Mr. Speaker, on behalf of the NDP caucus we find ourselves generally speaking in support of the bill at second reading. There is much work to be done in committee as some members have already pointed out.
I want to begin by saying how much I regret that the government has decided to bring in an omnibus bill of this kind. In listening to the debate it is already clear that we could have had a different scenario before us. It could have been more pleasing to parliamentarians and more pleasing to the public in terms of passing expeditiously a number of measures that have broad support in the House and among the Canadian public.
That is not the situation we are faced with. Bill C-15 is an omnibus bill containing controversial items which have the prospect of delaying the passage of the legislation, and I find that very regrettable.
Would it not have been better if parliament could speak swiftly and emphatically, with one voice, on matters such as: the luring of children on the Internet for the purposes of sexual exploitation, child pornography with respect to the Internet, the seriousness with which we want the criminal code to take the act of home invasion, and the disarming of police officers?
This is a short list of the kinds of things that are in the bill. We could have said with one voice that we want these things to happen quickly. We know that our laws need to be updated with respect to the new phenomena of the Internet and all the criminal possibilities for the exploitation of children that the Internet provides.
It is something that is long overdue because it is not as if the Internet just showed up yesterday. It has been around for a long time, yet it is only now that we have legislation before us. It is better late than never. It would have been better if we had been presented with a legislative scenario in which we could have proceeded to do that right away.
The same applies to home invasion. This is a relatively new phenomena but it has been around for far too many years already. There has been a cry on the part of the Canadian public for the criminal code and our laws to reflect the seriousness with which people regard home invasions. This is not just any sort of ordinary break and enter, not that we should convey any kind of ordinariness on acts of break and enter, but home invasion. Some of the things that have gone on offend the senses of propriety, decency and morality of all Canadians. It is something that we could have proceeded with quite expeditiously.
We could have also proceeded swiftly with the new provisions having to do with the luring of children on the Internet. This also applies to the disarming of police officers. It is not so long ago that the Canadian Police Association had its week of lobbying here. I am sure that it found very few members of parliament who said that they were against bringing in the provision dealing with the act of disarming police officers. That too could have been proceeded with expeditiously.
Perhaps those things could have gone into an omnibus bill and they could have been done all at once. What makes an omnibus bill offensive is not necessarily what is in it but what the government may be trying to bury within it that it would rather not deal with on its own.
We have a couple of examples of that, and I am not saying that because I am necessarily opposed to what the government is doing in the bill. It just makes for bad politics in the best sense of the word politics. It makes it hard for parliament to speak clearly about these issues if we must always be speaking about more than one issue at the same time when we are speaking about a particular bill.
It may look like good politics in the more pejorative and cynical sense from the point of view of the government that it insert something that is obviously controversial and was controversial in the last parliament. I refer, for example, to the provisions having to do with cruelty to animals. Instead of having them in a separate bill, the government put them in the omnibus bill. People who have concerns about that, whether they be right or wrong, would be open to the charge that they are holding up new provisions for dealing with the luring of children on the Internet when what they are really trying to debate is the merits of what the government is doing with respect to cruelty to animals.
If it is true, as the member from the Alliance alleges, that the way in which the legislation is drafted represents a conceptual transition or a conceptual leap from regarding animals as property to regarding animals as having rights, this is a significant conceptual development. If it is done in a certain way it may be a conceptual development that my colleagues and I would be in favour of and that would not be unreasonable with respect to all the things many people would have to continue to do, whether they be hunters, fishermen, farmers or whatever the case may be.
However it is something that merits debate in its own right. It should have been dealt with in a separate piece of legislation rather than in the context of all the other things I have already spoken about. It could have been dealt with in a way that reflects the agreement that exists among members of parliament about those provisions.
We do not want to bring legislation forward, particularly if we are trying to make some kind of moral statement, which I presume we are trying to do in Bill C-15, about luring on the Internet, child pornography, home invasion and the disarming of police officers, in a way that ascribes controversy to those measures by tacking them on to things which are controversial. Why would we not want to do that in a way that conveys the full measure of support that exists in parliament and in the Canadian public?
This is the argument to be made for splitting the bill. I do not know if the government is open to that but I doubt it. It seems that it has already made a decision not to do that because it has taken formerly separate pieces of legislation and put them into the omnibus bill. I regret it has done that for all the reasons I have already discussed.
There will be a lot of work to do in committee, particularly with the issue having to do with cruelty to animals, not just in terms of that conceptual leap but in terms of definitions and just exactly what is meant here. It may be that I do not know what the government has in mind. There are issues to be looked at in terms of cruelty to animals that may not have to do with the destruction of animals but with the treatment of animals in factory farms. I am not even sure it comes within the ambit of the legislation but I know there are many Canadians who are becoming concerned with the way in which their food is being produced, as well as the living conditions of animals. In some cases it is more the pre-dying conditions of animals that are raised and harvested for human food purposes. This is something that obviously has to continue to happen but surely there must be a way in some instances to do this better than we do now. However, that may well be outside the range of the bill, and I digress.
Another area of controversy in the bill has to do with the firearms legislation. Bill C-15 proposes to put in place certain efficiencies with respect to registration so that people can register on line, et cetera. It would change some definitions.
Here again, although very few of us in the House would look forward to a debate centred specifically on this legislation, or on firearms registration and control because it has been so controversial, I still have to say that it would have been better to deal with this by itself. There is already a lot of suspicion out in the community about what the government may or may not be up to with firearms registration, and changing definitions in the body of a big omnibus bill gives rise to a lot of anxiety and suspicion, which may or may not be warranted.
I and perhaps other members of parliament have had a great deal of mail from people who enjoy the sport of paintball. People wonder whether or not the definitions in the bill are designed in some way, either accidentally or intentionally, to eliminate the game of paintball. I had my staff check with the firearms control folks and they say that paintball will not be covered, but others say that it might be. Therefore this is obviously something that we need to address in committee not just with respect to paintball but with respect to any new definition of what constitutes a firearm.
If it is the government's intention to restrict things that are not now restricted, such as the registration of things that are now not registered, it should be very upfront about it. It should not hide it in some type of microcosmic detail about length or width of a barrel, how many joules, how many feet per second or whatever it is that is used to describe the speed of what comes out of the cannon. It should be very clear with the Canadian public about what it is up to. At this point I do not have that feeling. Maybe the government is not up to anything at all but it has not been very clear about making that clear either. This is something that will have to be dealt with in committee.
As the member from the Bloc said, another element of the bill deals with the whole question of judicial error, wrongful conviction and the setting up of new procedures in respect of that. Again, this is something that could have been done better on its own. After what we have learned with regard to Donald Marshall, Guy Morin, David Milgaard and variety of other occasions, surely an attempt to put in place new provisions with respect to how we deal with wrongful conviction or judicial error would have been something that would have merited its own legislation and debate and yet the government has chosen not to do that.
For all those reasons I want to register our strongest objection to the way in which the government is dealing with the bill and the fact that it brought in the bill in the first place as an omnibus bill.
The minister in her presentation said that we had an omnibus bill in 1994 and 1996 and she cited examples as if it were some kind of virtue or justifying precedent. The fact is omnibus bills have always been offensive to members of parliament. Omnibus bills have always allowed governments to put members of the opposition, and presumably many of their own backbenchers, in a difficult position. Members who want to vote for A and are against B must choose to vote for A and explain why they also voted for B, or vice versa. It does not make for good law-making. It does not make for good politics in the sense of having clarity as to what people are for and against.
This is the same government that brought in the clarity bill which said it was important that the question and the verdict be clear. The government is engaged in an exercise that is quite the opposite. It is engaged in an exercise which, by design, is intended to confuse Canadians as to who is for what and in what context.
Having said that, I look forward to the bill going to committee and to hearing what I am sure will be a great many witnesses. I am sure we will hear concerns about its cruelty to animal clauses, its firearms control and registration clauses and perhaps a number of other issues. I regret very much that we could not have dealt today with some of the clauses having to do with child pornography, luring on the Internet, home invasion and disarming a police officer. I regret that we could not have dealt with that in the same way we dealt with Bill S-4 earlier. I do not think we would have or should have dealt with it that quickly. It certainly could have gone to committee, witnesses could have been heard and this kind of thing could have been on the books very soon. Instead, because the government chose to play politics with other things in the bill, it may well take a lot longer. The Liberals will answer to the public for that, not the opposition.