Mr. Speaker, the question was whether our opposition to Bill C-17 and some of the arguments I made against it were timely, in light of some of the historical abuses of human rights and civil liberties that we have seen in this country. That is an interesting question. What have we learned from our mistakes in the past? The suggestion is that mistakes made in the past will not be repeated.
When we look at the number of times we have made the same mistake in the past, usually in a crisis, we see that sometimes governments panic and attack certain members of their society by undermining fundamental rights. That is what this bill would do.
One of the other parts of the question, to be a bit more timely, was whether we can we rely on our courts to protect our fundamental rights. In this country, we have a division of authority, and courts certainly have a role to play in protecting our rights by interpreting the Constitution and the Charter of Rights. However, they also have, as I think our Conservative colleagues rarely will acknowledge, a deep respect for the role that we as parliamentarians play in passing laws.
We have a responsibility as parliamentarians to protect fundamental rights. We are not doing that by this legislation. Nor is there any reason to believe that our courts will find, as they have for part of this legislation, that it is within the Charter of Rights. That is not the end of it. We still have a responsibility to deal with this as parliamentarians. They have a responsibility not to interfere other than in the most exigent circumstances.
I have at times been critical of our judiciary. When we look at the process of security certifications that has been gone through in the last seven or eight years, we see that any number of times we have had interpretations, particularly from the federal court, in which they did not at the time protect fundamental rights. They have begun to do so. They began in 2006 or 2007. There were several years in which those certificates were used improperly, and our courts finally got around to realizing that. So we cannot rely exclusively on our courts to protect fundamental rights. We have to assume our responsibility, and supporting this legislation would not do that. This should be opposed. We should be striking this bill off our agenda.