Mr. Speaker, It is a pleasure to actually stand here in the House and represent them and have them formally named each time that I do stand.
The member opposite, the member for Wild Rose, spoke excellently. I think he came up with a number of very good suggestions on how we could stiffen the laws to get at organized crime. However, I invite him to review his own words in Hansard tomorrow and he will find that nowhere in his speech did he actually make an argument for using the notwithstanding clause to adjust the constitution or the charter of rights to limit association, to make it a crime to join motorcycle gangs.
The closest he came to a criticism of the constitution was when he brought up the issue, as he alluded to it before, of the child prostitution legislation that was attempted in Alberta. I am absolutely on the same wavelength with him there. I think it was good legislation and it should have survived but it was overruled by an interpretation of a lower court.
I think if he really thinks about it, the member for Wild Rose will realize that the problem is not the constitution. The problem is the interpretation of the constitution that is taken in varying forms by the courts.
I would like to get his reaction here because we are having a debate in which we have an opportunity to put forward novel suggestions. I think one of the problems that has bedevilled us as a society since the constitution came in and since the charter of rights came in is that there have been interpretations of the charter that we as parliamentarians know, from our own feelings, from contacts with our constituents and from our own sense of the nation, are sometimes not right.
What I would suggest to the House is that one of the reasons why we get this feeling is that we are never invited to appear before the courts for these interpretations. We make the laws but we never have the opportunity to explain to the courts what we mean by the laws. We never get to go before those courts.
I would ask the member to respond to this right now. When there is a challenge before the supreme court, the justice department sends lawyers. I am not always sure that our justice department can advocate for the laws we pass in the way that I would wish, as indeed, Mr. Speaker, in our debates here, I often find myself at odds with our own justice department. Would he think that it might be a good innovation, a good initiative, if we brought more lawyers into the House of Commons so the House of Commons lawyers could advocate on behalf of parliamentarians? It is this place, parliament, that creates the laws, not government. It is a myth that it is government. Government brings them in and they go forward but in the end it is the vote of the parliamentarians here that determines the legislation.
The courts never hear the opposition arguments when legislation goes through. They only see one side. Unfortunately, as it stands now only the government advocates on issues pertaining to interpretations of the charter.
I would suggest that the member opposite and all opposition parties should get on side and pressure the government, pressure the Board of Internal Economy and pressure the Speaker to create more lawyers in this House to sit at that table who would act for we parliamentarians and advocate for the interpretations of the legislation for us on all sides of the House.
Then perhaps someone can say that maybe the charter should not apply to children in this circumstance. Indeed, Mr. Speaker, if I had an opportunity to plead before that court, I would say that my intention as a parliamentarian is never to put children at risk in that context. The charter was never intended to do that.
However, I cannot do it alone. We need to have another voice in interpreting the charter. It is not the words that are the problem. If you start monkeying around with the words, Mr. Speaker, you will get into trouble. That is exactly what Hitler and Stalin did. They limited the right of association and that is how we got the night of the long knives or the night of the broken glass. That is how we got the genocides in the Ukraine. We cannot do that. We cannot limit the words of the constitution but we can certainly try to get parliament represented when interpretations of the constitution are going forward in the courts.