Mr. Speaker, I will recap in simple terms the nature of Bill C-5 for my constituents who might be listening back home.
The government has decided it will pander but the question is, pander to whom? It is not listening to the environmentalists. It is not listening to the farmers and corporations that will be affected by this bill. It is not listening to any of the people who will be losing jobs. I do not know exactly to whom it is paying attention. I think the Liberals are doing a bit of navel gazing with regard to the bill. I cannot find the group they are supposedly paying attention to with regard to the bill.
The gist of the bill is to impute criminal intent on people who may harm a species on their private land and to not fairly compensate them in terms of the protection of those species.
I would like to rename the bill. I do not think it actually has anything to do with species at risk. I think it has everything to do with property at risk. It should be called the property at risk act.
Think of the fundamental things this legislature does. We are supposed to protect property. We are supposed to protect people's individual freedoms and their liberties. That is what I understand part of our job to be. This bill is directly opposed to that.
I will mention somebody south of the border because the Liberals are borrowing on American experiences in the American endangered species act, the ESA, as they put forward this bill.
My favourite president of the United States is Thomas Jefferson. He was the third president of the United States. Instead of having the words life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in the American constitution, he wanted to have protection not only for property, but what was absolutely crucial was that he wanted protection for private property. He recognized that there was a substantial difference between what some would construe to be public property and what would be properly termed as private property. Jefferson believed that respecting people's private property rights was absolutely fundamental in having a just society.
The stamp act to levy taxes upon American colonists was one of the reasons they had a revolutionary war. The government did not respect people's private property rights. It did not take into account that it had taxation without representation.
The bill before us goes against all the fundamental ideas. It goes against very Canadian ideas. One of the rationales for even having the other place, the Senate, in the first place was that it would serve as a protection for property. This House would serve the commoners and the Senate in a sense would be for the property owners. The Senate's job was to make sure those people were not overrun by mob rule. That was a basic understanding of the protection of private property rights.
Bill C-5 goes against that because it does not guarantee fair and reasonable compensation for property owners and resource users who suffer losses. That is absurd. The government will be able to shut people out of livelihoods and jobs without any type of fair compensation. People should not be forced to do so at the expense of their livelihoods.
This reminds me of another issue that is famously tied to the government. It has to do with the Canadian Wheat Board. Andy McMechan, a farmer who grew his own grain, wanted to sell it outside the monopoly of the Canadian Wheat Board. He was jailed for that. This farmer was put in shackles over that very issue. He was not allowed to dispose of his private property as he saw fit due to the regulation and the meddling.
What a perverse turnover of the whole idea of liberal democracy and the very term liberal when we think of where the Liberal Party started off at the turn of the century. The Liberals in Laurier's day stood for free trade. They did not stand for protectionism. They stood for the freedom of individuals. Yet 100 years later, almost Orwellian, Nineteen Eighty-Four in terms of the doublespeak, the Liberals are actually adamantly opposed to those things now. They are coming out against personal liberties and personal freedoms and are going after grabbing private property and not giving it due respect. It is such a perverse topsy-turvy relationship they have had with this issue.
There is a criminal liability aspect to this. Criminal liability requires that there actually be some form of intent. As I understand it, and this goes back to the Romans and Latin terms, there has to be an actus reus, being the action that is performed, and in this case for example it would be harming a species, but there also has to be mens rea. That is the difference between manslaughter and murder. There has to be mens rea, the mental intent, to have intended to do that harm.
In this case the government has totally ignored these traditions that have been established for 1,000 years.