I am so glad the hon. member over there said yes, yes. I expect him to vote according to the way his constituents want him to, not the way the agenda has told him to.
It matters what history has told us. Our custom has been very clear, that marriage shall be the lawful union of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others. That has been our history and tradition. Much has been said that that is what the definition is and it will continue to be. Parliament put that on record last June by passing Motion 216-55. It was very clear that parliament should do every thing it could. If the minister had really wanted to make the definition of marriage in her amendment legally binding, she could have.
According to David Brown, a constitutional expert and litigation lawyer in one of the reputable firms in Toronto, if she really wanted to do that, there were three things she could have done. She could have done something to amend the Marriage Act to include a specific definition of marriage. Or, she could have amended the bill to include an enacting section which provides that “for the purposes of all federal legislation, the word `marriage' means the lawful union of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others”. Or, she could have amended the bill to include amendments to each affected act enacting in each such act a specific definition of the word marriage. She did none of those three.
In fact, what she did was put it into the interpretation section. What was the amendment? She said “For greater certainty, the amendments made by this act do not affect the meaning of the word marriage, that is the lawful union of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others”. If that is what she really meant, she should have put it in an enacting section in the law. It would have meant something. The way it is written now does not have that impact.
We have hon. members opposite who are in the legal profession and who know jolly good and well that this is the case. The Minister of Justice knows this is the case. There is absolutely nothing new in what I am telling the hon. minister. She knows better. So do certain other ministers who are sitting across the way.
The time has come for us to tell the truth and to recognize that the people of Canada do want marriage to be defined as the lawful union of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others. They want that in the law of Canada. That is what they have told us. If these government people are going to honestly reflect that, they are going to vote that way. It would be incorrect for them not to vote that way and vote the way the whip tells them. I would suggest that it is an abuse of the power of the whip to force each one of them to vote a particular way. They should vote according to the way the people have told them to.
If they do not do that we then have to be very clear that that group of people over there is anti-family and not in favour of marriage. We have to be absolutely clear what this is about. It is time that we determine what we are. Are we democratic? Do we really mean that marriage is one man and one woman lawfully united? Is that the issue or is it something else?