Mr. Speaker, this has been a very interesting debate. It was made much more interesting by the intervention of the hon. member for Hamilton-Wentworth who brought another dimension to the debate. That dimension is that it is far better that 1,000 guilty people go free than one innocent person be convicted. That is the cornerstone of our jurisprudence and that is the way it should be.
If we go back to zero, back to the start of parliamentary democracy, I believe we will find that as parliamentarians our fiduciary responsibility is to the individual citizen and to protect those citizens from the power of the state. That is what this bill is about.
The hon. member for Hamilton-Wentworth dealt specifically with people who came to see him and brought to his attention that someone with false memory syndrome could totally destroy the lives of people with false accusations. The counsellor protecting the accused would not then have the ability to investigate, to prove that it was false memory syndrome that caused the problem. This is a particularly cogent criticism of the bill and it is something we should investigate very carefully in committee.
This bill has the effect of making it far more difficult, but not impossible, for defence lawyers to break down the credibility of a complainant. We must ask ourselves, why is this? I believe it is basically to protect innocent persons from being victimized by the trial process.
This was very aptly put when, in a 1988 presentation of how to go about undermining the position of a complainant, a criminal lawyer said: "Whack complainants hard at the preliminary inquiry. Attack with all you have got so that he or she will say, `I am not coming back"'. We ask if this is justice for someone who has been assaulted or sexually assaulted. It is usually only a small minority of women who are sexually assaulted that actually come forward. Why? It is because they have been invaded as it is. Then they come forward and find their whole lives being bared to everybody. They find themselves being whacked by the lawyer for the accused. We must balance the rights of the victim with the rights of the accused. As I read it, that is what this legislation is all about.
It is important to look at the mindset of a society which allows the law to put the rights of the accused far ahead of the rights of the victim. I would like to use as an example a particularly egregious incident which took place and was recently brought to light in a trial in Yukon. I am talking about the circumstances of the murder of Susan Klassen.
Let me tell the House something about Susan Klassen. She died in November 1995. She was 36. She was murdered by her husband Ralph. Her husband pleaded guilty to manslaughter, notwithstanding the fact that he killed her with his bare hands, bruising his thumbs doing it, and then knotted a pillow case around her neck.
How is that manslaughter? Manslaughter is when a person hits someone and they fall over dead. The person did not mean to kill, however, the individual hit his head and ended up dead. How is it manslaughter when you choke someone so hard that you bruise your thumbs and then you strangle them with a pillow case? How in God's name can that be manslaughter?
We wonder what it would take to get 300 people from the Yukon, on one day's notice, at minus 38 degrees, to march in honour of Susan Klassen. They were not marching just for Susan Klassen; they were marching out of frustration and rage at a judicial system that would allow provocation to be used as the excuse for killing. Provocation. My God. How on earth could anybody use provocation as why they killed somebody by strangulation so hard that they bruise their thumbs and then smother them with a pillow case? Provocation is when somebody says something, you get a little bit upset, like what happened here in this House today, you go over and you nail them, and the person winds up dead. You did not mean to kill. That is what manslaughter is all about.
Susan Klassen attended St. Angela Catholic elementary school and Sir John Thompson junior high school in Edmonton. She won the top award for excellence at Archbishop MacDonald high school, graduated from university in 1981 as an occupational therapist with distinction, and worked in the community. She probably was not an angel. None of us is. Was whatever happened in the relationship between Susan and her husband sufficient provocation for this person to kill her and then plead manslaughter because of provocation?
How does that come back to Bill C-46? It is an entirely different circumstance but it has a common root. When women-and we all know that 99 per cent of the time it is women-suffer from assault, whether it is sexual or any other kind, and when that assault is permissible because of provocation for whatever reason, then we are in a situation where a person who brutally kills someone is able to say: "I did not mean to, therefore, it was manslaughter. I did not mean to rape this girl. I did not break into her house and rape her. I was provoked into raping her because she was there".
It is time that we put an end to that. We need to balance the rights of the accused and the victim through amendments and at committee we may satisfactorily answer the question of false memory syndrome. However, the rights of the victim must at least be on par with the rights of the criminal. I would ask the House to consider this when the bill goes to committee and before it goes to third reading.