Madam Speaker, I am glad to engage in this debate because I agree with the member for Kelowna. This is a very delicate issue for Canadians and we need to have a very good debate in the House of Commons on it.
My reaction to Bill C-23 is that it is both a good bill and a bad bill. It is a bad bill in the sense that it still keeps the issue of sex in legislation, and I am one who believes that the statement of a former prime minister that the government has no business in the bedrooms of the nation is very apropos and very correct. I am disappointed that the bill did not go much further, as many of us on this side wanted, to explore dependent relationships, which would certainly include same sex or heterosexual relationships, but to expand that to other forms of dependency. It would have been a better bill for that.
However, it is an excellent bill for another reason, a very different reason. It is a classic example of the government responding with alacrity to pressure coming from members of parliament. This is a case where the government actually responded to the very insistent demands for action on the part of backbench MPs on this side and many members on the other side.
I will tell the House a story with respect to this and I will address my remarks, to some extent, to the member for Kelowna. In his remarks the member for Kelowna suggested that this bill was driven by supreme court decisions. In fact, Madam Speaker, there is a story to this bill.
Last spring I served for a while on the committee studying Bill C-63, the citizenship bill. I was not actually a member of that committee, but I was very interested in that particular piece of legislation and served quite a bit of time on the committee. I was interested actually in the oath of citizenship. I was there for an entirely different reason.
We had several witnesses come to the committee who pointed out what they thought was a major flaw in Bill C-63. This was a small section, section 43(i), and what it said, simply, was that the governor in council would be able to define spouse for the purpose of the legislation at hand.
Elsewhere in the bill there was a clause dealing with the problem of Canada's officials when they serve overseas. If they enter into permanent relationships which would lead to citizenship, the law wanted to acknowledge that this should include same sex relationships as well as heterosexual relationships. With leaving the governor in council the opportunity to define spouse for the purpose of these other clauses, what was happening was that this was abrogating parliament's responsibility to define spouse.
I should say that this issue was brought up first in committee by the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada. Its members spoke very well before the committee. Later there were a number of legal representations made by people from law societies who raised the same concern. They pointed out that this clause which gave the governor in council the authority to define spouse, and that could be defining spouse as a same sex relationship, was actually anti-democratic. People spoke out very loudly against it.
Then came clause by clause. This was all compressed into a very small space of time. The committee sat very late that night because the minister wanted the bill finished as quickly as possible. Of course the committee does try to help the minister in this regard.
This is what happened on the Liberal side of the round table. We sat in a room with opposition members of the committee on one side and Liberal members on the other side. As we went clause by clause, there was a group concerned about section 43(i) on the Liberal side. At about 10 o'clock at night, even though we were still discussing other clauses, three members of the committee held up debate on the citizenship bill. We complained that the Reform Party was not co-operating and we used that as a pretext to suspend debate on the bill.
We left the committee room and went to another room and phoned the citizenship minister. We told her that we could not pass this bill. We told her that we could not pass the clause as it stood because we all felt, all of the members who were sitting on the committee that night on the Liberal side, very strongly against the clause.
The minister was quite upset. She said “Look, I don't like it either, but it is impossible for me to change it without consulting cabinet. Can you hold on for a few days?” We came back and continued to go through clause by clause and that clause was accepted. The bill in fact returned to the House for third reading and we continued to be concerned.
What happened subsequently, as everyone will remember, is that the House prorogued and Bill C-63, the citizenship bill, actually went into suspension during prorogation. Interestingly enough, when the House resumed the government picked up just about every other piece of legislation that it had before prorogation except the citizenship bill. In fact, Madam Speaker, if you look at the new citizenship bill now, Bill C-16, you will find this particular offending clause missing. It is no longer there. It was taken out.
The background to the background is that after this confrontation of the Liberal backbenches and the minister—and it was a polite confrontation but nevertheless it was a confrontation—in the fall, at the same time as this clause disappeared from the new citizenship bill, the Minister of Justice held a meeting for all members of the Liberal caucus and said that she was prepared to undertake an omnibus bill that would fix the situation with respect to the definition of spouse once and for all.
The hon. member for Kelowna is quite right. It is absolutely wrong to leave it to judges to define things that are so essential to the way we interact with one another as human beings, much less as Canadians. What had been happening is that because the charter indicated that we had to give equality to people regardless of gender and regardless of sexual activity, the courts had been more and more inclined to redefine marriage.
The majority of people in my riding would be absolutely opposed to defining marriage as a same sex relationship. I would not hesitate to vote against the bill in a flash if I felt that in any way it was perpetuating the idea that marriage should be a same sex relationship, but it is not. What it is in fact doing at last is providing a means to give people in same sex relationships the same kind of benefits that people have in heterosexual relationships outside of marriage. The operative word is common law.
Madam Speaker, you cannot be married and be in a common law relationship. The whole idea of a common law relationship is that it is not marriage. All the legislation is doing is making a parallel. It is saying that a common law relationship can be heterosexual for the purpose of benefits and a common law relationship can be same sex. It is simple. No problem.
The problem though in the bill is twofold. The legislators sometimes get very frustrated. In amending various sections of the act, the legislatures chose to create this common law definition of same sex relationship. In every instance, they have said it is a common law relationship involving people of the same sex cohabiting in a conjugal relationship.
Sometimes we people who are into the meaning of words just throw up our hands because conjugal means heterosexual. It does not mean same sex under any circumstances. I just cannot for the life of me understand why the people who advised the justice minister did not simply use the word sexual. What is wrong with sexual? It covers everything. It is absolutely same sex and opposite sex. Sexual covers it all but conjugal actually refers specifically to a heterosexual relationship.
In a sense I sympathize with members like the hon. member for Kelowna because when the drafters of legislation use a word improperly, a word that has a pejorative meaning that is completely contradictory to what is intended, of course we are liable to have suspicions about the intent of the people who are crafting the legislation.
In that context, I am hoping I can persuade the minister to, for heaven's sake, change the word conjugal. I will try to move an amendment on that subject.
There is another simple way to alleviate many of the fears of members in the House. I am convinced that the bill is important and that it does at last take away from the courts the pressure they have been putting on us to define same sex relationships. It was very important to bring this back to parliament, and this bill does that.
However, there is fear and worry out there. I sympathize with that worry. I cannot for the life of me understand why we cannot, simply to satisfy that concern, put a definition of marriage in the bill, the classic definition: the union of one man and one woman. It is simple. Just stick it in the bill.
The argument is a lawyer's argument “We cannot do that because it is beautifully enshrined in common law and it will somehow box in the courts if we narrow the definition of marriage”. We are not in this place because we are lawyers. We are in this place because we are legislators. We are here to shape society by the good laws that we create. I have great sympathy for anyone in the House who says “for Heaven's sake, don't be driven by the supreme court necessarily. The supreme court can give some direction but we do not have to do whatever the lawyers tell us”.
I cannot for the life of me, nowhere up here, see a single reason for not defining marriage in the legislation and satisfying the many people in my community and Canadians across the country who are worried about losing the traditional legal definition of marriage.
I will speak briefly about my community. My riding contains a large number of people who are very devout Christians. I have a number of Christian communities, Protestant and Catholic, that are very concerned about this issue. I also have a number of people in my riding who do live in same sex relationships and who contribute very well to the community.
This compromise that exists in the legislation where same sex benefits are grouped very narrowly under common law relationships—although we are not entirely satisfied that it is completely done—and where marriage is protected, at least the minister, I point out, has been very careful to eliminate the word spouse from the legislation so that we do not get into that trap. So that is gone from the legislation.
My sense of most people in my riding is that they really do believe that people who live in same sex relationships and who have a genuine dependency on one another should have the same benefits as people in heterosexual relationships who develop benefits so long as it is not a married relationship. Marriage is the key thing.
I also have a problem with marriage. I do not believe marriage can ever be considered a same sex relationship because marriage implies the rights of adoption. I would never ever take away the rights of children in order to satisfy the rights of adults. Until evidence is to the contrary, and I do not think it will ever occur, I think all things being equal there is not doubt that heterosexual partners make more appropriate parents than do same sex partners. So we cannot detract from the rights of children.
All in all, the bill at least finally addresses what we on this side of the House, and I think many across the country, have been clamouring for, to take away the initiative of the courts that were poised to define marriage and spouse as same sex relationships which would be entirely inappropriate. I will support the bill on that basis.
Having said that, what I want the members opposite to realize is that many on this side fought very hard behind the scenes to have the bill take the whole sexual component out entirely and to address dependent partnerships. There is no question about what is ultimately fair here. We should not be talking about sex at all, any kind of sex. What we should be talking about is the relationships that occur between human beings. They may be of the same sex. They may be of the opposite sex. They may be a sister and sister or a brother and brother. They may be any kind of combination where after a while they have lived together and they have become emotionally dependent on one another. It is not just material dependency. It is that real emotional dependency that can occur in families.
In the case of the Citizenship Act, what I wanted to see there was a dependent partnership relationship occur where someone could adopt a child when he or she were serving overseas and have that child be treated as a dependent in a dependent relationship for the purposes of the Citizenship Act. However, we did not achieve that. Unfortunately, the government has said—and I have to accept it—that there are aspects of the dependent partner concept that it has not fully examined.
It is certainly true. We must be careful about plunging ahead with something that is really novel just in case we create problems for people to whom we had not intended. The justice minister has said—I do not know whether she has said it in the House but she has certainly said it on the side—that she is prepared to study this issue of dependent partners forthwith.
We have a bill that addresses a current problem, gets the court out of parliaments, settles the legitimate concerns of people who have same sex relationships and who have been denied the equivalent benefits and other opportunities of heterosexual people living outside marriage. We have solved that problem with this legislation.
However, this is only a beginning. It is an important beginning. What I like about it is that it is a beginning that actually began in this place, in this parliament, in a committee, at least for me, but I really do believe it is a beginning that began here among these MPs and the government has taken action. In that sense, I think the government should be congratulated.
