Mr. Speaker, I have four amendments in this grouping. I appreciate the opportunity to have 10 minutes to explain to the House some of the concerns I have with respect to the sections I wish to speak on.
I want to echo a number of the comments of the speaker before me. I commend him for some of the motions he brought forward, in particular Motion No. 23.
Motion No. 23 will bring clause 25 at page 51 back to the way it was. In other words it will be a return to status quo. That being the case I say outright that I will be supporting the motion. I agree that the matter has proceeded in undue haste and I think the motion is appropriate.
My motion, as I will explain in a moment, is a compromise to the motion put forward by the member for Calgary Centre on the chance that the House chooses to reject that motion and perhaps chooses to consider in some way my compromise. I will explain that.
I am concerned about clause 75 found at page 51 of the bill. I want to read it into the record. It refers to section 25 of the act to be amended. I pity the people watching on television who are trying to follow the clauses. However I hope to explain to the House my main concern. It reads:
(4) For the purposes of this Part, when a person establishes that he or she was cohabiting in a relationship of a conjugal nature with the contributor for at least one year immediately before the death of the contributor, the person is considered to be the survivor of the contributor.
As a lawyer I know that lawyers do not use language indiscriminately. They use language very carefully. I disagree with the hon. member for Calgary Centre who thinks that this section was drafted in haste and drafted poorly.
My view is that it was drafted very carefully and very insidiously by the justice department to continue its objective, that is its drive eventually down the road to force Canadians to accept same sex marriages and to change the law to require same sex marriages.
This is a very significant step down the road. Why? Let us look at the word conjugal. It has an ordinary English dictionary meaning. If we are speaking the English language as we do as one of the official languages in the House, we have to look at the ordinary meaning of the word conjugal. It is very simple. By the way I have checked it in French. It has the same meaning in French as it has in English:
Conjugal, of marriage; the right of sexual intercourse with a spouse; of the mutual relation of husband and wife.
That is its definition in the Oxford English Dictionary .
This is the section used by the government to provide for same sex benefits. Yet the word conjugal is known in the English language as pertaining to marriage and pertaining to the right of sexual intercourse with a spouse. Therefore it is an oxymoron to say that it deals with same sex couples because that is not a husband and a wife and it is not the sexual intercourse between spouses. Yet the word is used. It can only be used as the first step toward trying to ensure that the federal law is changed to permit same sex people to marry, which is federal jurisdiction.
What about the legal definition? Is there a difference? As it happens there is no difference, but I went to a very well known source, Black's Law Dictionary which deals with definitions of the terms and phrases of American and English jurisprudence, ancient and modern.
The definition of the word conjugal in Black's Law Dictionary reads as follows:
Of or belonging to marriage or the married state; suitable or appropriate to the married state or to married persons; matrimonial; connubial.
Then it provides legal citations for that definition. What does that mean? It means that both the ordinary English Oxford Dictionary definition and the legal definition of conjugal mean of marriage. It means relations between a husband and wife.
Why are the lawyers in the justice department using a word with such a clear English and legal meaning to justify the extension of same sex benefits to homosexual couples? There can be only one reason. That is to further the agenda and to push us down the road to the recognition of same sex marriages.
The allegation made by my own party is that we are simply keeping federal pensions in line with court decisions. I have three things to say to that. That is bunk. That is baloney. That is balderdash.
All we have to do is look at the Supreme Court of Canada decision in Egan and Nesbit which the government has ignored purposefully and which the Ontario Court of Appeal in Rosenberg grossly ignored and in my opinion improperly ignored since it was a higher court. Egan and Nesbit was a case in which the court was called upon to decide whether or not same sex partners could get old age security benefits. That is right on point with same sex survivors benefits here.
What was the decision of that court? It could not have been closer, which is rather interesting. It was a 5:4 split decision. Five of the nine judges were of the view that the definition of spouse in the Old Age Security Act contravened section 15(1). Four of the judges felt that it was perfectly acceptable. One of the five who felt that it contravened was prepared to use section 1 to permit the contravention. Why? Because, he said, the “government must be accorded some flexibility in extending social benefits and does not have to be proactive in recognizing new social relationships”.
Couple that with the majority decision, that is to say the decision of four of the nine judges. There were no other groupings of judges in the Supreme Court of Canada in that case where four of the nine were agreed. They said:
Marriage has from time immemorial been firmly grounded in our legal tradition, one that is itself a reflection of longstanding philosophical and religious traditions. But its ultimate raison d'être transcends all of these and is firmly anchored in the biological and social realities that heterosexual couples have the unique ability to procreate, that most children are the product of these relationships, and that they are generally cared for and nurtured by those who live in that relationship. In this sense, marriage is by nature heterosexual. It would be possible to legally define marriage to include homosexual couples, but this would not change the biological and social realities that underlie the traditional marriage.
They went on to say:
The singling out of legally married and common law couples as the recipients of benefits necessarily excludes all sorts of other couples living together, whatever reasons these other couples may have for doing so and whatever their sexual orientation. What Parliament clearly had in mind was to accord support to married couples who were aged and elderly, for the advancement of public policy central to society—
The advancement of public policy central to society is to sustain the traditional definition of marriage, and this will erode it.
On Egan and Nesbit the Supreme Court of Canada has spoken. Activist judges in lower courts did not like the decision so Rosenberg in Ontario chose to ignore it and went right ahead and decided their own way, ignoring a higher court.
The government examined the Rosenberg decision, realized that it was more in thinking with what it wanted to do with its agenda and with the agenda of the justice department and chose not to appeal it, thereby legitimizing what I would argue is a questionable decision.
I urge members of the House to consider rejecting the paragraph as it now is for no other reason than the legally improper use of the word conjugal. It will open up a Pandora's box of nightmares.