Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to make some comments on this opposition day motion today. I will be splitting my time with the member for Halifax.
First I would like to say that I wish the opposition had taken this important and rare opportunity to have a debate in the House, a public trust, to raise an issue that the public actually cares about. Frankly, my constituents do not come to my office or call to complain about judges. They are concerned about real problems for real people.
I have spoken to people this week about issues around disability and around the high costs of insurance, car insurance, and pharmaceutical drugs. They care about the fisheries; we are facing a crisis in the fisheries in the east. They care about the environment. There are many issues that they care about and I do not see why we cannot be looking at those issues here today.
Instead, opposition members have decided to debate this motion. They have decided that their political future depends on retreating into a campaign of divisiveness, of playing on misunderstanding of and bigotry against gays and lesbians and of preying on parents' fears for their children by attacking the courts, the one institution unable by law to defend itself. It is sad that the opposition has descended to this level. Let us look at the motion:
That this House call upon the government to bring in measures to protect and reassert the will of Parliament against certain court decisions that: (a) threaten the traditional definition of marriage as decided by the House as, “the union of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others”; (b) grant house arrest to child sexual predators and make it easier for child sexual predators to produce and possess child pornography; and (c) grant prisoners the right to vote.
That is the justice agenda of the opposition. In fact, it is an agenda of creating fear, spreading misinformation, preying on maternalistic and paternalistic fears for children, and opposing equality. Opposition members seem compelled to find a murderer behind every bush in spite of a falling crime rate. They are compelled to take away the historical rights of first nations communities and generally be opposed to individual equality rights enshrined in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This motion shows how they have shrunk in the polls. They have been reduced to attacking the one group that cannot talk back: the judiciary.
Frankly, I think it is a good thing the NDP is in Parliament so that Canadians have a real opposition voice here, one that talks about real and important issues like health care. The NDP is the only party raising the fact that the government has continued to underfund health care and is not implementing the Romanow report. We are the only party keeping the government accountable for the fact that it is still underfunding the health system by over $5 billion, according to Romanow. We are the party raising the alarm about endangered public health policy across the country and how this mess has shown itself in the haphazard responses to SARS and the West Nile virus. A plan could have stopped SARS, but we have to rely on the brave doctors and nurses to risk their lives in a policy vacuum.
The NDP is also spending its time talking about the smog crisis that is covering our country every spring and--