Madam Speaker, it is a privilege to speak to Bill C-33 and oppose it.
Countless tens of thousands of petitions in opposition to this have come through my office and through many offices in the country and yet the government still pursues the road of its intent. I compliment those members opposite who are opposing this bill and have the courage to oppose this bill in the face of what seems to be a strong arm of a governing majority party.
I will address a concern of what is wrong with our country, the concerns I have as an individual, the concerns of people I grew up with and the people I live with. Where is Canada heading?
We see employment equity programs brought on by the government, multiculturalism programs, the official languages bill, gay rights bills and other such socially engineered bills. I have difficulty with the fact that if we oppose any aspects of any one of these bills we are immediately identified as a bigot, a racist and homophobic. Not only that, but if one or two or three people among us say something that happens to be a bit untoward in meaning, the whole works of us today are considered to be the same.
I find the problem most concerning. For instance, it can be a boy scout group, a church group or any group. All we need is one or two members to say something wrong and the whole group is identified as such. That is a sad commentary on where Canada is headed.
When I headed the posse in the Reform Party I observed a number of blatantly poor grant payments made to organizations. One was a $30,000 grant to study the Tzu Tzu dynasty, an ancient Chinese dynasty.
A comment was made when we observed this which at the time seemingly was humourous. The Vancouver Province , which is at best a Liberal rag, said that because I issued this news release I am a racist. It has since two or three times said I am a racist because I made these comments.
In this country if something is said, even if it is minor, even if it is not considered by many thousands of people to be in any way slander, it only takes one group, and the media is just as bad as the rest, to say racist and everybody in this country ducks, goes into hiding.
Now we enter into the gay rights debate. If you disagree with gay rights, you are homophobic. You dare not say anything about gay rights in this country, otherwise you are homophobic. I feel sorry for some of the stronger people opposite who stuck up for what they believed and are categorized as such.
Let me just give members an idea of where I come from. I guess I can explain it best by reading from a 1993 Supreme Court ruling which stated that a gay man did not have his charter rights violated when he was denied bereavement leave in the wake of his partner's death. Okay, decision made by the judge.
The chief justice at the time wrote that the refusal of the benefit could not be condemned on the basis of family status without introducing into the Canadian Human Rights Act the prohibition which Parliament specifically decided not to include in the act, namely the prohibition of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
Indeed, the judge goes on to say that if Parliament had decided to include sexual orientation in the list of prohibited grounds of discrimination, his interpretation of the phrase family status might have been entirely different. Here a judge is saying that when the Liberal government puts in sexual orientation as a form of discrimination, he will judge otherwise.
The justice minister knows that. The Prime Minister knows that. The government knows that. In fact, so do a number of members opposite who caught the government up on these statements. The government stays mute on the issue, hoping to get the bill through as fast as it can with as little damage as possible. In that way perhaps it can get more votes from the gay community than any other party, stay in power and we will still have social engineering at its worst.
It is a vicious circle. It is a sad commentary about what is happening in the country. Do not dare oppose it because you will be called homophobic. Do not stand up for what you believe in, you could be a racist.
I do not know how many times I have been called a racist because I had two individuals deported from this country. I fought hard over a year and a half to do that. One was from El Salvador and the other one was from Laos. Never mind the fact that one helped murder a kid in my neighbourhood. Never mind the fact that the other had 12 criminal convictions and had raped twice. Never mind those facts. By fighting for the rights of my community to help the police to help victims I was called a racist. My family takes great exception to that. So do my friends. So do I and I guess since my mother is watching so does she.
If we do not agree with the governing party, everybody else is something different. They are racists, bigots and homophobics. I hope Canada goes in a better direction because we deserve better than that.
Finally, it was no mistake that the turn of events which hit the Reform Party last week happened. When you are the mosquito of politics stinging the political elephant, then everything comes against you when you take on the system, including the media engineers and their politicians. The House can be guaranteed that everybody who supports us and those who are considering us will
understand we are here to fight, we are here to stay and we are not going to be budged off of that mark.