Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to address the House on the bill and the amendments.
I want to make it absolutely clear that the Canadian Alliance does not in any fashion condone or support cruelty to animals. We believe that cruelty to animals should be vigorously enforced by our criminal justice system and that wrongdoers receive severe and just penalties for cruelty to animals.
When the bill was in the House last fall I believe, we had concerns about the wording of the amendments and the changes to the Criminal Code. We were in close contact with many groups and organizations that are involved with the care of animals: the livestock industry, the hog industry, the poultry industry, people involved in medical research and a long list of other people, fishers and so on. They had major concerns about the definition of cruelty to animals under this legislation.
When we looked at the wording of the legislation we could see why there would be concerns. The wording was very wide, very loose, very ambiguous and very confusing. The Canadian Alliance tried, through committee and amendments in the House, to get the draftsmanship of that section amended and straightened out. At that time the government would not listen to our appeal and our concerns.
The other concern that legitimate caregivers of animals and people who work with animals had was that the amendments had the effect of eliminating a longstanding defence that people had toward cruelty to animal charges, a defence that I think, in all fairness, was a legitimate one. Government officials told us that we should not be concerned because that really was not the intent. However our position was that we should make it crystal clear and leave that type of defence in the Criminal Code so the courts and everyone would know what the intent of Parliament was but the government refused to do that.
Fortunately, the other House has addressed the concerns that we had on some of the wording, the definition and on the defence area. We support those amendments. There are provisions in the bill that we reject and we support the government's position. That would be amendments two and three.
We are in close contact with people who are involved in providing care to animals, livestock and agricultural producers and so on. It could be fairly said that a lot of those producers are pleased with the amendments and support them. With that being the case, we support them as well. We feel it does take away a lot of the concern that we have with the bill.
There are other provisions in the bill that are far from perfect, which I wish the other House had addressed as well, but that is not the nature of the amendments so I will not deal with that today.
As a final point, the opposition and particularly the Canadian Alliance in committee and in the House made a huge effort to address the deficiencies in the bill when it was in this House and we were stonewalled by the government. It would not listen to us. It now comes back from the other House with pretty much the same sort of changes we supported in this House in the first instance. If the government had listened to the opposition in the first place we would not have to be doing a lot of this follow up work at this stage.
Our basic position is that we support the amendments proposed with the exceptions of amendments two and three which we reject.