Mr. Speaker, do forgive me. I should keep on the topic. The topic of my remarks will be the amendment and the subamendment before the House.
I would like to begin by commenting on some of the remarks made by the member for South Shore. Hansard will show that the member for South Shore got himself into a contradiction in his argument where he supported the original amendment and its call for particular attention to be paid by the judges to the circumstances of aboriginal young persons.
The member, as Hansard will show, made the argument that aboriginal did not really mean race. What it really meant was something to do with societal, as he said. If that is the case, I think the member for South Shore was correctly brought up short by the member for the Bloc. If he feels that that amendment and aboriginal refers to something that is exclusively societal, then he should be supporting the Bloc's subamendment that calls on the bill to be rejected because it does not reflect the distinct character of Quebec.
The distinct character of Quebec, I would suggest, is societal, just as the distinct character of P.E.I., of Vancouver, of Saskatchewan, of Hamilton or of Linden. Wherever we are in the country, there are societal differences that have nothing to do with race. In fact we will find aboriginals in every part of Canadian society. The suggestion that the word aboriginal does not refer to race is a specious suggestion.
Let us pursue this whole idea of aboriginal and society for just a moment as well. A member of the reform party asked whether or not judges would be expected to determine the aboriginalness of the defendants before them by blood test. In fact, it can be determined by an Indian status card which is determined in turn not by the societal context in which aboriginals find themselves. It is not a matter of whether aboriginals are on reserve or not on reserve. The Indian status card is determined solely by the ancestry of the individual concerned. In other words, his genetic makeup, his race, his blood. I would agree, by any standard, this is not where this society and our laws ought to be going. I have always felt very opposed to the suggestion that anyone in our society should get any special attention or any special privilege based solely on race.
I will give an example of the type of dilemma that the original amendment presents for us. In Oakville, which is one of the richest communities in Canada per capita, one can easily find people who are aboriginals who come from families who are very rich, who have jobs in the high tech industry, whose kids go to private schools and on and on it goes. Yet these young people who come from these families who have all the wealth of the nation can have and do have Indian status cards.
What do we have here by this original amendment? We have the suggestion to the courts that when youth appear before them, when a crime is committed in an affluent area of urban Canada, the judge is called upon to take into account special circumstances among the youth before him if one happens to be an aboriginal. This is unacceptable and I do not and cannot support the amendment. It just flies in the face of everything I believe Canada ought to be about. We are different in our language. We are different in our ethnicity. We are different in our countries that our parents came from, but we are all one as human beings and I absolutely refuse to distinguish people solely by race.
I find myself in the awkward circumstance of actually being on the same side on this question as the Canadian Alliance. This has happened extremely rarely in the eight years that I have been in the House. However this is a House of Commons. This is a place where we have open debate and where it is very important for all of us to express our true feelings no matter where we sit in the House.
However another issue has come forward here that I think is so interesting. That is the question of whether or not a member of the government side should feel the same obligation to support a bill or a measure before the House that emanates from the Senate.
If amendments emanating from the Senate were treated as free votes that would empower the Senate. It would not diminish the Senate as was suggested by the member for South Shore. What it would mean is the Senate could then feel that if it had before it a piece of legislation, which it was really concerned about that had passed through the House of Commons, it could hope that if it did put an amendment forward, the amendment would go before the entire House of Commons and the government members would treat it not as a vote to be whipped by the government side, but treat as an expression of conscience, an expression of genuine concern from the Senate and that it should receive the individual consideration of every member in the House.
I think there is the potential there for a parliamentary reform, and we are always saying here that we should try to reform this House, that would be most welcomed. I do not want to see an elected Senate because I do not think it advances the progress of democracy. The model we see in the United States where there is an elected senate and elected house of representatives is not an efficient model as far as democracy or the advancement of legislation, we have a good model here.
It is true that the Senate as an unelected body has not been functioning as effectively as it might. If the Senate truly acted as the conscience of this parliament, then the way to give it that conscience and give it that empowerment is to treat Senate amendments when they do come back to this House, as free votes.