Mr. Speaker, this private member's bill addresses an issue which is of some significant concern to every legislator, or at least it should be. That is the constant debate we have, and I suppose it is the essence of democracy, as to whether we over-govern ourselves. Sometimes maybe we pass legislation in reaction to current incidents to deal with what is at that point a hot topic issue and then within months or certainly within years, the law is no longer necessary. The law has become irrelevant, but it sits on the books until there is a move either by the government of the day or through a private member's bill to repeal the legislation.
Bill S-202 provides a mechanism, although I have to say with some reservations that I am not sure it is the proper mechanism, that would deal with those laws that have become outdated, irrelevant or no longer necessary but are still sitting on the books.
Every so often we will see in the popular media an example of a law, sometimes it is a municipal bylaw, other times it is a formal piece of legislation at the federal or provincial levels, that is held up to ridicule because it is so out of date. The one I always think of is the provincial law that required someone to walk in front of a horseless carriage, as it was called at that time, after a certain hour of the day waving a lantern in order to protect domesticated animals from being struck by the vehicle. That was on Ontario's books until well into the 1960s, if not the 1970s.
We hear of those kinds of examples. To some degree they hold the particular legislature up to ridicule that such an irrelevant and out of date piece of legislation would still be on the books.
I want to congratulate the member for Mississauga South who has brought this bill before the House for debate.
Having praised it to that extent, I have to express the reservation which is the risk we have of applying this bill, if it did become the law of the land, and legislation which is still relevant, necessary and useful could be struck down and made useless due to inattention by the government of the day. A law may have fallen into some lack of use, even for an extended period of time, but it may still be necessary given a change of circumstances in the country.
I am proposing how we should deal with this as opposed to it being an automatic absolute under the circumstances as set out in Bill S-202. A clause should be added that would provide some saving grace under certain circumstances. I am looking forward to the bill going to committee. Hopefully it will get through the House and will be addressed more extensively in committee so that that possibility could be addressed. The difficulty is that if the bill is approved in principle, that type of deviation from the principle may not be acceptable to the committee. It may not be acceptable under our rules and it may be ruled out of order. That causes me some concern. However, I think it is the way we need to go.
The number of statutes we know that are sitting on our books that should be repealed are fairly numerous from what I have been led to believe. I cannot say I have done a full study of that, but there are a number that are sitting on our books. It would be good to get them off our books.
It is back to the issue of overgovernance. Every so often when we have one of these pieces of legislation that is the law of the land that was intended for these specific purposes and was passed originally for these specific purposes, another issue arises and the law applies to that set of facts, but we end up with an unintended consequence, one that is negative and was never intended by the legislation. That is always the risk of having that old legislation sitting there.
Just on a side point, one of the tragedies of the government refusing to fund the Law Commission comes into play here. One of the roles the Law Commission could have had assigned to it is to review, either all of our legislation or at least segments of our legislation, already passed, already law, and identify those bills that were no longer necessary, had become irrelevant, were out of date, and where we could see no future use for them.
It would have been a very good task for the Law Commission to have performed. The members of the commission had the expertise and could very well have taken on that assignment. As I said earlier, it is badly needed to be done. With the Law Commission no longer being funded, it is not something we could assign to it.
It is quite clear that we do not have the ability, and I say that within the Department of Justice, nor do we have the resources in terms of personnel to do that overall review of all of our legislation. The Law Commission would have been very conveniently available to have that task assigned to it. It is no longer able to do it, and certainly the Department of Justice does not have the resources to do it.
I want to make one final point before I conclude. One of the other flaws that I see in the legislation, and I am sure it was not intended and it may not be possible to include it in the legislation, is that we have all sorts of pieces of legislation that still do function in part. They provide a role in terms of providing legislative infrastructure for activities in the country or, in some cases, prohibiting activities, but there are other parts of the same law, because they have become out of date, that are irrelevant.
The bill does nothing to assist us in reviewing those pieces of legislation or, more specifically, those parts of the legislation that are no longer relevant. We have no ability under the bill, if it were to become law, to place in the infrastructure of our legislative system an ability to review those laws that are still valid, but only in part.
Those are some of the flaws that I wish to point out to my colleague from Mississauga South. This of course will be a free vote when it comes to second reading. I do intend to support it, but I do have some reservations regarding the bill and I hope we can resolve those problems at committee.