Mr. Speaker, I am very honoured to participate in the debate today. I want to say at the outset that I was quite shocked at the speech given by the parliamentary secretary from the government side. I have never seen such a wimpy attitude toward defending something that is worth defending.
We keep on saying that we do not want to offend anyone, that we want to make sure people can do or say anything they want and therefore we do not dare lift a finger and in any way suggest that desecrating our flag might be wrong. People would probably say that it is a right that is protected under our charter. We certainly have it wrong if that is what we are saying. It is almost beyond comprehension to me.
I am not particularly a flag waver. This may come as a surprise to some people since it is known that historically I was involved in what came to be known as the flag flap a couple of years ago. However that was quite unplanned. It was a reaction which I made at a time when I was challenging something that I believed should be defended.
It was at a time when one of the members of the separatist Bloc Party insisted that we not display a flag in the House. I felt that I could not allow a member of a party that wanted to break up our country to tell me that I had to put away my flag. It was a plain defence reaction. When challenged in that way I knew I had to stand up for that symbol of our wonderful country.
Unfortunately, it did not go the way I intended. The Bloc member appealed to the Speaker at that time calling it a prop. We know that props are not permitted in the House. Even in this debate I cannot hold up but an imaginary flag or bring any props into the House. The Speaker ruled that in fact I could not display this prop and I was dissuaded from doing so.
I made the mistake of defying the Speaker at that time. I said that if we had to take the flag away in here then it was all worth less. It then became a controversy which I later regretted and apologized most sincerely for having defied the Speaker but certainly not for having defended the Canadian flag.
Our flag represents very hard won freedoms. The flag we are talking about today is the flag that represents for many of our immigrants the hope for freedom and opportunity which they were denied in their own countries.
I just confirmed that on July 1 I will be participating in a celebration of inviting new citizens into our country and giving them their citizenships, as many MPs do on July 1. I remember a number of years ago at one of those ceremonies there was a relatively young lady, of course at my age everyone is relatively young. She was living in this country and was about to receive her citizenship. She had tears running down her cheeks and just kept saying “thank you, thank you, thank you” with a broken voice.
I could relate to that because my grandmother always said that, too, having escaped from a country in which the family was under threat of death. My dad was just a youngster at the time when my grandparents brought their family to Canada. My grandmother so often said that Canada was a wonderful country and how thankful she was to be in a country of freedom and opportunity.
Since 1965, if I remember right, we have had a new Canadian flag. This was not the same flag when I was a youngster in school. This may come as a surprise to the pages, but by the time the current flag came into being I had already graduated from university. It is ancient history to them but it is pretty contemporary history to me that this flag came to be.
I remember the debate that was held at that time about the Canadian flag. There were of course various defenders and detractors of the flag. However, having adopted it, it is now the symbol of our country and it is recognized around the world as the flag of a country of freedom and opportunity, probably unequaled in the world. People are literally risking their lives in order to come to this country.
My colleague has come forward with a motion, which I was most pleased to second, that is the most gentle of motions. There can be no member in the House who could come up with any rational reason to be against it. All the motion says is that we want to refer the issue to a committee that will work through the details of coming up with acceptable legislation so that the wilful desecration of our flag as an act of disrespect will be subject to penalties.
The definition of desecration and the penalties would be decided by a multi-party committee so there can be no serious objection to the motion today. Members who vote against the motion today would be saying that they do not want to even talk about it. They are ready to give up. They are ready to put their hands in the air, raise an imaginary white flag, the flag of surrender, and give up. They are not prepared to stand up for what is right in the country. They do not want to even talk about it. They do not want it to go to a committee and they do not want to discuss it any further.
I believe that members who stop to think about what the motion says have no defensible reason to vote against it.
I want to quickly address the issue of freedom of expression. We do not yield that as a universal unassailable right. We have laws in the country, and rightly so, that there are some words that we cannot use. A classic example is that a person cannot in a crowded theatre in an evening yell “fire, fire”. It would put people's lives at risk. If a person did that and people were hurt, he or she would be subject to criminal charges even though the person may only have been expressing his or her freedom of speech.
We have laws that do not permit us to counsel other people to commit murder or to commit suicide, although I think the one to counsel people to commit suicide has now been pulled from the books. However, when I was a youngster it was against the rules to counsel people to take their own lives.
I could say that I have the freedom of speech to say to some young person or older person that he or she would be better off to end it all. However I do not have that freedom of speech because that is against the law.
I do not have the freedom of speech to speak against an identifiable group of people and promote hatred toward them. That right is taken away, and quite rightly so. Even within the confines of our charter we may not do that.
There are some exceptions of course. In the last election campaign we had the case where the then minister of immigration thought it was quite acceptable to take an identifiable group of people and say all sorts of horrible things about them that were untrue and which would then subsequently produce a great aversion and a hatred toward the group. It happened to be the Canadian Alliance. We had to live with that and accept it. I guess that is part of the political process. Personally I think it would have been quite legitimate for us to have launched a legal action in that case but we chose not to do that.
We have accurately and justifiably put limitations on the expression of our speech. Therefore I do not think there is any reason not to say, yes, we can speak in opposition to the government but that we must do it respectfully and that our debates should be logical, rational and persuasive. I do not believe in the kind of debate that involves violence and overturning cars. That is not debate.
I once was asked to speak at a meeting and there was a small group there who started chanting and basically drowned me out. They deprived me of my free speech. I did not want to deprive them of theirs so I just walked away and let them do that.
We must have the right to protect our flag in this country. I urge all members to support the bill because it is a proper limitation on our total and absolute freedom of expression, which is well justified.