Mr. Speaker, I will begin with the last point first. What I said, if my hon. colleague had not been running in and out of the chamber and would have actually been sitting in his seat paying attention to my remarks, was that my constituents are conveying to me repeatedly that when it comes to protecting children they do not give a damn about the charter. If the charter is the impediment to protecting children or the rights of the criminal, I can tell the hon. member which side my constituents come down on. I do not know what side he comes down on.
It seems to me, in the nine and a half years that I have been here, that the Liberals are more concerned about the rights of the criminals than they are about the rights of the victims. If that is not the case, then why in heaven's name does Bill C-23 even say that there is concern about the privacy of the sex offenders?
One of my colleagues, the member for Langley—Abbotsford, has been trying for nine and a half years, ever since he came to this place after the 1993 election, to have a victim's bill of rights passed by the chamber, but to no avail. If the member for Mississauga South cares so much about the rights of victims, children, women, and the most vulnerable members of our society, why has his party been holding up any drafting, and certainly any passage, of a victim's bill of rights? That is the first point that he made. So that it is clear where I stand on the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, certainly I support it.
The other thing is that I have often heard it remarked that it was too bad that when Mr. Trudeau was designing his Charter of Rights and Freedoms he did not also design a charter of rights and responsibilities to go along with it. I hear that from people out in the real world all the time. Perhaps something the hon. member for Mississauga South would like to consider as well is that in addition to a victim's bill of rights, maybe we should start working on a charter of responsibilities to accompany the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
The member said a number of times today that he was concerned that we could not include retroactivity without running afoul of the justice practices or the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Let us try it. That is my point. Is the chamber not in the process of drafting law? Are we the lawmakers or have we, through the Liberal government, handed off that job to the courts? Increasingly, that is what my constituents are saying.
Why is it that we are so afraid of being overruled by the Supreme Court of Canada that we will not draft and introduce legislation that people are calling upon us to draft, introduce and pass? We seem to be afraid that the Supreme of Court will overrule it or interpret it some other way than what we intended. Why is that? I do not understand it and people in my riding do not understand it. We should be the lawmakers. We should not be saying that we would like to include retroactivity, but perhaps it would run afoul of the justice practices or the charter.
First of all, we should decide if it is the right thing to do. Then we should do it and use all the powers of the Parliament of Canada to ensure that if we do believe it is the right thing that it stands up. If it does not stand up, then we should fix the problem. We should be in control, not the Supreme Court of Canada.