Mr. Speaker, it gives me great pleasure to have the opportunity to question at somewhat more length than we were accustomed to having during the periods when I would ask the former minister questions during question period.
I want to ask him a little about some of what he said today in his comments. He made reference to a number of issues that are important. I know he takes them very sincerely.
He is a very sincere advocate of human rights, both domestically and particularly abroad. He deserves to be congratulated for that. I am glad he raised, for example, the issue of Darfur, which is a very serious matter and which I know he is pursuing. I received an e-mail from his office today about it.
I have a question for the member about the Anti-terrorism Act. The member made reference to the Anti-terrorism Act. He mentioned that our government had raised the issue in the throne speech. He pointed out that there had been some reviews underway at the time the last Parliament was dissolved.
It seems a little unfair to me to raise this point and criticize us for it, given we get criticized so often for all the things that were not in the throne speech. One could have turned that around and complained there was no mention of it in the throne speech, if it had not been there.
I get the chance to ask this question now that we are in government and they are in opposition. Back when the Anti-terrorism Act was being debated in the House, in a debate that went on all night long, I stood up around one o'clock in the morning and raised the issue of putting in a sunset clause. Other people also got the idea about the same time. Had a sunset clause been put in place, there would have been, by necessity, a review of the law which would have dealt with the matter. There would have presumably been a two or three year sunset and that matter would have been dealt with by necessity. Parliament would have been under very genuine pressure to deal with the aspects of the law that were rushed through.
There was a crisis at the time and we could not be as thorough or as precise in our protection of rights as we might have wanted to be. We all accepted this at the time. That was the merit of putting in a sunset clause. The idea was promoted at the time by a number of us, including I think some Liberals. In the end it was rejected by the prime minister of day, Mr. Chrétien.
Would the hon. member be able to shed some light on that decision to reject the idea, which I think was a very unwise one? That ultimately was what led me to vote against the law. Would the member agree with me that when future legislation of the same nature arises, should it ever arise, that we ought to consider putting sunset rules into place to ensure that whatever restrictions we have to place on individual rights in our country would be restrictions of short duration?