First, Madam Speaker, I was quite sincere when I said at the beginning that I did not regard this as a partisan issue. I will not attack the motivation of any other member who has a different position than I have. I fully appreciate that people have very strong views with respect to individual rights, women's rights, gender issues and see this as being fundamental to the question.
I think my colleague across the way from Simcoe, whom I have known for a long time, said that we take our obligations under sections 15 and 28 seriously. If the hon. members goes back and looks at the debates that took place in 1979, 1980 and 1981, we wrestled with the question of the balances between self-government and sections 15 and 28. Those debates will go on long after the hon. member from Simcoe and I gone. They will continue and that is a healthy thing in a constitutional democracy.
For my colleague, the member for Ottawa Centre, , I respect his views a great deal on this question and on many others. My problem is it is a question of how seriously we take self-government. If we take it seriously, we have to listen to the people who tell us not to pass the bill. We have to listen to the ministerial representative who has said that there are all kinds of ancillary questions and all kinds of other questions that have to be dealt with properly, but they will not be if the bill is passed in its current framework.
My concern is a lot of things are being sought by those who are critical of the bill, which that the bill itself does not address and the bill itself cannot address. What those people are looking for is a broader approach and commitment from the government than they are currently seeing. That is the challenge we are facing.