Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to address this issue, which lies at the heart of parliamentary democracy. We are elected by constituents and have choices every time we stand to cast a vote in the House of Commons: whether to represent our constituents' views, as we see them, configured to the majority; or to represent our party's views, as we may have campaigned on them; or to vote according to our consciences. I am unaware, having read the rules as I entered this place just about a year ago, of any prescription that tells us when we must represent the majority that we perceive to be in our constituencies, any rules that say when we must vote the party line, or any set of rules that talks about when we must vote according to our consciences. I do not know how to define the choice we have to make legalistically among those three different positions.
There are times, which I have seen in my own caucus meetings and hope others have seen it in theirs, where the caucus will debate an issue before it lands on a final position; and when members leave the caucus room, they leave agreeing to vote together to represent what they perceive as the position their party has taken. There are times when members have the right—and in my party it is a very clearly defined set of rights, around private members' bills in particular—where members have a defined right to vote as they see fit. When they do that, they have a choice. They can represent what they perceive to be the majority position in their ridings or what is in the best interest of their ridings, or they can choose to act individually based on their consciences.
What constitutes an issue of conscience differs from person to person in the House. What may be an act of conscience for one person may be perceived in a totally different light by somebody else. It is framed in this debate today—abortion and capital punishment being two examples—that yes, in the history of the House, those have been examples where people have been freed by all party leaders to vote according to their consciences. However, there are also conventions in the House—budget bills being one of them, and in my party protecting charter rights being another—whereby we try to invoke some discipline, and that discipline is held to account at election time, as it should be.
The explanations that individual members give as to how they cast their votes will be tested democratically, as they should be. Did their vote represent the majority interest of a riding, was it faithful to a party position, or was it, in fact, an expression of the members' consciences? All three of those are in play at every single vote. To pretend otherwise and introduce a private member's bill that suggests otherwise—that there are other conventions and other rules that override individuals' behaviour—I think does a grave disserve and dishonour to the bravery that individuals have shown in the history of the House.
What really bothers me about this bill is that it would seek to legalize something that is already legal. It would seek to allow something that is already allowed. It is not unlike the previous bill, which tried to make illegal something that was already illegal, as though somehow making it illegal twice would make it even more illegal. It is a redundant position and a redundant bill. I would say it is not an act of conscience in this case; it is an act of rhetoric.
While I appreciate that sometimes politics plays into that, it does not actually clarify or accurately describe the freedoms we have as individual members of the House of Commons, who freely choose to associate with parties and freely choose, each and every time we stand up, to cast our ballots and show our support for particular pieces of legislation. Sometimes the way we express it is the same, but the motivations are different. We also need to respect that as well.