Mr. Speaker, I thought the time was coming to an end.
There is one last contextual piece that I would like to put forward for consideration just to put it on the record and not to militate against the spirit in which the bill is put forward. It has to do with the whole evolved envelope of the criteria which the court now uses, much of it judicially generated, in deciding what is in the best interests of a child.
This particular amendment would be added to the Divorce Act beside the best interests of the child criteria, if I could put it that way. We could end up with a lack of clarity about just which criteria are the most important in dealing with child custody and access.
This particular section would be a side piece, a collateral piece. There is every prospect that when the courts get a hold of it, it would not be clear as to just what degree of strength or what degree of importance this new section would have. It may prove to be unclear to party litigants and also to judges. This may invite a temporary destabilization in the criteria.
Just to draw an analogy, about 10 or 15 years ago, Parliament put in place sentencing criteria. The initiative put all the criteria in order. We tried to rank them so the criteria were all there. No new criteria have been put forward since then. Those sections of the Criminal Code that set out for the courts the criteria appropriate to sentencing decisions are all there in one code.
If this section were adopted as part of the Divorce Act, it could destabilize or significantly alter those established criteria for determining what is the best interests of the child. We could have a whole list of things that are criteria for those best interests and then one new one, death or terminal illness of a parent, which may trump all the others, but it is not clear from the legislation.
I will leave that on the public record and hopefully that may be helpful to colleagues in the event they have to review this legislation further.