Madam Speaker, with respect to the comment made by the member behind me, that is exactly what would be required for them to qualify under Bill C-23. Bill C-23 totally excludes the kind of relationship that I just spoke about.
The only way for survivor benefits or any of the benefits to be extended to a person who might otherwise be dependent on the public purse is for these two gentlemen to enter into some sort of physical intimacy or sex which they do not want to even entertain. They are left out of this. This is the equality bill. This is equality and fairness, as the justice minister says.
The bill leaves out all kinds of people. The sole criteria is, is it conjugal, is there sex. It is inappropriate and unworkable. If the government is intent on extending some benefits, it would be better to extend them based on some stated dependency agreement which people voluntarily enter into rather than have them excluded all together, which is what Bill C-23 does. Without this consideration of dependency, dependency really means nothing in Bill C-23 and sexual activity is a qualifier as I have said.
I remember when Bill C-78 went through the House. It had a similar kind of approach to this issue. I questioned the treasury board minister at the time in committee. I asked him about it and he responded kind of weakly and kind of meekly that the courts made him do it, that the lawyers wrote it this way.
Does the government serve the people by letting the courts set policy and the lawyers draft the legislation in the whole process? Where is the voice of the people? It is not there. We are not hearing it. The Liberals do not want to hear it.
We launched a lot of committees across the country to get input from people, to hear what they had to say. I remember being a member of the committee that travelled from coast to coast on the issue of custody and access situations that had to be dealt with in divorce. We heard from hundreds, if not over a thousand Canadians, their input on what needed to be done to restructure family law to cope better with marital breakdown and make the law more beneficial to families with these kinds of problems.
I know that members of the House travelled with all kinds of committees. The finance committee travels every year to hear input from Canadians. Here we have a piece of legislation that changes 68 statutes and will affect 20 different departments, and what are they taking as their guide? They have an Angus Reid poll that is telling them that this is what people want.
Angus Reid predicted that Mike Harris would lose the Ontario election. Angus Reid said the Liberals would win in Ontario, and they lost. This is what they are using as the basis for justification for bringing forward a bill that affects 68 statutes and 20 areas of the government. They do not want to have any public consultation on it.
The minister talked a bit about public consultation at the end of her speech, but she is implementing a bill without any of it. What I suggest is that the government put it on hold. Let us hear what the people have to say. Let us launch a committee. There are 68 statutes being changed. How about some public hearings, public input?
I am reminded too of the comprehensive report we put together on the custody and access committee. There was a lot of agreement around the table by all members of the House. There was a whole screed of recommendations. The justice minister said she would not act on it because she wanted to think about it. Maybe in another three years or so we will do something with it.
That is the voice of the people coming through the committee process being shelved. The bill says that they like the results of a poll, the court told them to do it. Boom, it is done and people are shut out. Bill C-23 is weak because the Liberals have not allowed the people to have input.
I remind members opposite and all other members that every word spoken in the House is recorded and bound in volumes which are kept in the Speaker's office. Everything we say and every vote is recorded. In a sense it is our accountability. In a sense we might say it is a legacy we leave to our families and those who follow that may want to reference what we said and where we stood on issues.
I ask members to consider their positions on Bill C-23. It takes every benefit and every obligation we currently extend to marriage and families and gives them to two people living together for a year, provided they have sex.
The bill needs to be sent back for a redraft. It needs to include a clear definition in law, in legislation, that marriage is the union of a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others. Let us get that in the statute. That is what people have asked for in petitions. That is what the House has voted in support of. It is time to do it. Unfortunately the justice minister has missed an opportunity to do exactly that.
It also needs to be redrafted to include respect for people's private intimacies. To make benefits subject to the private sexual activities of individuals is clearly inappropriate in our opinion. If the government is intent on drafting legislation to allow benefits to flow to relationships between two people of the same gender and to make benefits contingent upon their having some sort of sexual relationship, it is inappropriate.
Is it not more reasonable to focus on demonstrated interdependencies and the social contribution of the relationship when considering benefits rather than on the private physical intimacies of the person being considered? I believe, Mr. Speaker, you would even agree with that.
I encourage all members of the House to send Bill C-23 back for an improved redraft. Let us protect marriage in legislation and let us focus on dependency, not on conjugality. In its current form this is an unworkable piece of legislation.