Madam Speaker, I am pleased to make a few remarks in connection with Bill C-50 before the House at this time. It is noteworthy, as other speakers have mentioned, that this issue has been before the House for a number of years. It has proven to be very difficult legislation to get right and to get through the House and the Senate. The Senate has been one of the obstacles, I think, in getting this through.
Originally the legislation became tangled up in a couple of omnibus bills and at some point we all recognized that the bill, even by itself, was troublesome and difficult. Fortunately, the bill now stands on its own and I think the government has taken the view that rather than trying to rewrite the whole piece, reinvent a good portion of the wheel, that it would go back to basics and has essentially in this legislation reused the language that exists in the Criminal Code.
There has been some modification to the language and some rewriting but essentially the government is of the view that for the most part the legislation is simply restating what is already in the Criminal Code. There are some notable exceptions to that and those exceptions are the main point of debate, or at least they should be.
I think all or most of us in the House can agree that there was a need to modernize the language, to update the legislation and to legislate tougher sentences. The trick, given the dynamic that is out there across Canada in the various communities, is to get that piece correct. The principal dynamic that I think has been the biggest obstacle is that we have a rural-urban divide here. Some of the push for this new legislation has come from urban areas and part of the urban politics include what some have referred to as animal rights activists. That is not necessarily a pejorative term, and it perhaps is not to the people who are looking out for our animal friends all across the country, but they do want firm legislation that protects animals from pain and unnecessary death. The problem is not their objectives at all. It is perhaps how they carry on their work. In rural Canada we have people who have been taking care of animals and who have been the experts in animal husbandry for centuries and doing it without much of a problem and they provide the food for our tables. They have been serving our country and serving open mouths around the world for centuries and taking care of animals.
The rural perspective, the farm land perspective on cruelty to animals, would be just fine but when we begin to measure what happens on the farm, whether it is a big production or a small production farm, and we combine that with those who I will call the animal rights activists, we end up with disagreements. As we go to legislate, while almost everyone agrees on the principle that we had to modernize and beef up the sentencing, the actual definitions become very important. The people on the farms want to ensure that when we as legislators pass the new law that we do not adopt a definition that will interfere with their families' abilities on the farm to take care of their animals and to slaughter the animals in the ordinary course as they might do for food and as they have been doing for centuries, whereas from the urban perspective we have individuals who, for what they believe are excellent reasons, do everything they can to reduce the killing of any animals by humankind and certainly they want to reduce suffering among animals caused by any source.
Everyone in that morality plight that I have just described is actually doing a fairly good job right now, but as we legislate, these differences in perspective are coming out and our challenge in the House is to find some legislation that satisfies both and everyone in the middle as best we can.
One of the things that may assist us in the event that matters do end up in court is the discretion of the judge. There may in fact be differing perspectives, rural and urban. One of the rather ugly urban perspectives has to do with the scenario of a person conspicuously torturing and killing a domestic animal or pet. These ugly incidents often end up in newspapers, magazines and in the electronic media, and the public says that we, in Canada, have to do something to prevent that from happening and where it does happen, to firmly respond.
I suppose it is a little bit unfair to say that part of the resolution here will lie in the hands of a prosecutor and a judge, but at the end of the day, those two perspectives may have to be managed by the courts, the prosecutors and the judges.
I say that, acknowledging right up front, that we do not want our social problems to be managed by judges. Judges are there to resolve conflicts and to make decisions about guilt or innocence. It is unfair to ask our judicial community to be the arbiters of everything that goes on in society. However, I do offer the judicial process, at the end of this, as being a kind of spill safe mechanism to ensure that community standards and community perspectives are brought to bear in dealing with these portions of the Criminal Code.
I want to dwell briefly on the language of the provisions. As I said earlier, the bill, for the most part, continues language and concepts already existing in the Criminal Code. The offence of causing unnecessary pain to an animal stays the same, give or take, but the sentence is increased from the current six month maximum to a five year maximum. This upgrades the sentence into what we call a hybrid offence where it may be summary conviction or indictable, depending on the discretion of the prosecutor, but the maximum sentence goes up to five years.
There is a new provision that I will not read from the statute, but it involves brutally or viciously killing an animal. That offence also has a five year maximum and it too is a hybrid offence.
The concept of causing pain by negligence or allowing pain to happen by negligence, certainly wilfully, has an increased sentence as well. That would be a sentence of two years maximum. That would keep it as a summary conviction offence.
I note that the bill is only four pages long. In terms of a piece of legislation around here, that is relatively small.
The issues that I have attempted to address, the issues that colleagues around the House are attempting to deal with, all revolve around setting a threshold that it will be a criminal offence and defining it in a way that it will not impair the ability of our farmland communities to raise livestock and produce food the way they have always done so well for us.
We are looking for the magic solution. In my view, at this point, I think the government has come forward with a good vehicle and I am prepared to support it. At the same time, I am also interested in any debate that ensues and its disposition at committee should it pass the House at second reading.