Mr. Speaker, I want to congratulate my colleague for his well-reasoned speech. I do not agree with everything he said but I do agree with the way he laid it out in the recent debate that he made.
I want to say that for some of the same reasons he is going to support the change to the definition of marriage, I am not going to support the change to the definition of marriage. The vast number of constituents who have contacted me by phone, e-mail or letter or who have dropped by the office to have personal conversations have overwhelmingly supported the traditional definition of marriage, unlike the constituents in his riding.
I want to make one point that was alluded to by my friend's colleague from Lac-Saint-Louis. He touched on a very important philosophical point which really has not been mentioned by anybody else and has not been expounded on. It has to do with the intrinsic value of marriage.
He talked about the Ontario court decision laying out the analogy of marriage being the same as criminal law or banking, almost as though he were comparing marriage to the colour of the carpet that we would choose in this chamber. It is very much different from that and my colleague from Lac-Saint-Louis was alluding to that, that there is intrinsic value in marriage itself and that by changing the definition of marriage, we do not actually recognize those intrinsic values, the bedrock of marriage as the foundation of our society. I want to quickly quote from the Ontario court decision. At point 129 it states:
The difficulty with the Attorney General of Canada's submission is its focus. It is not disputed that marriage has been a stabilizing and effective societal institution. The couples are not seeking to abolish the institution of marriage; they are seeking access to it. Thus, the task of the Attorney General of Canada is not to show how marriage has benefited society as a whole, which we agree is self-evident, but to demonstrate that maintaining marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution is rationally connected to the objectives of marriage, which in our view is not self-evident. What is self-evident is that marriage is intrinsically good and has provided the bedrock of our society.