Mr. Speaker, it will come as no surprise to anyone in the House that I would like to speak very strongly against this motion.
This is a deeply emotional debate and I hope that during the days that we debate the issue of marriage and the definition of marriage that we will do so with respect.
I respect the rights and the opinions of those who for religious reasons do not support the expansion of the definition of marriage, but for me this is a matter of rule of law and equality.
In section 15 of our charter we have enshrined minority rights. This is very clear. In section 2 of the charter we have also counterbalanced the rights of religious freedom, for religions to follow their own dictates and their own moral laws. Neither of these are contraindicated in an expansion of the definition of marriage to include same sex couples.
The law is a living thing and our charter gave voice to that. I want to quote Pierre Elliott Trudeau when he was speaking to the proposed charter. He said:
Perhaps a good place to begin is to ask what role we think the law should play in Canada. Is it to be, as is so often it now seems to be, little more than a set of rules...a body of statutes and judicial decisions which act as precedents for our conduct? Do we give the impression of persons constantly looking back over their shoulders, attempting to see what was done in the past? The law, by this definition, is static. Rather than serving us, we find that it controls us. It is a rigid framework within which we must remain, an inflexible harness which would bind us to the status quo, and intimidates our attempt to change. Surely this is not the proper role of law.
Properly employed, the law is the instrument which will permit the preservation of our traditions and the pursuit of ideas which our society cherishes. These ideals or values are many, but the most basic of them, I suggest, are the freedom and dignity of the individual. If we as individuals do not have the opportunity to stand erect, to retain our self-respect, to move freely throughout our country unhindered by any artificial impediment, then we have not created in this land the political climate that we are capable of creating. We will not have made use of the law as we should.
This was Pierre Elliott Trudeau when he was speaking as justice minister to the charter. In that charter he proposed that the rights of four different categories be constitutionally protected, rights such as freedom of expression, freedom of conscience and religion, freedom of assembly and association and legal rights such as security of life, liberty and property, the presumption of innocence and the right to be protected against self-incrimination, and egalitarian rights, the right not to be discriminated against.
These are the things we are debating here today in this Parliament when we discuss the issue of moving forward and evolving the law. Mr. Trudeau said as well about the charter:
In short, we should not underestimate the strengths of our society and assume that the public interest will automatically suffer if the interest of the individual is further protected.
Over the course of time we have in this very Parliament , in this very country and indeed around the world looked at the status quo and we have tried to preserve it. We did so, as we heard, for millennia. We have tried to say that this is how the world should be and how it should continue to be. Take for example women. For millennia women were considered to be chattel. They were seen as unworthy to be part of the public institutions of Parliament. They were seen as unworthy to vote and they were seen as simple possessions.
I point out that this same Parliament, in its wisdom, has sought to protect the status quo with regard to women. There were debates in the House, as reported in the Globe and Mail on April 12, 1918, when women were seeking the vote. I will paraphrase what Mr. H. A. Fortier from Labelle said. He said that in fact the movement was one of the forms of feminism spreading around the world and that the matter should be studied before the government decided to make such a radical reform. He thought that a woman's place was in the home.
Bringing up the fear that if women should vote or if women should be allowed into Parliament, the danger to families and to family life would be absolute, the Globe and Mail article reported that Mr. DuTremblay said that women had their influence which they exercised through the medium of the home. He said that in the province of Quebec they had large families and their domestic duties employed all of their time and he thought it unwise to tempt women into political life and that it was not the time for government to try to make experiments.
In Paris, even then, the chamber of deputies talked about the natural order, which is another argument that is brought forward whenever there is to be change, that this is not how nature meant it. I quote Deputy Lafagette:
No one can do anything against the natural inequality of the sexes. If we pretended to create absolute equality the whole moral system and social laws would collapse and marriage be endangered.
That was said in 1918. I want to quote what Mr. Fournier said in the House of Commons:
If we grant women the right to vote who can tell the result in two decades? Shall there not be a conflict between men and women? ... Women must be kept in the home, which is their proper sphere. The nation was not made up of individuals, but of families, and the suffrage bill will disrupt family ties and destroy parental authority.
I stand in the House as clear evidence that by allowing women to vote, by treating women as persons, by bringing them to their full potential in the life of this country, it was indeed a good thing.
I also want to talk about the debates in Parliament regarding the Chinese exclusion act in the House in 1923 when Chinese were condemned and Chinese men were not allowed to bring their families into Canada. It was legally impossible for wives to join their husbands. At that time MacInnes in the “Oriental Occupation of British Columbia”, pages 12 and 13, said:
It may be very right indeed to separate a man by law from his wife and family if he belongs to a race whose increase in the country would be disastrous to those already in occupation of it; especially if such intruding race be very prolific and very difficult to assimilate; and by reason of a more meagre standard of living capable of undoing the masses of those to whom such a country belongs. But aside from all that, the Chinese cannot rightly be said to be separated by any Canadian law from their wives and children in China. They are free to go back to their wives and children any time, and God speed to them.
These were the thoughts of those days when those laws were created in Parliament, laws that we have since rescinded. All of us in the House agree that the laws against women; the Chinese exclusion act; the law creating places for the Japanese to go, taking away their citizenship and their right to mobility, which was repealed in the House in 1988; we know that laws live and that they change. They move forward as we seek to create a society in our country that is diverse and in which we recognize that minority rights are as important as majority rights and that they must co-exist side by side if we are to be spared from the tyranny of the majority. Indeed that is impossible in our country where there is no real, no particular majority. Everyone of us belongs to minority groups and we must be careful when we look at section 15 of the charter how we deal with our minority groups in this country, of which we are all part.
We must have learned something from our past mistakes with some of the things I have quoted with regard to women, to the Chinese exclusion act and to the Japanese internment.Our children have learned.
The Globe and Mail ran a series of 12 articles just before July 1, in which surveys were done. It found that our children, people under 34, have now come to believe that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the rule of law are of primary value for our country. They have said that they do not trust Parliament. We need to think about that. They trust the charter and the rule of law ahead of us in Parliament. We have made mistakes in the House. In this great House we have seen that we have created laws that were wrong and we sought to change them.
Marriage is what we are discussing here. Marriage is an anthropological, social, legal and religious institution. There is a deeply human need for us to be together, for us to love and be loved, for us to join with someone for life. This need is as old as humankind. There is also a deeply social need that when we meet someone whom we wish to spend our lives with we want to tell the world, our community and everyone around us that this is an important union, that we value and we cherish each other.
There is a legal need for marriage in which everyone's rights need to be protected. Those who are married need to have the full recourse of the law to protect them.
There is of course a religious need for marriage, which began in the Council of Trent in 1563 when marriage became a religious institution.
None of those things are being denied in this debate today. In fact, we know that marriage began a long time ago as a major legal and social institution. Indeed in Roman law there were legal reasons for marriage. It was felt that marriage was the transference of property because at the time a woman was chattel. As the woman was transferred to a husband, she moved all of her inheritance and her rights with her. It was also created for children. At the time children were seen to need to protect their inheritance.
Today all families have children. I ask members when they think about this to think about children and ensure that we do not create two sets of families with two sets of children, some of whom are less equal than others.