Mr. Speaker, I must admit that I rise today with mixed feelings about this motion. It has been 28 years since the charter came into effect, and 25 years since section 15, the balance of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, came into effect.
It seems almost to the point of being ridiculous that we are standing in the House, if we follow the tenor of this motion by the Liberal Party, defending the charter from this attack by the Conservative right-wing ideologues. I have two comments in that regard. One is that it is not necessary. When we hear those extreme, almost fanatical views, the vast majority of Canadians dismiss them as being ridiculous, including some that we have heard from the newly elected member for Vaughan, although I will come back to that in my main speech because I think to some degree the response to his comments is significantly overblown.
The other point is that each political party in the House has the absolute right to choose the topic and issue it wants addressed on an opposition day. My friend from Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, in sponsoring this motion, is well within his right to have done so. However, there are a number of other, what I have to call, more important issues, because the charter does not need to be defended.
The vast majority of Canadians, and by that I mean into the 90th percentile of all Canadians, support the charter. Quite frankly, with the way it has been applied, in the vast majority of cases they support it. They see it as a fundamental guarantee, which is what it was intended to be, of their human rights and civil liberties in this country, as well as linguistic rights and a number of other rights. I therefore believe there is no need for this debate in the country but there is a need for other issues to be addressed. So I am critical of the Liberal Party for the choice it made today.
Having said all of that, it is the obligation of the NDP, as one of the parties in this House, to engage in the debate since it has been put on the floor of the House. If we are going to do that, it is a way of speaking out to Canadians generally, but more significantly to the small percentage who still have doubts about the need for the charter.
When we analyze the opposition to the charter, it is not so much about its existence. It may be very close to 100% of all Canadians who accept that it is absolutely necessary to have a charter of rights and freedoms, as we do, but they are oftentimes opposed to the interpretation of the charter in individual cases, and I think that is true of the new member for Vaughan.
I am quite confident in saying that if we ever did a referendum on the charter, subject to the concerns we have already heard from the Bloc, from that perspective, and setting that aside for a minute, if Canadians, including in the province of Quebec, were asked whether they want these guarantees in the form of a charter of rights and freedoms as part of our Constitution, which would be fundamental law and not a bill that can be changed, in overwhelming numbers they would want to maintain it.
The problem is the interpretation. Going all the way back to the Magna Carta, and coming out of the English parliamentary system, the concept of democracy that we were forming through the last 1,000 years, we wanted it to be a rule of law as opposed to the whims of the royalty at the time or even of elected officials subsequently. We wanted that guarantee. When we look at it, we say yes, we have done these things and we have had these bills, going back in the English system for a long time, as well as in Canada.
Because of the right under the common law for judges to enforce certain fundamental rights, we had that. Where we were found lacking was in other fundamental rights that were regularly breached or not protected. We see this at times when the country is in crisis. We saw it with the author of the charter, Mr. Trudeau, breaching fundamental rights, probably as grotesquely as any prime minister has, by invoking the War Measures Act, used primarily against arguments.