Mr. Speaker, when I came into this House tonight, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister said to me: "It is a sad day". I said that it was not a sad day, but that it was a great day for a number of reasons. If I may refer to another piece of legislation, a battle was won tonight in the House, the battle to see the gun control bill passed. That made it not a sad day.
I know that my colleague and my other colleague, the member from Mississauga who also thought it was a sad day were referring to attitudes that are expressed not just in this House, not just in this city or this province but right across the country. I want to talk a little about that in my very brief time. I am paraphrasing but I believe and my colleague from Toronto agrees with me that it was St. Thomas More, the great chancellor of England who said that all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.
I have listened to some of the nonsensical reactions. I am not talking about members in this House but the letters I have received and responses from people who clearly have not read the bill, who do not understand what the bill is about, or who perhaps do understand what the bill is about and still evince an attitude of frightening intolerance. I know what my two colleagues mean when they say it is a sad day.
The reason I know it is not a sad day is that this bill will become law. It will pass because it is the right thing to do. What I am struggling with is the fact that colleagues in this House, some colleagues within our own party, members of the church to which I belong and to which I pay great homage and great love hurt me very much by their illogical and irrational response to this legislation. This legislation says in effect that if x goes out and hits y because he just does not like y 's face and injures him and he is convicted of let us call it assault causing bodily harm, so we do not have to worry about private prosecutions here, the provisions in this legislation would not kick in. It does not call for it. It is not one of the things that falls under these provisions against hate.
What if someone does not like you, Mr. Speaker, because you may be a Presbyterian and decides to assault you because he does not like Presbyterians and you are a member of that group? Should this exacerbate the situation? I think so. The Minister of Justice thinks so, the Prime Minister thinks so, the parliamentary secretary thinks so. The vast number of Canadians think so. The vast number of Canadians are tolerant and believe that to attack someone because of a belief, ethnocultural background, skin colour or sexual orientation exacerbates the assault.
The questions as to whether that is right or wrong are distinct questions of policy and divisions between the Reform Party and the Liberal Party to take one example. What we are talking about is something that goes much deeper. It goes back to what I said when I started my speech that the member for Mississauga and the Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister were disheartened when I came in here tonight because of the feelings of intolerance that have flown around this bill from its inception.
I went home today to do two things. I was opening a special centre for technology in my riding, a wonderful thing for the G-7, and also because my mother is very ill. She is dying in the hospital after a very long life. I thought about bringing up this allusion tonight in my speech.
In a sense I want to pay tribute to her because I am here and I hold the opinions I hold because of the way she, a single mother, brought me up. She was a school teacher who desperately wanted to be a lawyer but coming to her maturity in the depression in Cape Breton, the oldest of nine children, it was not possible. She taught school. She was involved in politics. She was involved in the teachers' union. She was a feminist. She was a single mother because my father died when I was very young. She believed passionately in tolerance.
I remember when I was four years old a man came to our house selling baskets. He was a Micmac. As was the Cape Breton tradition, my mother gave him a meal before he left. She bought some baskets from him as well. As he walked away from our house my mother said: "That poor man. It is a very difficult thing to be an Indian in this society".
I remember the discussion that resulted from that. It went on between us for the next 40 years as she talked to me about questions of tolerance. She talked to me about taking people at face value. She talked to me about tolerance based on fear and ignorance and how we must always fight to root it out.
Whether that intolerance is against aboriginal people, people of colour, people who hold a different sexual orientation from someone else's it is shocking that we allow the vilification that has gone on around this debate to go on, that we allow the ignorance and fear to go on, and that we do not collectively as parliamentarians stand up and say enough.
We are changing the sentencing law because it is the right thing to do. We are changing the sentencing law because people deserve to be protected from people who hate them. If someone assaults someone else because they hate what he or she stands for, thinks, believes in or because of something endemic to that person which includes sexual orientation, they are wrong and it deserves to be brought out after their conviction in a court of law and added to their sentence.
I stand here tonight to say this from my mother, Reenie Clancy, who will not be with us for very much longer. I am very proud that she taught me to believe this way. I am also very proud that I am here to vote for this bill.
