass laws. If we do not understand them, somebody has to understand them. We hope that they are the lawyers in the justice department. If they do not understand them, then as has been done in the past, the courts will tell us what they mean. I will be referring to that very topic in my speech in a few moments. We do not want to be told by the courts what we meant. Therefore we had all better make an effort to understand this gobbledegook because if we do not understand it, then we are at the mercy of the lawyers.
The previous speaker from the hon. member's party gave the nub of the problem of the Reform Party which is that there is really nothing wrong with Bill C-45. It is actually kind of good. It actually does some good amending to former Bill C-36. However the Reform members dare not support it because, in the words of the hon. member for Medicine Hat, that might be enough and we will not go any further.
I recall the Reform Party members, when they came here, saying they would do things differently. They were not going to oppose for the sake of opposing. If something was good, they would support it. What is really wrong with Bill C-45 that the member cannot support it while still making the points he makes about the various other topics he spoke about?