Mr. Speaker, I noted that the hon. member referred to the Canadian Alliance members as hateful probably a dozen times in her speech. It does not serve anybody's interests to revert to name-calling. I notice that when people disagree in the House, particularly members of the NDP, they go on the attack and make accusations of this kind rather than substantive debate, which is unfortunate.
One of the things the member has missed in our comments, which we have continually repeated and which I would like her to address, is the fact that our core themes on this bill have been that if marriage is going to be put at the front of the bill, does the member have a problem with putting marriage right into the statutes, where legal opinion says it will actually have substantive legal effect? Legal opinion is that, the way the justice minister has done it, marriage will be left out.
Second, she said that we did not want to put people in the courtrooms and cause them to incur legal costs. Yet with the undefined definition of a conjugal relationship in the statute, people will probably be driven into the courtrooms to have their relationships assessed by the state. We have consistently said that is probably inappropriate, that it would be better to define it in the statute. I would ask her to speak to those two issues.