Mr. Speaker, I want to clarify that at committee we did adopt two amendments related to conscience; one in the preamble and one in the body of the legislation. In fact, the amendment put forward yesterday was one that was defeated at committee, because there was no agreement at committee that the institutions should avail themselves of these protections but that simply individuals should.
I want to come back to the comments on the notwithstanding clause.
The federal government has never used the notwithstanding clause. It has been used twice by provinces. It was used once by Alberta on same sex marriage, about which even my Conservative colleagues have changed their minds last weekend. More important, it was used in Quebec, which I personally experienced, on the language of signs. The Quebec government promised English-speaking Quebeckers that bilingual signs would be allowed, and then reversed itself and used the notwithstanding clause to tell our community that we had no place to be visible in our own province.
I would ask the hon. member, based on the Canadian experiences of the use of this clause—how an entire community felt their rights had been recognized in the court and then thrown out by their own government—how she could believe that we should use a notwithstanding clause in a case like this.