Mr. Speaker, raising the issues that we are bringing to the floor is to make the point that we too believe the House of Commons is a place where issues that Canadians care about should be addressed. We are saying that we have to reassert the power of the House of Commons and we are doing that with bringing the issues of Canadians into play.
I will get back to some of the issues that are being addressed here. I think the official opposition is bringing forth in this motion somewhat of a shopping list on rights that it wants to remove from the Constitution. In the motion it complains that the courts have said that all Canadians are equal, including gays and lesbians. Because the Alliance is opposed to equality rights for gays and lesbians, it attacks the courts which are simply doing their jobs as told to them in the Constitution.
This shows that the Alliance believes in the Animal Farm approach to equality. It says that all Canadians are equal, but some should be more equal than others. The motion says that if someone is gay or lesbian, that person should not be equal and the law should sanction bigotry against those Canadians. The only problem with this narrow-minded concept of heterosexual superiority is that as soon as we say some Canadians can be legally allowed to have fewer rights, then in reality all Canadians have fewer rights.
I recall reading Animal Farm , the excellent short story by George Orwell. If anyone remembers George Orwell's Animal Farm , the farm was the attempt at the creation of a utopia represented by the animals driving humans off the farm. While the notion of self-government by the animals was great for a time, eventually some of the animals took over and decided that they were more important than all the other animals. They therefore changed their basic slogan that all animals are created equal to some animals are more equal than others.
Another premise of this motion is that judges are out of line. Judges interpret laws passed by this place. That is their job. Parliament and nine provincial legislators passed the Constitution, including the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Judges have started interpreting this law passed by this place.
If the official opposition has problems with the equality provisions of the charter, it should say that and not hide behind attacking the judiciary. I support maintaining judicial independence. It is fundamental that judges be able to implement the laws without political interference.
I did not hear the official opposition attacking the Supreme Court when it upheld the Latimer conviction, even though there was considerable public debate over the case. The court properly, in my opinion, said that the rights of a disabled victim are equal to all other Canadians. I do not remember the Alliance standing and calling for the judges' heads on that one. It seems to pick and choose.
Another strange aspect of this is the contradiction between this motion and the opposition's obsession with becoming American. The opposition has spent an inordinate amount of time trying to say that Canadians should be American. Its cultural policy is, let the Americans do it. Its defence policy is, let us do what the Americans say. Its foreign policy is to follow the Americans in whatever adventure the Pentagon decides is best for it.
If the opposition was really pro-American it would never put forward such an anti-American bill, I would suggest, because in fact it would have understood that one of the great strengths of the American system is the protection of basic individual rights as stated by the U.S. bill of rights and protected by an independent judiciary. These things are central to the American system of law and government. Indeed, the U.S. supreme court has been more activist than Canadian courts on important issues such as segregation in the schools, abortion, due process for criminals, the use of the death penalty, cruel punishment for prisoners and have given an absolute freedom of speech blanket to even pornographers, but the official opposition seems to have forgotten that.
In conclusion, I wish the Alliance had decided it had something more useful to talk about today, such as the environment, health care, peace, or the crumbling state of our cities. Instead we see this myopia, this sense of betrayal by our courts which in fact I believe is one of the strengths of our democracy.