Mr. Speaker, the member for Langley--Abbotsford would be interested to hear that I agree with the main point that he made in his presentation.
I feel very strongly that laws should not be based on race. They can be based on economic situation, even ethnicity in certain instances, but race alone, people are always the same regardless of their race. It is other factors that make them different, and the law can take an account of those other factors but not race.
I would suggest to him, if he does not mind if I extend my comments for a bit, that the analogy he might consider is the situation in Winnipeg where there is a lot of urban poverty. That urban poverty involves not only aboriginal young people. It also involves non-aboriginal young people, people of other ethnicities, people who have come to Canada from Asia or Europe or somewhere else in the world. Yet the amendment would suggest that, all things being equal among the poor young people in Winnipeg who might be tempted to crime, the aboriginal young people should be treated differently, and I would agree that this is unacceptable.
I also sympathize with the government, however, because this is something that was raised in the charter of rights and I think has created a pattern of legislation that derives from an original mistake, if you will, but the member for Langley--Abbotsford raises another point in his speech that I found most fascinating, and that is this whole question of how this House should respond to amendments from the Senate. The problem, as he rightly points out, is that if a government stays in power for a very long time then it will dominate the Senate, and he was suggesting that this amendment would never have made it through the committee and it is going back to this House possibly through a back door.
Well, I do not know whether that is a fair analogy but I will say to him that perhaps parliament, perhaps members on both sides of the House, should consider Senate amendments in the same sense as private members' bills. In other words, perhaps Senate amendments that really do not reflect the will of the elected representatives should be treated when they come to the House as free votes. It will be interesting to see the outcome of this particular vote.