Mr. Speaker, I rise in condemnation of this piece of legislation. The previous member of the Liberal Party who spoke made comments about the bill being balanced. Those types of comments originate from the south end of a northbound cow. They have no justification whatsoever. The reality is that if the bill does not get dropped immediately to be reworked and redone for the benefit of all Canadians, my fear is Canadians will wake up to something that they will regret for a long time.
There are 116,000 young Canadians who fought for freedom and democracy buried in over 60 countries around the world. They did not fight for a country to create legislation like this. This is a major overreaction to what happened on September 11.
If one looks at the way the government works with its economic policies, it is probably the cheapest way to deal with what happened on September 11. The budgets of our enforcement agencies, military and others have been drastically cut over the years on a continuous basis by the government. Now the government says there are huge loopholes in the system because of those cuts and terrorists may take advantage of them. It figures the only way to deal with it is to bring forth legislation that would take away the rights of many Canadians.
I am not a lawyer, but the last time I checked a person was innocent until proven guilty. The premise would now be that a person would be guilty before proven innocent. It is unbelievable.
In an era of government when everyone says we need to be more open and transparent my colleague from Pictou--Antigonish--Guysborough introduced motions to dispense with becoming even more secretive. Where is the openness and transparency in that? There is not one piece of evidence that this would protect Canadians or allow them to sleep better at night. I suspect Canadians would have great nightmares over this.
What about the visible minorities? We read over and over again in the media how individuals of Arab descent are looked upon with a jaundiced view because of their nationality. That is unacceptable. This type of legislation would create fear among visible minorities in the country and would do away with the hard work that has been done over many years of attempting to create equality and bring an end to racism.
The bill would create a strong racist notion in most people's minds because determination of whether or not they were guilty or innocent would be based on perception of who they are and what they look like. That is something that our party could never support.
We encourage the government to drop the bill, go back to the table, look at it again, and this time work with all members of society to bring forth a bill that would provide the security we are looking for and end terrorism once and for all.