Madam Speaker, I listened to the hon. member speaking about society.
I stand in a House that was built on the principle of democracy and today I watched the government vote against democracy. By moving closure on this debate it is stopping the people from having their say. If members want to talk about hypocrisy they had better start doing what they are supposed to be doing in a supposedly democratic House.
I wish to express the strong opposition of my constituents to the government's legislation for adding the undefined phrase sexual orientation to the Canadian Human Rights Act.
Since I became a member of Parliament in 1993 no issue, no government action or inaction, has provoked such an outpouring of letters, faxes and petitions to my office. No issue has had a greater impact, yet closure has been moved in the House on it.
People are concerned for many reasons. First is the needless haste, the almost diehard rush of the government, to ram this very important legislation through Parliament without giving the people of Canada adequate opportunity to study its possible impacts and to reach public agreement on whether it is advisable.
The government is pretending, because the bill is so short, that there is virtually nothing in it. People give more apparent thought to getting the oil changed in their cars than the government has given to adding the undefined phrase sexual orientation to a list in the human rights act of forbidden grounds of discrimination.
One other action of this government provoked a similar degree of public protest and that was Bill C-68, which will take police officers off our streets in order to process gun registrations for law-abiding Canadians while doing virtually nothing to end the criminal misuse of firearms. For that legislation the same justice minister made a point of bragging how he had consulted with the public.
Day after day he read to hon. members a list of the groups which he visited, a list of the groups which supported that very controversial legislation. He apparently made a point of at least notifying such groups and now we hear from the groups that this was not true in all cases. But he did express this. He seriously considered amendments, if not outright in their opposition to his legislation, to at least seek consensus and to answer their concerns by modifying his original proposal.
I believe his legislation was bad because there is no proof that it will ever reduce criminal misuse of firearms. At least the justice minister gave an appearance of listening to the people. However, not in this case.
Currently the Canadian pension plan secretariat has been helping with hearings across Canada so that all Canadians can have the opportunity to speak about changes to their pension.
When the subject of doctor assisted suicide came before Parliament during the first session, the other place held extensive hearings and produced a significant report. The government ap-
peared to listen because it did not proceed with legislation. Even now the government is listening to different groups.
Let us look at the Devco development, the Cape Breton Development Corporation, which will seriously affect the future of the Atlantic region, especially the Cape Breton coal mining industry. It is prompting serious Senate hearings to examine the plans put forward. Community members and labour leaders as well as local legislatures have had opportunity to come to Ottawa and lobby members, including officials of Natural Resource Canada, to try to ensure that the best possible decision is made.
We are all aware that sometimes such hearings are more for public relations than for the real purpose of listening to Canadians. However, the people of Canada can at least hope that the government will listen to them. The people can at least get the impression that Parliament, including the Prime Minister and his cabinet, is acting as responsibly as possible about issues which Canadians perceive to be important. Not in this case.
Past governments have viewed it as being so important that people must have hope they will be listened to that they even added a special section to the Criminal Code so that some of the worst criminals in our history would be guaranteed the opportunity of getting a hearing for early parole, even if they have been a serial murderer who has been tried and found guilty. Sometimes they have even confessed their guilt for the killing of many people and for the terrible pain and suffering they have inflicted on the surviving family and friends. Supposedly even those murderers must be assured that there is some hope they will be listened to by the government.
Surely the fact that every member of Parliament has received hundreds if not thousands of faxes, letters and petitions about the government's plan to add the undefined phrase sexual orientation to the human rights act ought to have convinced even this government that the people of Canada view this legislation as very serious business indeed.
What do we get? We get closure. A gag order. That is the government's response to the people of Canada.
Is the government listening? No. Is it showing respect for the fact that very often the people of Canada have a collective wisdom which is far greater than anything displayed by a government? No. Is the government holding cross country hearings? No. Will there be a Senate committee appointed to look into the issue? No.
The Minister of Justice is turning his back on the Canadian people. He is listening instead to a very small special interest group. He has not made any significant effort to seek a consensus from Canadians on how he should proceed.
The government has brought forward Bill C-33 with the kind of extreme haste that reasonable people could only expect when dealing with a major national emergency. By contrast, the west coast grain handlers went on strike during the first session of the 35th Parliament, putting thousands of people out of work and threatening Canada's international reputation as a reliable supplier of grain. Even then the government did not act with such haste.
What effort has the justice minister made on Bill C-33 to contact groups which could reasonably be expected to have concerns or perhaps to oppose the legislation outright? What effort has the government made to seek the consensus of Canadians before proceeding with legislation to add the undefined phrase sexual orientation to the human rights act?
The laws that are made and passed in the House will affect the people of Canada forever, yet the government refuses to consult the people. It is shameful.
Unlike serial killers, which the government thinks must have the hope of special hearings, it gives people opposed to including the undefined phrase sexual orientation in the human rights act no hope at all that their concerns will be examined. Instead it substitutes name calling, like bigot, racist and homophobic to anybody who stands up to question the legislation. That is how much respect the government has for democracy.
The second reason I oppose the legislation is that members of Parliament have not been given any proof that homosexuals and lesbians are not being paid fairly, are not being promoted or are not being admitted as students in our colleges and universities. On the contrary, we have proof. The member for Port Moody-Coquitlam pointed out to the government that the gay population in North America appears to have full access to a standard of living which is considerably above average.
The government usually presents hon. members with pages and pages of statistics regarding, for example, the recognizably lower household incomes of aboriginal peoples compared with non-aboriginal peoples, or the much smaller percentage of women compared with men in management positions. We gets reams of statistics on these issues from the government.
Where are the pages, where are the statistics on this issue? Nowhere. The answer is clear. The government has no statistics to support this legislation. It has never had any statistics supporting this legislation.
I would like to remind my hon. colleagues that the government also assured Canadians that passing the Young Offenders Act would not result in an increase of any youth crime. on the contrary, from 1986 to 1994, violent youth crime-