There the member goes again, special status. Because it says sex he concludes it means special status because women receive rights they would not otherwise have under this act. Men receive the same rights, but the hon. member cannot accept that the rights have to be the same. In his view it is special status. His leader is doing his best to cover up the difficulties within that party by arguing that somehow we can just make a declaration which says everyone is equal.
Let us go to the ramifications of that. What are the prohibited grounds of discrimination under this new Reform law? There will not be any prohibited grounds of discrimination. Everyone is declared to be equal and therefore everyone who is discriminated against in any way will have a claim.
One of the members of the Reform Party is a retired professor. I wonder what he would say if a student applied to Simon Fraser University where he taught and was told that his or her marks were insufficient to get in and then the student laid a claim of discrimination saying: "I am a Canadian citizen and the new Reform human rights code says discrimination is not allowed in Canada. My marks are lower than John Doe's. John Doe got in and I did not. I want in". What would the hon. member say to that?
I would like to hear from the hon. member for Calgary Southwest on that point. I bet he does not have the faintest idea of what he would say because he could not possibly come up with a law that will do what he says he is going to do and make it stick. This whole notion is a chimera.
There is no sense of how you divide people into groups, how you discriminate against people if you do not have the bases of discrimination spelled out in the human rights act. This act spells out the bases of discrimination. Almost all Canadians agree that the bases set out in this act are fair and reasonable.
The government by this amendment is providing justice for a group of Canadians who have complained loud and long that they have been unfairly treated. They have already been included in the human rights codes of seven of the provinces. They have been determined to be part of this code by the courts in their exercise of judicial interpretation of this statute.
This law is doing virtually nothing new. What it is doing is bringing Parliament up to date with what has been going on in the rest of society. It is something that should have been done a long time ago and obviously has gone right over the heads of hon. members opposite.
The hon. member for Kindersley-Lloydminster and other members have suggested that this bill is being rushed through with undue haste.