Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to take part in the debate surrounding Bill C-23, an act to modernize the statutes of Canada in relation to benefits and obligations.
I ask hon. members to keep the title of the bill in mind during my remarks. It is important that we focus on what the bill really is and what it really means and not let the debate get out of proportion. It is a very practical and pragmatic piece of legislation which simply seeks to modernize the way we treat benefits in employment situations or in hereditary issues.
I would like to honour the member for Burnaby—Douglas who on behalf of the NDP caucus has been championing this issue for his entire adult life. It must be very gratifying for him to see the bill finally being debated in this way today. Some 21 years ago when the member was first elected to the House of Commons we would have been light years away from actually having a debate on same sex benefits.
Progress has been made very slowly and at a very frustrating pace, I am sure, for the many activists who have dedicated their lives to it. As we have often said, it is like steering a supertanker one degree at a time. Slowly but surely, with dedicated people like the member for Burnaby—Douglas, we are making social progress on the issue, and I recognize him today.
Gay rights are the last great civil rights movement of our time. It is one issue we have failed to deal with during the last century with the emancipation of black people and their moving forward on social issues in the United States. That was a genuine civil rights movement. The aboriginal people in this country in recent years have finally been put at the forefront of social justice issues. That was a civil rights movement. The one remaining movement about which we have been negligent and to which we have failed to give enough attention is the very real discrimination that still exists in our dealings with gay and lesbian people.
I am always frustrated and saddened by the reaction in some of the speeches I have heard from the right wing extremist parties. The extremists always find it easier to promote hatred than to stamp it out. It is much easier to get attention by a divisive argument than by an argument which actually unites and moves society forward. More than angered, I am saddened by some of the tone and content of the debate we have heard from the right wing extremist party.
It saddens me in that it is a little frightening to think that those Canadians can be that retarded in their development on social issues. That is the only term I can use. Somehow they have been held back. The rest of us have moved forward and they have not. They have either failed to listen or refused to listen or failed to understand what the rest of the country is telling them.
The Liberal Party should not be any more proud in one sense. It moved an amendment which catered to the musings of right wing extremists in that an 1880 definition of marriage is now entrenched in Bill C-23 by amendment by the Liberal Party to appease and placate right wing extremists who simply could not tolerate the idea of the bill going forward and threatening what they believe to be the sanctity of marriage.
When the definition of marriage was put forward in the 1880s in Britain's common law other things were typical about marriage as well. For instance, two races were not allowed to marry. At that time interracial marriages were illegal. We have gone beyond that. We have matured and developed to realize that was silly, and so we chucked it out. At that time it was legal to beat one's wife as long as one did not use a rod thicker than one's thumb. That was silly. That was obsolete and had to be dealt with, so we modernized the institution of marriage to toss out those anachronisms. There is another one we have yet to toss out, the barrier which so horrifies right wing extremist parties today, same sex unions and same sex marriages.
I am very proud that my children grew up in a neighbourhood where they recognized that families could take all kinds of shapes, that there was no one definition of the perfect nuclear family. The reality is that I have neighbours where there are a mom, a dad and two children, and that is a family. There is a single mom with children, and that is a family. There are two moms with children, and that is a family too. My kids have grown up with that realization and they are not frightened by it. There is nothing to fear by extending the same rights to other groups that we ourselves enjoy.
Right wing extremists always seem to feel that by extending rights to one group somehow diminishes the rights others enjoy. Nothing could be further from the truth. It augments and accentuates the rights we all enjoy. When we all move forward together that is the only time society truly moves forward together. If we leave any one significant group behind, we are not doing our job in terms of equal rights and equal opportunities.
Some of the arguments of members of the Reform Party or the right wing extremist party are nothing short of ludicrous. One criticism is that the bill will lead to “benefits for sex” and abuses of who will be entitled to benefits. They are saying that heterosexual men will claim to be gay so they can get dental benefits or something. They are groping for ways to criticize the bill. That is absolutely absurd, but we have heard them put forward such arguments.
Reformers have consistently voted against every measure to promote equality on this issue. We have seen it all through their comments since I have been here in 1997. In 1996 Reform critic Sharon Hayes, during the debate on changes to the human rights act, said the Reform Party had taken the position that it rejected the inclusion of sexual orientation in the Canadian Human Rights Act as both unnecessary and inadvisable, recommending the exclusion of significant numbers of our population from coverage under the human rights act.
I wonder sometimes if members opposite think about what they are doing and what they are saying. I honestly wonder if they have given the matter any serious thought, or if they just react in a knee-jerk way, driven by emotion but certainly not by any kind of principles with which we would agree.
At the start of my remarks I asked members to remember that this is an act to modernize the statutes of Canada in relation to benefits and obligations. It is nothing more. It seeks to grant benefits to those working persons who may seek to share their benefits with someone other than the conventional definition of spouse.
This is something that has already been amended in most collective bargaining agreements and in many provincial statutes. It is really bringing the federal statutes into line with what is already the norm. There is nothing radical or revolutionary about the idea. It is simply institutionalizing what society has already agreed should be the norm.
We believe the bill is a long overdue reaction by the government to the rulings of the supreme court. If we need guidance on its origins or the moral authority, we can look at cases such as M v H. It was about payments after the breakdown of a same sex relationship. Sooner or later we knew we would have to deal with the issue. This very high profile case helped the country finally come to grips once and for all with what happens in a same sex relationship when the relationship fails and whether it should be treated in the same way as a more conventional union.
It was useful for the country to finally wrestle with the issue. We have all benefited from having the debate of recent days. I look forward to the passage of Bill C-23 because I firmly believe it is one of the last great civil rights issues of our time. I am very proud that I am lucky enough to have been elected in a period where I was able to play some role in bringing it about.