Mr. Speaker, I have always believed that the people who crafted our charter and crafted our laws were people of great wisdom who saw society as a very large issue, and that they crafted certain clauses, especially section 1 of the charter regarding reasonable limits, to enshrine the possibility that institutions that have been with us in the long term should be protected, that reasonable limits should be put on it to prevent the fact that societal mores, which evolve at a tremendous pace, should not interfere with basic institutional frameworks that have been with us, in this particular case, over the millenna. This is why I disagree fundamentally with the Ontario Court of Appeal, which compared marriage to banking and criminal law, as if marriage is one of those things that evolves, that today it is marriage between a man and a woman plus marriage between people of the same sex, and tomorrow it will be marriage of three, four, and five people together, because society evolves that way.
It seems to me that we should have exercised far more caution. We should have taken the step that the British have taken, which is to say this is an institution that has been there for thousands of years, so let us take our time and look at it deeply.
There have been judgments, but there is still the Supreme Court. We could have appealed. It would have given us two years to have debates here in the House of Commons to find solutions that would respect the rights of one another. I do not think we have done this, and because of a hasty, injudicious decision, we are now faced with tremendous polarization in society and, if the example of my riding is such, then I think this society is deeply into a malaise and is very polarized on this issue.