Madam Speaker, it is certainly a pleasure to rise today to speak on behalf of my constituents against Bill C-23. We have just witnessed closure on the bill, another timely action by the government. I have actually lost track of how many times the government has invoked it. It is getting to be a habit. It is all the time.
Most of my constituents are upset with the content of the bill. I will be expressing the views of thousands of them as well as millions across Canada who have written in and sent in petitions on the issue. The view is that institutions which provide the historical, social, economic and legal foundations for the country deserve more respect and consideration than is being shown by this unaccountable government.
It is unaccountable because it has consistently sat back and allowed questionable court decisions to dictate how it responds to issues that concern Canadians. It has dragged its feet on young offenders legislation and wandered aimlessly in the legal wilderness while judges decided it was more important for pedophiles to have access that victimizes children than for those children to have a chance at a decent life free from exploitation.
This leads us to wonder what is worse: to watch the Liberals stumble over issues they do not want to deal with or to see them intervene in areas they have chosen as their pet projects.
Members on this side have expressed outrage over the irresponsible dispensation of taxpayer money to multimillion dollar corporations and other dubious projects that we have seen in the last month or so.
We are fully aware that there can be good public spending, that poor and vulnerable Canadians need a hand up at critical times in their lives, but what we have seen instead is a disproportionate amount of taxpayer dollars wasted on outdated concepts of what constitutes economic prosperity.
What we see in Bill C-23 is an ill conceived and badly written bill which attempts to address the concerns of one segment of Canadian society by trampling on the sensibilities of society in general. It is not just the so-called Christian right that is uncomfortable with the implications of the bill but well meaning Jewish and Muslim communities as well.
Average Canadians who express their beliefs about fairness and equality in various ways are also concerned with the long term impact of omnibus bills which purport to sweep away supposed inequalities in one fell swoop.
It is not just the scope that is worrisome here. It is the confusion and open-ended qualifications in Bill C-23 which should stop the government and any clear thinking person in their tracks.
Cabinet ministers are unclear about the meaning of conjugality as it is used in the legislation. The justice minister rejected the idea that public benefits should be based on dependency and insisted that conjugal referred to the sexual union of a couple. The Secretary of State for Multiculturalism disagreed and expressed the idea that there were some requirements to fulfil in order to be considered conjugal but not necessarily sexual.
They are asking Canadians to commit public money and the future direction of social policy based on undefined opinions about who might qualify and who might not. It is terribly irresponsible because it allows the Liberals to take the easy way out: write a big bill and let the courts settle it later. It sounds very familiar.
Most Canadians realize it was the actions of the courts that started all this in the first place and now we leave the future of Canadian families to them again. The biggest loose end is the absence of any definition of marriage, which our amendments will seek to rectify. This is an issue that is providing all sorts of amusement as various parties try to dance around the ultimate intentions of Bill C-23.
The Liberals started out by claiming the bill was just about addressing an equality issue raised in a court case. Supposedly M v H required the redefinition of spouse, and so the government scrambled to change hundreds of statutes to comply. That court decision was really about redefining the responsibilities of partners toward each other in relation to splitting up property, but never let it be said that those without a backbone cannot stand at attention when a judge makes a decision over there.
It was clear to everyone else that when hundreds of laws were rewritten to change what it meant to be a spouse the result would be the dilution of the sanctity of marriage, but the justice minister kept up that fiction for a while. Public pressure finally got to her. She announced last week that a definition of marriage would be posted in the front of Bill C-23, which I suppose undermines her assurances that Bill C-23 was not just about marriage. Unfortunately putting it in the preamble gives very little weight to the amendment. Canadians will not be fooled by that.
That does not mean the confusion has gone away, especially not in this place. On April 3 the member for Burnaby—Douglas began his speech by suggesting that Bill C-23 had nothing to do with marriage. Then he spent 10 minutes complaining that the definition of marriage needed changing and he would not be satisfied until that happened.
He introduced the notion that restricting marriage to heterosexual relationships automatically rendered all other relationships as inferior, although I would suggest that he is taking this a little too personally and forgetting that there are millions of Canadians in a variety of relationships who do not go whining to the government for a pat on the back for every decision they make in their personal lives.
The member also raised the point that marriage, and the laws that have defined it, have changed over the years. He repeated the old myth that the rule of thumb used to refer to the right of a husband to beat his wife as long as his weapon of choice was no thicker than his thumb. Winnipeg historian Gerry Bowler points out that the rule of thumb is a reference from the lumber trade and wife beating has always been illegal in England and its colonies, including Canada.
Heated rhetoric aside, the point is taken that marriage and divorce have been examined and redefined over the years. That does not mean that there has been a continuous stream of blissful progress, far from it. Divorce laws were liberalized in the 1970s and the implications of this are coming home to roost now.
The rate of common law relationships has risen faster than the rate of traditional marriages in recent years. Lone parent families are becoming more numerous. It is rare that Canadians do not know other couples who are divorced if they themselves are not among those statistics.
It has been widely documented that the implications of all this include economic distress, personal breakdowns, increased stress on social programs and systems, and a rise in youth crime and anti-social behaviour.
I do not need to exaggerate. In fact I will say that many people successfully cope with everything thrown in their path. But that does not mean it is good public policy to create these stresses and then ask Canadian taxpayers to pay for them.
There is a good, better and best way to organize society, and we are here to make sure we do what is best. Not everybody will agree with the decisions, but sometimes it is right to say no.
Some people would argue that what we see happening in society is a lot of people making personal decisions and governments having no moral authority to dictate what those choices should be.
There is confusion over the obligations and entitlements of individuals and a deliberate blurring of the lines between what affects an individual and what applies to the group as a collective.
Governments are responsible for the general conduct of society and the preservation of its institutions. The best they can do is lay down the guidelines for what is desirable or beneficial behaviour for the greatest number and then make sure that all law-abiding citizens are free to make the best lives for themselves. Only when one citizen interferes in the rights of another, especially when the vulnerable are being victimized by the powerful, do governments have a duty to step in and use guidelines to restore order.
The guidelines cannot be whimsical and they cannot be remade every time another self-identified group rises to demand that society recognize its special circumstances. That is not tolerance or compassion. That is chaos and everybody in society suffers as a result.
This does not mean that open societies cannot make accommodations for legitimate demands, only that those demands have to be held up to public scrutiny and be openly debated by a broad representation of society. That is not what we are seeing with Bill C-23.
Otherwise intelligent individuals are reduced to name-calling and spurious references to try to get their points across. Others, who are the first to complain if their free speech or ability to express themselves is being trampled, are the first to shout down their opponents and insult their beliefs.
This is an omnibus bill that wants to affect 68 statutes covering 20 government departments, but it wants to do so with ill-defined concepts, no provisions for co-operation among those departments and no recognition that the bill is unsettling for millions of Canadians on all sides of this debate.
In a Globe and Mail article dated March 18, 2000, several gay men expressed reservations about having traditional forms of entitlements and obligations imposed upon them. Toronto writer R. M. Vaughan is quoted as saying:
I think this legislation codifies the larger battle in gay culture between conservative elements who want to mimic heterosexuals and think that is the path to freedom, and the traditionalists, now turned upside down as radicals, who don't want anything to do with straight norms.
The problem is that Bill C-23 introduces lawyers to the bedrooms of the nation and drives thousands of couples to define their relationship in terms of where they might fit on a bureaucratic scale of benefits. Rather than impose equality on a wider range of relationships, Bill C-23 would impose dozens more distinctions for individual Canadians, and their personal decisions would come under scrutiny and evaluation from faceless bureaucrats and overpaid lawyers. As I mentioned earlier, there is a blurring of the lines between what affects an individual and what applies to a group.
The Liberals have said that Bill C-23 is not about marriage, only about extending benefits. In 1996 the justice minister of the day said that Bill C-33, at that time, was not about extending benefits, just about putting sexual orientation into the charter. There are many quotes which could verify that.
The member for Burnaby—Douglas asked if marriage was so fragile that it could not stand to be pulled and stretched by the courts, and of course the Liberals, in this way. In response the member for Erie—Lincoln said that 20 years after benefits were extended to opposite sex common law couples people were still getting married in significant numbers.
There are over one million lone parent families, about 85% of them headed by women. In many cases people are making personal choices, although I am not sure that divorce is always a case of choice. I am sure that many people come to regret the choices they have made and we know that most of the children who do not have a choice in the matter are not always well served by these arrangements.
In answer to the members question, is marriage fragile? No, it is as solid as a rock.