Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest to the Minister of Justice on this bill. Our member for Trinity—Spadina has obviously been out front and centre on this and introduced a bill just prior to this that looks, in some parts, similar to what was introduced today by the minister.
I think the principle here is that we never want to create a situation where a victim is turned into an offender under what we would call reasonable grounds, that is, where someone who is attempting to defend themselves, their family, or their property, becomes a criminal themself. The minister did not mention it specifically, but the case of the Lucky Moose is something that has received attention. The prosecution in that case was over-zealous and brought exaggerated charges. A charge of kidnapping was a bit much and clearly out of line with the public's understanding of what the owner of that property was trying to do.
I have a couple of questions for the minister. Here I would say that I think that when this place is at its best, it takes good ideas and we go back and forth and try to understand how to make decent ideas better.
One question is about the education of the public. If we are going to change the way that people can defend themselves or their property and how much further they can they go in doing a citizen's arrest, I think it is incumbent upon the government to make sure that the public clearly understands where its rights have now been extended to. We do not want to have any situation later on where somebody goes too far in the spirit of this bill and causes grievous bodily harm.
If we proposed certain changes to this bill, potentially even hiving off sections of it to fast track, because we are facing an imminent budget, et cetera, would the government be willing to discuss the fast tracking of elements of the bill, on which I think we could find some consensus to move quickly through the process?