Madam Speaker, I am privileged to speak to Bill C-15B which contains unfortunately provisions that are continuations of some of the greatest flaws in the legislative drafting practices of the current government. It behooves us to look at what some of these themes are and to think about what could be done to avoid doing them both in this law and other laws in the future.
There are three themes. First, this is an omnibus bill, but not as bad as it started off being. However it is still an omnibus bill dealing with more than one topic. Second, it strips basic legal protections from individuals who are accused of making offences under the law. This is a current theme that is also quite strong in Liberal legislative drafting practices. Third, it contains vague regulatory guarantees and requires us to take it on faith that the government would undertake the protections that it has refused to place within the law. At the very same time we are finding these guarantees withheld we are told to trust the government. The guarantees would be placed in the regulations at a later point in time subject to the government's arbitrary will.
These are three themes that are strongly present in the general legislative practices of the government. For example, Bill C-36 was an extraordinary omnibus bill that contained provisions like rules relating to the Internet and appointment of judges as well as the enactment of provisions relating to preventative search and detention, and provisions that related to the enactment of United Nations conventions and so on.
This law follows the same general pattern. It contains unrelated provisions dealing with cruelty to animals and dealing with firearms. I cannot see any reason why these two subject matters are contained in the same bill. There is no logical connection between them whatsoever.
The bill was worse before. It contained measures relating to child pornography which fortunately were split away from the bill and are now contained in Bill C-15A.
It is difficult to deal intelligently and to vote rationally on a bill that is effectively a package deal, a part of which might or might not be acceptable to an individual member. How does one vote one's conscience when something good and bad is contained in the same bill?
To some degree we have divided the good from the bad in the bill, but the bill should have been subdivided into several sub-measures.
This is a trend that has existed in Canadian legislative practice for some length of time. It has been a disastrous practice that nearly split up the country on some occasions. I am thinking of the Meech Lake accord which contained five unrelated constitutional amendments as a single package. They all had to be passed. Most Canadians were quite comfortable with certain aspects of the Meech Lake accord. Other aspects were quite contentious, particularly the distinct society clause. However they all had to be done together.
The Charlottetown accord was even worse. It was a package that effectively would have gutted the entire Constitution and cobbled it back together in a vast document that was several times as long as the entire United States constitution. It was presented as a single package deal. Had it been broken into a series of smaller items not all of them could have be passed, but many could have been. Some of them were good; a lot of them were terrible.
This practice has continued on in Bill C-15B and it should be stopped. It should not be a practice that occurs at all in Canadian legislation.
I will turn to the stripping of basic legal protections. This is another thing that occurs frequently in current Liberal legislation. I recall Bill C-36 and the way in which basic legal protections of Canadians were stripped away under the preventive detention provisions of that bill. That bill made it possible to be prosecuted for one's religious beliefs. Amazing, but true.
Bill C-5 has provisions which I am attempting to amend. I have several amendments before the House that deal with the question of mens rea, whether one must have a guilty mind prior to being found guilty of destroying an animal habitat or destroying an endangered species. That law denies the requirement that one must have a guilty mind, a mens rea, in order to be found culpable.
This law does much the same thing. I will say it is not as bad in this respect as Bill C-5, but it is still problematic. It takes the aspects of the criminal code that deal with animal cruelty and removes them from the property offences section and moves them to a special new section.
I cannot determine what the legislative reason for this is, that is to say what is the need for this, but I can determine what the result would be. The result is we would remove the various protections that are built in under the property parts of the criminal code. There are certain basic protections that are not accompanying this section of the law as it moves from one part of the criminal code to the other.
The phrase legal justification or excuse and with colour of right in subsection 429(2) of the criminal code currently provides protection to those who commit any kind of property offence. That would cease to be available as a protection.
It is a funny thing that those on the government side of the House are always happy to attack members on this side of the House as somehow being out to strip those who are accused of offences against the law of their legal protections and legal rights. The fact is, and the record will show this, it has been entirely the other way during the course of the government.
This law would strip those who are accused of offences of basic protections. Protections, which are inherent to our traditional rule of law, to the common law, and to our entire legal structure, would once again be stripped out in Bill C-15B, Bill C-5, and Bill C-36. This is a consistent, unacceptable, inexcusable and entirely avoidable pattern.
The meritorious goals found in parts of each of these three pieces of legislation could all have been achieved without stripping Canadians of these basic legal protections. They are absolutely not needed. That should be corrected in this law. Or, potentially, if the government were unwilling to protect it, then the law in my opinion, on that basis alone, should be dropped from the order paper.
I want to turn to the offer of vague regulatory guarantees that protections which are not included in the law would be included later on. We are told by the minister that this would be taken care of. There would be protections for those who are accused or charged, but they would not be included in the law, they would be included elsewhere.
The record of governments, not this government in particular but of governments in general, of protecting individuals administratively when they are not protected by law is very poor. That is the whole reason why our system of government is based upon the rule of law.
I encourage the minister and all members of the government to look at the classic academic text written by Albert Venn Dicey which deals with the question of the rule of law. It is a book called An Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution published in the 1880s and republished in many editions prior to Dicey's death around the time of the first world war. He deals with the question of the rule of law at length.