Mr. Speaker, I too would like to add some comments with respect to this bill.
The debate regarding the bill has had a long and tortuous history. It began as part of an omnibus bill. What the Liberals were trying to do was to embarrass people into voting for the bill. If one did not vote for the bill, one was against things like the protection of children or mechanisms to ensure that police officers received additional protection. They put firearms legislation and the cruelty to animals legislation all in one bill.
Of course it was a complete subversion of transparency in the House of Commons. In fact the Liberals did not want Canadians to know what was going on in the House. Yet the Canadian Alliance stood firm on this issue and indicated that amendments needed to be made specifically to the animal cruelty sections.
I have stated before that the Canadian Alliance has been quite firm in its opinion that cruelty to animals cannot be tolerated and that indeed the penalties need to be increased to ensure that there is a proper deterrence. In fact I found it rather strange that I would be agreeing with the Liberals on that point because generally speaking the Liberals were trying to avoid criminal responsibility for criminals. Yet in this case they seemed bound and determined to push forward not only with respect to the issues regarding the additional penalties. What was a more troubling aspect of the bill was they were so willing to put criminal responsibility on to people who may not have the appropriate mens rea , that they were so willing to take away the time honoured statutory defences included in the legislation.
I found it curious that the Liberals were going to remove the legislation, the relevant sections from one part of the Criminal Code, where there were specific defences available to those who owned animals, and move them to another portion of the Criminal Code. The justification was that the bill was not changing any substantive issue, that what was illegal today would be illegal under the new legislation.
I found it a rather strange exercise after months, indeed years, of working on this legislation that all we were trying to do was put the legislation in exactly the same place in which we had left it. It made absolutely no sense. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. This legislation fundamentally changed the defences available to farmers and others who had a legitimate interest protecting their livelihood.
One of the misleading aspects about the whole debate was that people who were pushing this legislation, essentially animal rights activists from larger urban centres who did not really have an understanding of the reality of farm life, stated that the reason people were opposed to the amendments was because they wanted to see covered horrific crimes being committed against animals. They told stories about cat skinnings, dogs being starved and tortured or otherwise abused or neglected. Of course that had nothing to do with the reality of the situation. The reality of the situation was that those kinds of horrible things, cat skinnings, hurting dogs and other animals were already illegal.
I am speaking as a former prosecutor and part of the problem as a prosecutor is that it is difficult to prosecute these kinds of offences because the victims often are not in a position to speak.
Therefore, it was not the fact that the law did not properly address those kinds of situations. It was that it was difficult to prosecute those kinds of situations.
What we saw of course were various groups carrying out a particular agenda. I want to quote some of these groups because it is crucial to understand where these groups were coming from.
A lawyer for the World Society for the Protection of Animals, Lesli Bisgould, said:
In fact, the legal status of animals today is analogous to that of oppressed groups in society over the past century...the right not to be seen as a means to an end, the right not to be property.
Here we have an animal rights activist saying that animals are on the same level with oppressed groups of human beings from the last century. That is a disgusting thing to say about human beings.
We respect animals and we respect their place in our society. We respect their use by farmers and other legitimate organizations. But to suggest somehow that animals are an oppressed group, equivalent to the oppressed human beings of the last century simply is nonsense.
Even organizations as respectable as the Ontario SPCA said, in a 1999 recommendation to the justice department, that pets should:
--become literally a part of the family and any abuse, wilful or otherwise, would be treated the same as abuse of a child.
We know that the Liberals do not put much effort into protecting children in this country. So maybe this is not saying that much about animals.
I happen to believe that we have a higher duty and standard toward children than we do with animals. And to equate, again, animals with children is a dangerous kind of statement to make. It degrades human beings.
What these kind of comments illustrate is the real agenda behind these amendments; that, in fact, they were designed to put those who make their living from farming and medical research at risk; that there would be a chilling effect in the area of agriculture, medical research, hunting, trapping, and in all of these legitimate activities; that people would be too frightened to know what was the right or lawful thing to do and they would be dissuaded from participating in these activities.
Indeed, we had one of the senior justice department officials testify before the committee and refuse to disclose how he disposed of rodents and other pests on his farm property outside of Ottawa. The suggestion being he did not want to land up in some kind of criminal charge.
When it comes down to being frightened to say in the House of Parliament and its committees how one can properly deal with rodents--and this is one of the chief law officers in Canada--how much more reason do farmers, medical researchers, hunters, trappers and others, have to have about the possible repercussions of these changes?
The Alliance was very strong in putting forward specific amendments that clearly set out the defences available. This kind of nonsense that it is not explicit, it is implicit and, therefore, the defences are there. That simply has no basis in law.
If I were a defence lawyer in court, I would stand up on behalf of my client and say, “Well, you know, your honour, in the other part where the offence used to be, there were some defences specifically set out and the government, for absolutely no reason at all, introduced a bill to move the offences from one part to another but left the defences in the other part. But, your honour, you shouldn't pay any attention to that change in the legislation. Those defences, although they existed explicitly in the other part, now can be read implicitly in the new part”.
As a prosecutor, I could have stood up and said that is absolute nonsense. To think that Parliament would debate a bill and go to all this length of discussion to do absolutely nothing, makes no sense. The offences were taken out of the one part and put into another part. The fact that the defences were left in that first part obviously means that the law has been substantively changed.
I was pleased to support amendments that explicitly brought those defences into this new part. My colleague from the Bloc was very strong on that as well. We spoke together on that issue in committee and I appreciated his interventions in the course of those committee hearings. He did his constituents a good service and I believe that the Canadian Alliance spoke for its constituents in protecting their legitimate activities.
Now we have, as the member from the Progressive Conservative Party stated, certain other amendments that had been recognized as important by the Senate. These amendments have been brought forward on a non-partisan basis.
These are legitimate concerns that senators who have carefully followed the bill's discussions, made prior amendments, and brought it back to the House are now making additional amendments. They have brought these forward after conducting hearings. These are not major amendments to most of us living in urban areas. However, to those of us living in rural areas, those us who are living in the north, aboriginal hunters and trappers, these are significant amendments.
What I cannot understand and the question that I would like to leave this House in why the Liberal government is refusing these amendments is, why are Liberals so petty on this particular issue? The government's entire handling of this matter from beginning to today has been petty. Now we see another demonstration of that pettiness, that inability to bend to reasonable arguments being brought forward.
I am asking the minister on the other side to put aside the pettiness, pass this legislation as the Senate has amended it and let us move on. Let us give animals the protection they need. Let us give those hunters and trappers, farmers and medical researchers the assurance that they need that their activities are legitimate.