Mr. Speaker, I agree with my colleague from Windsor—Tecumseh, and I too will be voting against the bill.
As I said earlier, I have been getting a lot of calls, letters and emails from my constituents and I know that other members have been hearing from their constituents as well. This tells me that Canadians are very concerned about this piece of legislation and they do not want to see it go forward.
Canadians are concerned about human rights. They want the government to protect human rights not just for Canadians who live here, but for people from other countries who want to live here as well.
These are some of the things Canadians have said in their letters: “The answer lies not in taking away freedoms and the rule of law, but enforcing the law as it currently stands. We have laws to prosecute criminals who create acts of wanton terror and mass murder without creating a special set of secret judicial processes to bring them to justice. Please think about this bill carefully before you vote and decide if it is really in the best interest of Canadians to create a system for us and a system for the rest”.
That is something we need to think about very strongly. Why are there two classes of people? Why are we creating another class of people in this country by putting in place a piece of legislation that would violate the Canadian Human Rights Act, and something that the Supreme Court of Canada has decided against, something that circumvents the criminal justice system?
People have likened this to what happened in the past in the second world war with Japanese people who were living in Canada. I know that story very well because my partner is Japanese and his parents were interred in the interior of British Columbia. I also come from a community that had a lot of Japanese people working in a mill there and they were all removed from the community. Many of them were friends of my mother. She has reconnected with those people. They have told us very sad stories. I would hate to see anything like that ever happen again in this country. It is these things that I want to remind people about when we are voting on legislation like this.
I wonder if my colleague could add some more comments on those points.