Mr. Speaker, I too am pleased to enter the debate on this private member's bill. I sense the deep caring of members of this House for those who are less fortunate or disadvantaged particularly because of their social condition.
The proposal is that the Canadian Human Rights Act would add social condition as a prohibited ground of discrimination. I think the concern for others that is behind this bill is something we all share and applaud. The question is whether this proposed remedy is appropriate, whether it will do the job and whether it will have the consequences we hope it will have.
The first question I have for the sponsor of this bill is what is the definition of social condition? There was no definition offered by the member in her speech. It is very important that we define our terms.
We saw the problem the Liberals got themselves into by committing themselves to something called pay equity. It was undefined and it was left up to courts and tribunals to sort out what the legislators meant. They came up with the result which the proposers of the measure did not like. Now the Liberals are in the very embarrassing position of having to fight the interpretation of their own legislation. That is not a good position to be in.
If we are going to add something into such a critical and strong piece of legislation as the Canadian Human Rights Act, we had better know what we are talking about.
The eight provinces that have similar provisions in their human rights legislation use somewhat different terms. Newfoundland uses the term social origin. Nova Scotia, P.E.I., Manitoba and Alberta prohibit discrimination on the grounds of source of income. Saskatchewan and Ontario prohibit discrimination on the basis of being in receipt of public assistance.
The member in her speech mentioned source of income or being in receipt of public assistance as a concern encompassed by the bill. We need to be clear about what we are talking about.
I noticed that the senator who introduced this bill in the Senate said “poverty is a serious breach of equality rights, which I believe has no place in a country as prosperous as ours”. It is suggested by the senator that social condition refers to poverty. If it does, I think we should be clear about that so that we do not get unwarranted or unexpected interpretations in our desire to protect some Canadians.
The senator also referred to the absence of any direct recognition of poverty as a pervasive source of inequality and disadvantage in Canadian society. If we are talking about poverty, perhaps that is what we should say.
Quebec is the only jurisdiction in which the term social condition is used. It is listed as a prohibited ground of discrimination and it is not defined in the Quebec statute. How has it worked out in Quebec? What has happened is that virtually all applications in which social condition is stated as a ground of discrimination were dismissed by the Quebec courts. I would suggest it is not a very strong protection for people when the courts do not find the term to be sufficiently specific to actually use it to protect people.
There is only one case concerning the refusal to rent a housing unit that was found to be discriminatory on the basis of social condition. That is not an experience the Parliament of Canada would find very helpful in protecting the people we want to protect under the bill.
The human rights tribunal in Quebec has taken a broader interpretation of the term social condition, as human rights tribunals have done for example in the case of pay equity. Damages were awarded in seven of eight decisions that we have been able to identify. In those seven judgments, the social condition was defined fairly narrowly as being a social assistance recipient.
It is important that legislators legislate from their hearts. But they also must legislate in a way that is objectively and legally effective to protect people in society.
The other question I have concerns the whole area of the law of unintended consequences. If we are going to protect people on the basis of social condition, nobody knows exactly what it is. Senator Cohen made a very revealing comment at the end of her intervention on this subject. She said “In passing this bill, hon. senators, we provide protection for our most vulnerable citizens”. We all want to do that. “While you or I may not fully understand the significance of this law, it is clear to me that those who live in poverty consider this to be an extremely important statement about their worth and their value as citizens of this country”.
There probably is not a member in this House who does not think it is extremely to important to affirm the significance and value of each human being, each citizen of this country. We need to do this, but to put an undefined and possibly wrongfully interpreted term in our legislation in order to make this kind of affirmative statement is very dangerous. At the very least, it is a very poor and illogical way of bringing forward a social consequence that we would all support.
We have to look at how this term could possibly be misinterpreted. For example, as the member who spoke before me pointed out, social condition could be used to bring a case that higher income people should not be given higher progressive taxes because it would be discriminatory. By taxing the higher income people more because of their higher incomes, their social condition could be seen as being treated in a discriminatory way.
We want to be careful that those kinds of interpretations cannot be made because our terms are carefully defined.
While the intent of the bill is something we all support, I would argue very strongly that this House carefully consider whether it is appropriate and whether we are going to get the results we want by passing the bill in its present form.
Social condition is largely subjective whereas other prohibited grounds, such as race, ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age, all of those things are objective. We have to be very careful when we put subjective criteria in place. We may know what we want and we may think we know what we are getting but we can get something completely different. It would be very irresponsible of us as legislators to do that.
When we talk about this legislation, I would support having a very careful look at how we can remedy the wrongs and the ills that the member so eloquently points out. In my view the bill would not do that. It could very well have undesirable consequences because it has not been carefully drafted at this point and we could be quite aghast at the consequences in years to come.
For that reason, although I fully support the intent behind this bill, the compassion and caring that motivates it, I think it would be a poor piece of legislation for the House to pass. I would ask members to go back to the drawing board and come forward with something more specific and effective to do the job than this bill would do.