Mr. Speaker, perhaps members find this a difficult issue to talk about. I will state something personal for the record. I have received a lot of mail on an issue which the hon. member who introduced this motion referred to.
I am not personally in favour of repealing section 43 of the Criminal Code. I certainly made that clear to a lot of constituents who have written to me about this. I know I have colleagues who take an opposite view. However for the record, being private members' business and all, I do not take that view. I do not think the government does either. At least that is what it says.
People are being whipped up into a frenzy in some quarters about the prospect of this article of the Criminal Code being repealed when I do not see any evidence that the government has this intention. Certainly it would not have my support if the government did have that intention, if it were to come before the House that the government was trying to repeal it.
What the member has done is point out in a different way something I commented on years ago in this House during the final debate on the charter, which is that is the charter of rights and freedoms institutionalizes in this country a small l liberal individualist view of society and it has its limitations.
For instance it does not adequately recognize the rights of communities or of collectivities. It tends to regard all human life as the interaction of individuals. It goes beyond that to some degree when it recognizes the existence of aboriginal rights but I think it certainly is still limited in so far as it only succeeded in enshrining the small l liberal individualistic view of life.
This is not to say that there is anything particularly wrong with that point of view. It is just that it does not encompass the complexities of the relationships we have with each other both as individuals and as groups.
That was something I pointed out then and I think it continues to be true. The member argues that it does not adequately take into account the reality of the family. I am listening to that argument. In fact I read the articles he sent around. There are some concerns expressed in those articles which I agree with. At this point anyway I remain unconvinced that anything could be accomplished by actually putting into the charter something having to do with parents and families. I personally am not opposed in principle to that idea, I am just not sure how it would work.
One of the things I find curious in the debate that unfolded this morning, and it takes on this shape in other forums and on other issues, is this tension between the state and the family. To some degree I do not know whether to call it exaggerated or misplaced or a bit of a phoney war in this sense.
I think both the state and the family are losing out to the marketplace. There are two more fundamentally weaker and weaker institutions in our society, the state and the family. The reaction of those who are concerned about family values is to attack the state. It may be appropriate in some cases to do so but it is totally inappropriate in any case not to recognize that what is eating away at family values every bit as much as some of the things that are attributed to the state are the values of the marketplace.
After all it is not the state that creates and maintains the culture of violence we see on our TV screens. It happens because of the very successful marketing on the part of the TV companies. The advertisers participate in this. They will pay higher rates for programs they know have the attraction that comes with violence. We see this more and more in sports as well.
It is not the state that is the purveyor of pornography. We see this wrong attitude toward human relationships and toward women and men not just in what we strictly call pornography; we see it in advertising all the time.
Every time we turn on the TV people with young children have to worry about what boundary will be pushed by private advertisers, by people many of us in this place hold as examples: “Boy, that guy is a good marketer. Boy, that company is a good marketing company. Boy, they really know how to sell their product, look how their stocks have risen in the marketplace”.
It may be obvious but what I find difficult to take is this concentration alone on ways in which the state may be undermining the moral fabric of the country. I find this difficult to take when it is not accompanied by an equally vigorous attack on the values used in selling a product, that the end justifies the means, that sex or whatever the case may be can be used to sell the product and that is just the way the market works and we have to accept that.
I do not think we have to accept that. If we want to create a moral society, we have to be prepared to be comprehensive in our view of this and not just single out the things that fit our ideological predisposition. We have to be willing to take on the marketplace. This is not something we are willing to do, particularly in this day and age.
People who talk about the marketplace in this way, like myself, are regarded as some kind of archaic old socialist who has not embraced the freedom that comes from the marketplace where people do what they want. People sell what they want. People do whatever is permissible in order to sell their product.
I ask members who are concerned about these things to think about this as well because to the extent that we cultivate a particular ethic when it comes to the marketplace, we reinforce values that perhaps we do not really want to reinforce.
We often say when we speak of youth crime that young people do not seem to have any values. Well maybe they do. Maybe young people have picked up the values of the marketplace instead of the values of the family or the values of the state.
Perhaps young people have picked up on the value that what matters is the bottom line, that what is important is the quarterly profit margin. It does not matter how many people have to be laid off or how many hospital beds have to close whatever the case may be whether it is the state or a private company depending on what kind of activity is involved.
Perhaps young people have picked up that for 15 years we have been glorifying the ethic of every man for himself, every person for him or herself and that we regard as romantic, unrealistic and idealistic in a pejorative and patronizing way anyone who says that maybe this is wrong and maybe we should not exalt these types of values at the expense of everything else.
I would certainly invite people who are concerned about the points the member was concerned about to rethink this as well.