Mr. Speaker, I have a serious challenge in front of me today. There are, presumably, some 170 Liberals in the House who are listening intently to the arguments being made from this side today. My challenge is to somehow persuade them to favour the amendments that are being proposed so that we avoid disasters in the future.
I often think of the analogy of being a chess player. I have always enjoyed that game. It is a game that requires forethought. It is a game where one does not look just at the present move because if one does, one will almost certainly lose, unless one is playing with an opponent who also only looks at the current move. One must look at the second move and the third move and at what one's opponent may or may not do. In order to pass good laws we have to look at the consequences of those laws after they have been enacted to see what actually will happen.
The plea that I make to the members opposite today is to listen carefully to what is being said from this side and to actually, regardless of what their minister says or what the Prime Minister says, use their own judgment and carefully judge the impact of passing this law unamended.
I want to be a little more specific here. We have in our society a number of arrangements for how we live together. It used to be in our family, when we had all of the children still at home, that I as the dad often got my way, but just as often I did not. As a matter of fact, I was outnumbered four to one when it came to a family conference. I had to use arguments of persuasion if I wanted the family to agree on a certain task.
I also live in a little community. We happen to live out on one of those little acreage developments where there are 16 neighbours on a 40 acre or 80 acre parcel of land. I am not exactly sure how much it has extended beyond. For 17 years I was treasurer of our residents association. We had different rules that regulated what our association could and could not do. We agreed on those. We had meetings where we set up, in essence, a charter. That charter said what was permitted and what was not. When the neighbours came along and said that they wanted to have a big party and that the association should pay for it, I was the treasurer who said that we would not do that. I said that if they wanted a party they would have to collect from each of the people who came to the party and that would pay for the expenses of the party. I told them that they could not use our association money for that because it was to be used for other things, such as grass cutting, running the lights in the community and those types of things. We had those rules.
We also lived in a municipality and there are all kinds of rules in a municipality. I cannot build my garage any closer than four feet from the boundary of my property. I must put my garbage out on Tuesdays or they have no obligation to pick it up. I must pay my municipal taxes, which, by the way, I must pay with money that I have already paid tax on. That is why I have a private member's bill that says that property taxes should be exempt from federal income tax. One should not have to pay tax on money earned for the sole purpose of paying tax. However that is what we get in this federal government.
Beyond that, I am a member of the population of the province of Alberta, so I have to comply with provincial rules and regulations. One of the rules is that I must drive on the right side of the road, with which I comply most happily. Another rule says that on the road from my house up to the main highway I shall not exceed 80, with which I also comply very happily.
I believe we have rules that regulate us in that society. Now we get to the crunch. We are also Canadian citizens. Every one of us who calls Canada home is subject to the rules and laws of the Government of Canada. Those rules include a whole bunch of things, like the necessity of paying income tax, EI, CPP and complying with different aspects of the criminal code and other things. Of course the laws of Canada also provide us certain protection.
There is a myth going around that unless it is in the charter it is not necessarily a right. I disagree with that. There are many items and aspects of our lives which I believe we all have in an inherent right. It is not granted by the charter. It was not granted by Pierre Trudeau and his crew way back in 1982. In some instances the charter simply articulates rights which we already had. We have to ensure that we remember that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is simply an articulation of some of the rights that we have, but at any rate it is a rule that we have to live under.
If Bill C-11 is passed without amendments, I am very concerned about the application of the Charter of Rights under the bill. It is tremendously troubling.
I can live in my county and have all the rights of the charter that apply to me. If I were to live in the Westbank, suddenly I would not have some of the rights or at minimum it would be questioned whether I could apply those rights. I would have to go to court, as a citizen of that part of the country, to demonstrate that the charter applied to me. That is a very serious error, and I beg those 170 some Liberal members over there who are patiently listening to this to think like a chess player. Think about what will happen after the bill passes and somebody gets up to challenge it.
I know we want to trust the natives. Of course we do. We want to all trust each other. The purpose of the law is to restrain those who prove not to be trustworthy by themselves. The present government seems to be doing fine in the Westbank. However, some time in future the Westbank government may decide to do certain things which are deemed a violation of someone else's rights who live there. In fact one could even argue right now about the demand by it to collect property taxes, which it is already doing. That demand is one of the things which it presumably can carry on with, yet we find that the people from whom it is collecting taxes have no right to vote in respect to that municipal-like government.
Is that not a violation? Why would we put into law the ability of that local government to have a serious violation of our country's laws in terms of the ability to vote for the government that has control over our lives and property? That is a serious error. Why would the government want to pass the bill unamended and allow such a potential error to come in to part of the governance of the country?
In conclusion, this is a very serious matter. It is not one to be rushed through suddenly before Parliament prorogues and we have an election. It is one that requires serious thought. We need to look at the moves beyond just the passing of the legislation. We need to look at the consequences. I persuade, I beg, I cajole the members who are in majority in the House and who have the control to act wisely and to make wise decisions as our prayer says every morning.