Scott Reid

[Petitions, May 6th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I have seven petitions to present today, all on the same subject. They are from across the constituency, from Lanark Highlands, Denbigh, Carleton Place, Millhaven, Smiths Falls, Perth, Northbrook, Godfrey, et cetera.

The petitioners, of which there are over a thousand, call upon Parliament to preserve the current and traditional definition of marriage. They do so on the following basis. They say that marriage is the best foundation for families and the raising of children and that the majority of Canadians support the current legal definition of marriage as the voluntary union of one man and one woman.

They believe as well that it is very important that fundamental matters of social policy, such as the definition of marriage, be decided by members of Parliament and not by the unelected judiciary.

[Citizen Engagement, May 3rd, 2005]

Mr. Chair, I want to ask a question of the member who is famous for his mathematical moments.

I am sort of switching gears between his great passion for how the House works to my great passion for electoral reform. I want to mention one of the problems that seems to occur in systems other than our current system. Our system has the great virtue of extreme simplicity. We vote for a bunch of people and whoever gets the most votes wins, whether or not he or she has 50% of the votes. Just or unjust, it is certainly comprehensible. Other systems almost always wind up involving some level of complexity. Frequently they require vote allocations based on formulas, usually named after the person who came up with it. The Sainte-Laguë formula is used in New Zealand and the Droop formula, named after Mr. Droop who invented it, is used in Australia.

For those who are not as passionate about the peculiarities of mathematics, does this kind of thing lead to a problem? If voters do not know, if voters cannot see easily the results of what they are doing, is there a danger that they will lose the kind of interest and passion that the member has? Perhaps not all of us or perhaps not all of the citizens share the same enthusiasm. Is there a danger that we could not win? Are there other suggestions he has as to how to boost the interest and engagement of voters in the whole system?

[Citizen Engagement, May 3rd, 2005]

Mr. Chair, I have a comment to make rather than a question, but it backs up what my hon. colleague has just said.

I have tried as a member of Parliament to vote with the wishes of my constituents and to do so in a way that to some degree would replicate the kind of citizen engagement there would be if there was a formal referendum process in this country. We do have the Referendum Act, but it is used very selectively. Over the course of the last 100 years it has been used three times. There have only been three referendums from 1896 to 1992.

We do have what we call constituent referendums where a postal ballot is mailed to all households. I have done this with respect to a number of laws. I explain in the mailing why I am consulting my constituents and why I regard an issue as important. I provide a non-partisan description of the bill as well.

I did this in the prior Parliament with respect to Bill C-5, the Species at Risk Act. I included the review that was done for members by the Library of Parliament and included it in the mailout. I included it so people would understand the general purpose of the bill in a non-partisan kind of way and also included arguments for and against the legislation.

In order to ensure that I provide fair and reasonable arguments, I took arguments from individuals who actually advocated for or against the legislation in debates in committee, in debates in the House or from newspaper editorials and so on. I tried to give a representative sample of the arguments for and against the legislation. Thanks to the magic of the Internet further documents and links could be put in to allow people to look at it and consult. This is particularly easy on something like same sex marriage where there are numerous websites that promote either side of the argument.

Having done this, I can say this produces a lot of citizen engagement as well as a lot of respect for an MP. I did it on two pieces of legislation in the last Parliament where I actually voted against my party based on the recommendations of my constituents. One was the most important piece of legislation that faced the 37th Parliament and that was the Anti-terrorism Act. When I asked my constituents whether I should vote in favour of the bill at third reading if no sunset clause was included in it, the majority told me not to vote in favour of it. I voted against it. Only four members of my party broke ranks and voted against that legislation. I was one of those four.

On another occasion I was the only member of the entire opposition to vote in favour of a law. It was a lonely experience, but it was what my constituents had instructed me to do.

The number of people who respond to these constituent referendums can be substantial. In one constituent referendum I asked whether I should opt in or out of the MP pay raise. I had over 3,000 responses.

This kind of mechanism, if used by MPs, can produce a lot of citizen engagement and involvement. It seems to me that it is a healthy antidote to the danger that worries many MPs on the government side. They think that we are just going to get anarchy and people going off in different directions. If we have to go through the process and the discipline of explaining in an objective way to our constituents what the nature of an argument is, we are unlikely to be led astray unless the government itself has wandered astray from where public opinion actually happens to be.

[Citizen Engagement, May 3rd, 2005]

Madam Chair, early in the minister's comments she made reference to something just in passing, but I hope I will be able to encourage her to expand upon it.

She said that there is need for party reform if electoral reform occurs, which interests me. I think there is always a benefit to reforming and democratizing one's party even if there is no electoral reform. I got myself embroiled in a bit of a controversy over attempting to do some of this in my own party last month, although I still think that the policies I proposed are substantial improvements on the status quo. Some of them did actually get put through and I think they are a benefit to the democracy of our party.

However, leaving self-promotion aside, what I wanted to do was inquire about that, and because I am only going to get one shot at asking the minister of state a question, I am also going to ask her about her experience with her blog. I hear people starting to say that a blog is a useful tool. I would be interested in hearing from another person who has experienced it and might be able to add comments that would be of use to all of us.

[Citizen Engagement, May 3rd, 2005]

Madam Chair, one of the concerns we are talking about is participation. I bring this up because of the fact that the committee on which both the hon. member for Windsor—Tecumseh and I sit in plans to report to the House. I am sure the minister would take notice that what we would be reporting deals with electoral reform.

One of the problems that can occur with electoral reform, which was mentioned to us in our travels, is that if the system is too complicated, that is if there is a difficulty in determining what the effect of one's vote is and how one is making a difference, then that seems to lower citizen engagement. I think it is a real problem.

On the other hand, the arguments in favour of electoral reform on the basis that we ought to have election results which in some way resemble the voting patterns of the population as opposed to reflecting the random results of the first past the post system also has the effect of lowering people's rates of participation. I suspect that when one talks about young people, and I increasingly find it harder to relate instinctively as some of my younger colleagues can, to the feelings of young people, I think part of what is driving them not to vote is the sense that it is not going to make a difference.

Does my colleague have any thoughts on how we reconcile the prospect of changing with the need for some kind of transparency to allow an electoral system that will hopefully have some effect in raising citizen participation not only among young people, but among others who do not participate. One could look at other groups that have low participation rates if that seems appropriate.

[Citizen Engagement, May 3rd, 2005]

Two senators for each state. There was no change in that respect.

We will remember the talk about the triple E senate being equally effective. While it was a double E senate, it was equal and effective. There were very high level debates in the senate. The office of senator was highly respected, although it was not an elected office. The famous Lincoln-Douglas debates, for example, were debates of two candidates for the senate in the late 1850s.

There were a number of things that were problematic about this. It was not democratic for one thing. In addition, and the Lincoln-Douglas debates point this out, they went to these debates in front of vast audiences and argued the democratic and republican positions on the issue of slavery, western expansion and so on, and then people voted for their members of the state legislature largely based on who those people would then vote for in the state house to send to Washington as their senator, which means that to some degree the legislature was being turned into an electoral college for senators.

I do not want to exaggerate the importance of this transformation into an electoral college of the state houses but it was a problem. Of course, having discharged that one responsibility, a person then had to get on for the next two or four years, depending on the state one was in, with actually governing the state and other issues under state jurisdiction might not have been discussed in the fullness with which they should have been discussed. That was a problem.

What happened was the progressive movement of the 1890s and particularly the first decade of the 20th century arose and there was a movement for a variety of improvements, many of them democratic, including the introduction of the primary system to control the party bosses. There were some temperance movements that were tied in with it as well.

It was very much a populace movement. There was a lot of citizen engagement, some of it unfortunately tinged with racism and so on. None the less it was a genuine populace movement.

The state of Oregon decided that state elections would be held to select senators with the first election being held in, I think, 1906. This movement was already taking place in other states, but the election happened first in Oregon with the senator being accepted. The senate had the capability to reject a member of its body, but that was not done and the senator from Oregon was elected.

Senate elections occurred on a two year cycle. In 1908 there was a larger number. This number also increased with the 1910 elections. In 1913 an amendment was proposed which required acceptance by three-fourths of all the states making senate elections mandatory.

I do not think, as a result of that, the quality of the United States senate has gone down. It was always regarded as the chamber in which a more thoughtful level of debate occurred than that which occurred in the House of Representatives. Tocqueville points out that comparison.

Although the House of Representatives has become better, the senate has still retained a kind of gravitas that comes from the length of service. For example, Ted Kennedy has been around for years and so have many other senators. Unlike the lower house, it also has the advantage of not being subject to gerrymandering which is a severe problem unfortunately in the United States.

[Citizen Engagement, May 3rd, 2005]

Madam Chair, I would like to talk a bit about the abolition of the Senate first before directly answering the member's question.

Polls show that the abolition of the Senate is a popular option. It is not necessarily the majority option, but it has strong support in Canada. That has been the policy of the New Democrats and others in Canada for many years. It is a respectable position. Other countries have done it. New Zealand, for example, abolished its upper house in the early 1950s. All of the maritime provinces and Quebec had upper houses and got rid of them. The idea of going from a bicameral to a unicameral system is certainly respectable.

We would be very well advised not to take that course for a very specific reason and we should look at what happened in New Zealand as a model. New Zealand adopted a unicameral system, so there was no check from the upper house on the lower house. It retained a first past the post system. My colleague who went to New Zealand with me a month ago will recall this.

It entered into a period of unbridled power. In fact, the definitive textbook of New Zealand politics at the time was called unbridled power because there was nothing to stop the dictatorship of whoever controlled the lower house under the first past the post system, even when that person got a fairly small percentage of the vote. Therefore, the country was whipsawed back and forth between parties that would get elected on a mandate, abandon the mandate, and adopt policies that were dramatically at variance with where the people wanted to be. Typically in New Zealand's case, these were hard right policies and they campaigned on the left, and one party would replace the other. In the end, there was a tremendous frustration and so a new system of representation was adopted in the lower house.

I think the system has stabilized a bit, but that is the danger. One cannot get rid of the upper house without adopting electoral reform in the lower house. In particular, if one did that, I think one would have to have the kind of electoral reform that ensures some kind of perpetual minority government in order to keep things stable.

I would go further and say one would want to design a system of electoral reform for the lower house that ensures that the parties that hold the balance of power tend to be centrist parties as opposed to parties at the margin in order to ensure that one does not then get whipsawed between left wing coalitions and right wing coalitions but instead tend to get centrist coalitions, which unfortunately I do not think has been achieved in New Zealand. That is a long way of not dealing with the question the member actually asked me.

With regard to the senate in the United States, the American senate actually served quite effectively for over a century as a house of the states. The senators were appointed by the legislatures of the various states.

[Citizen Engagement, May 3rd, 2005]

Mr. Chair, I am delighted to rise tonight to speak on the subject of citizen engagement. I will start my comments by making the simple premise that the more democratic the system is, the more citizens will participate.

As the critic for democratic reform for the official opposition, I will focus my remarks on the subject of democratic reform and I think it will be evident how this will improve rates of citizen participation. Democracy, which is my portfolio, is also my passion. It is the reason I am in politics. I developed this passion while I was living in Washington State in 1990-91 and saw referendums in action. I saw what an effective and intelligent decision making tool they were.

This was added to when I lived in Australia in 1997 to 1999. There, I sat in on the country's constitutional convention in which Australians were debating whether or not to abolish the monarchy and replace it with a republic. Again, the level of intelligence of the debate impressed me deeply, as did the level of citizen participation. The number of people who came to sit in the viewers' galleries in their old Parliament House and listen in on these debates was very impressive.

Since that time I have gone to Switzerland to attend a landsgemeinde, the traditional citizens' assembly in the town square, and to Vermont to participate in a New England town meeting.

This is something I do very much believe in very passionately. I do believe that the more transparency and directness we have in our democracy, the increase in democracy, the more likely we are to see citizen engagement.

Other Conservative members speaking tonight will speak on other issues relating to democratic reform and the democratic deficit, but my particular topic tonight is Senate reform.

There are many democratic reforms that our party proposes. The Conservative policy document, amended in March of this year in Montreal at our convention, calls for changes to the answerability of officers of Parliament. They would be answerable to Parliament directly. That is one policy.

We believe in a substantial improvement in the nature of free votes. We have committed ourselves to free votes, including free votes of members of the shadow cabinet, or of our cabinet should we find ourselves in government, on issues of moral conscience such as abortion, the definition of marriage and euthanasia.

We would ensure that nominees to the Supreme Court of Canada would be ratified by a free vote in Parliament after receiving the approval of the justice committee of the House of Commons. This sort of ratification process would substantially increase citizen interest and participation, I think, just as the genuinely free debates that have occurred in the 38th Parliament, as opposed to the elected dictatorship that was the 37th Parliament, have increased citizen interest and citizen participation.

We would also work on Senate reform. I will read for members what our policy says on Senate reform before getting into more detail. It states:

i) A Conservative government will support the election of senators. The Conservative Party believes in an equal Senate to address the uneven distribution of Canada's population and provide a balance to safeguard regional interests.

We also state, and this is the democratic part, that:

ii) Where the people of a province or territory by democratic election choose persons qualified to be appointed to the Senate, a Conservative government will fill any vacancy in the Senate for that province or territory among those elected persons.

The House may rest assured that citizens will participate in Senate elections. We know this because there have been Senate elections in the province of Alberta and we know that more votes were cast for Bert Brown and Stan Waters when they were voted for the Senate than have ever been cast for any member elected to the House; a larger number of votes were cast for those individuals. That, I think, is a testament to the effectiveness of the system.

We know as well that individuals can be appointed to the Senate after having been elected, because this was done in the case of Stan Waters. Admittedly, the Prime Minister of the day, Brian Mulroney, was reluctant to make that appointment, but he finally conceded the point and did appoint Mr. Waters to the Senate, where he served as Canada's only elected senator so far. Hopefully he will be the first in a series that will become permanent.

With regard to the Senate, our party's policy and the Alberta elections to the Senate, I want to contrast what I have just said with the current Prime Minister's record on the subject of Senate reform.

The current Prime Minister came to office on December 12, 2003. On December 19, one week later, he said something to the effect that “I am going further than any Prime Minister has gone before to make the Senate of Canada a democratic place. What I am going to do is ensure that all senators must be approved by the House of Commons”. I do not have the exact words. This statement sounded very dramatic and on its face was a very Conservative proposal, or rather, a very democratic proposal.

When I heard this statement being made, I was absolutely astounded. I issued a press release under the title “Martin Kills Senate Reform”. I will read from it. I will substitute the words “Prime Minister” for the Prime Minister's name, although that is what was used in the original. I said:

Placing one house of Parliament in charge of appointments to the other is a dangerous and unprecedented departure from the traditional practice of federal, bicameral systems.

I noted that “no other federal system” in the world “allows the lower house any role in the selection of members to its upper chamber”. I said:

The Senate was intended to be a chamber of sober second thought, reviewing rash decisions taken in the Commons. [The Prime Minister] would rob it of its independence from the Commons. This reflects a surprising ignorance about how the separation of powers is supposed to operate under our Constitution.

I then pointed out that this would have certain other perverse impacts. I said:

Under [the Prime Minister's] proposal, Quebec's 75 MPs would get three times as many votes as Alberta's 26 MPs, as to who becomes a senator from Alberta. Ontario's 103 MPs would have a greater say than Quebec's MPs, as to who becomes a senator from Quebec. Only a prime minister who is completely deaf to the regional nature of Canadian federalism could dream up such an ill-conceived proposal.

I pointed out that the Prime Minister could have taken decisive steps. I said, “He could have called for Senate elections”. He could have appointed Bert Brown and Ted Morton, the two senators in waiting, as had been done with Stan Waters earlier.

The last thing I said was this:

So, in [the Prime Minister's] world, nationwide Senate elections are impossible, and so are local initiatives to introduce elections. This is [the Prime Minister's] way of simultaneously killing any prospect of a democratically elected Senate, and transferring the blame to others.

That is because he said, “I will not allow for piecemeal reform to the Senate. We can't do it unless the whole thing is done”. Of course, making all the changes required for an elected and perhaps somewhat regionally different but equal Senate would require not merely the consent of the provinces but the consent of all of the provinces. If it is piecemeal we cannot have it, he said, for reasons that he has never actually articulated. I am not sure that he knows why himself, except that it assures no change to the Senate.

Incidentally, what happened when I released that press release was that the very next day the Prime Minister called up one of the newspapers and said he was badly advised and was withdrawing his proposal. He said he did not actually want to do that after all, but of course piecemeal reforms cannot happen. That has been the state since then. Since then there has been nothing on the Senate except for the same old kinds of appointments, the same old undemocratic appointments that existed back in the bad old days. We see no prospect of that changing.

I want to spend a moment dwelling upon this theme of “I will not engage in piecemeal reform. I will never do it. There's something wrong with it”. If the Prime Minister really believes that, then there is a question we have to ask. Why did he support the proposal for Senate reform in the Charlottetown accord?

The Charlottetown accord of 1992, when of course he was a member of Parliament in the opposition, had in section 4 surely the most piecemeal proposals ever imagined for a national Senate. There was a proposal for two senators per province and one per territory, but if the territories became provinces they still would get only one. That was one piecemeal element: half-representation for these new provinces when and if they became provinces. There was going to be provision for the indirect election of senators in some provinces but not others. That was under section 23(a) of the Charlottetown accord.

There was going to be provision for some provinces, but not others, to have special measures to provide for equal representation of males and females. That was Ontario's proposal. That would exist in Ontario but nowhere else. There is something that is piecemeal.

The determination of electoral boundaries and districts in relation to the election of senators would be set up by the provinces. At least on paper this is not incompatible with multiple member districts in some provinces and not in others. Perhaps it is some system of proportional representation. In other words, it is one more element of piecemeal reform.

Finally, I will read from the Charlottetown accord: “Where a law of Parliament and a law of a province or territory under the paragraphs above conflict, the law of the province or territory will prevail to the extent of the conflict”. This is thereby ensuring more “piecemeal”.

So he was willing to consider piecemeal reform. We should be willing to consider piecemeal reform. The United States went from an unelected to an elected Senate through the use of piecemeal reform. Oregon started it in the first decade of the 20th century. Within another decade it became the law of the land through a constitutional amendment.

I think this makes a lot of sense. I think it would greatly increase citizen engagement. I very much would encourage all members to consider the possibility of piecemeal reform, starting with elected senators. Then we will work around to the other question of making our Senate more equal than it is today.

[Civil Marriage Act, May 3rd, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, if the flood of petitions and letters to my office over the past six months is any indication, Bill C-38, the same sex marriage bill, is by far the most important bill that will be dealt with by the 38th Parliament.

I have received about five times as much mail on this subject as on any other that I have dealt with in my four years as a member of Parliament. I have received many thousands of signatures on petitions in the constituency. For example, last week I presented nine such petitions to the House, and this week I have a further eight petitions that I am ready to submit. As members can see from the size of this pile, there are many hundreds of signatures on these petitions. As well, of course, I listen to many of my colleagues on all sides of the House presenting one petition after another, which is a very strong indication of the depth of interest expressed by Canadians on this issue.

Another sign of the depth of interest and commitment is the number of letters that are received and that are individual handwritten letters, letters from people who, although they are constituents, are not regular correspondents. People have been moved to write to me on this issue when they have written on no other issue. That is a signal to me of the depth of their interest in and commitment on this issue.

It was my practice in the 37th Parliament, that is, the one that sat from 2000 to 2004, to seek instruction from the electorate in my riding as to how to vote on key legislation via a mechanism that we refer to in the constituency as a constituency referendum.

I have conducted constituency referenda in which I asked constituents, by means of a mail-out ballot to all households in the riding, how to vote at final reading on, among other things, the species at risk act, which was Bill C-5 in the 37th Parliament, and the anti-terrorism act, Bill C-36 in the 37th Parliament. I have asked about whether to opt in or out of the MPs' annual $20,000 pay increase and also about how the riding boundaries of my then riding of Lanark--Carleton ought to be redrawn so that I could submit to the Electoral Boundaries Commission a submission that accurately reflected the community of interest as expressed by my constituents.

My party leader, the Leader of the Opposition, is a democrat, which means a lot to me because I am of course the shadow cabinet critic for democratic reform. He is a democrat. He strongly supports the right of MPs, including members of the shadow cabinet, to vote their consciences or to vote the collective consciences of the people they represent. That is why three members of our shadow cabinet are able to vote for this bill without fear of sanction, reprisal or losing their posts.

This contrasts dramatically with the Liberal benches, where no such freedom is available to members of the cabinet. I am also the critic for FedNor, the federal agency for regional economic development in northern Ontario. My opposite number in the Liberal cabinet, the minister for FedNor, has indicated very strongly that he personally is opposed to same sex marriage and is opposed to this legislation. He has been faced with a choice between resigning his post or abdicating his conscience. Unfortunately, he seems to have chosen to abdicate his responsibility to his conscience in choosing to fall in line with the government.

How many others have done so without at least speaking openly as he has done I do not know, but certainly there is very little in the way of democracy on that side of the House and on something that is the most important issue in the minds of many of the constituents of many of the members opposite, and of course also in the minds of many of the members opposite themselves, as it is in the minds of so many opposition members of Parliament.

The same lack of freedom to follow one's conscience or the conscience of one's constituents is even more evident in the New Democratic Party, where one member, the member for Churchill, in northern Manitoba, has essentially been knuckled under, read the riot act and told she must vote the way her party leader tells her to, without regard for her personal conscience or for the will of her constituents.

As our party's critic on democracy, I am proud of the courageous and democratic position adopted by our leader, but also of the democratic position adopted by our party, the Conservative Party, at its March policy convention in Montreal. I want to read from our policy platform a policy that was adopted in Montreal at our March convention. It states:

On issues of moral conscience, such as abortion, the definition of marriage, and euthanasia, the Conservative Party acknowledges the diversity of deeply held personal convictions among individual Party members and the right of Members of Parliament to adopt positions in consultations with their constituents and to vote freely.

My intention personally has been to vote against this bill at second reading and to conduct a constituency referendum to determine how I should vote at third reading.

At second reading a bill is being approved or rejected in principle. As such, it is the stage of the bill's life where it is most appropriate for a member of Parliament to vote his or her conscience. My conscience dictates that I cannot support a bill that fails to provide adequate protection for religious freedom when such protection could easily have been included in the text of the bill.

I have largely based my political career on the defence of religious freedom. My very first statement in the House of Commons, as a new member of Parliament, was the defence of the freedom of religion of Falun Gong practitioners in mainland China. When I turned to my constituents to ask how to vote on the Anti-terrorism Act and ultimately when I broke ranks with most members of my party, and with the government of course, in order to vote against the bill, I was primarily motivated by the unwarranted restrictions that the bill was placing on freedom of religion which I believe set a very dangerous precedent in this country.

Freedom of religion that is nominally protected in clause 3 of the same sex bill is quite frankly a fictitious protection of freedom of religion. It is a section that Liberal members will cite constantly. Let me read what it says because it is revealing when the text is read. We realize how hollow this protection of freedom of religion really is. Clause 3 of the bill says:

It is recognized that officials of religious groups are free to refuse to perform marriages that are not in accordance with their religious beliefs.

There are two things to note about this. First, which my hon. colleague from Okanagan—Coquihalla so clearly identified, this does not take care of all of the other impositions on freedom of religion, of many other actors in society that are not contained within the wording of this section, such as people who serve as commissioners of marriage who find their personal conscience violated.

It would be no great effort to find someone who finds it in accordance with his or her personal conscience to perform a same sex marriage as opposed to leaving it, requiring that all people who are commissioners of marriage must be willing to do so should the condition present itself. That is just unreasonable. It provides no extra rights to a same sex couple, but it takes away a fundamental and profound right to those who find that it is not in accordance with their personal religious or philosophical beliefs.

That provision could be taken care of by provincial law. It cannot be taken care of by federal law, but the federal government could have engaged in negotiation with the provinces to ensure those kinds of protections are built into provincial law. It has made no such effort and in fact is standing by while the opposite starts to happen. There are many other instances that my colleague cited, but I will not go through them all now.

The other thing to note about this clause is that in the draft of the bill, the earlier version that was submitted to the Supreme Court of Canada, an almost identical provision was written into clause 2 of that draft law except that it did not have the wording “it is recognized” at the beginning. Clause 3 states that “It is recognized that officials of religious groups are free to refuse to perform marriages--”.

The inclusion of those words makes this a purely declaratory provision. It has no weight whatsoever. It should be up in the very long preamble to the bill because it has no weight in court. The reason it has no weight in court, even written as the original clause 2 of the prior bill was, is because the court said it can have no weight. It is ultra vires; it is outside of federal jurisdiction.

The solemnization of marriage under section 92 of the Constitution is a provincial responsibility. So putting this in the bill is disingenuous. It should not be given any weight. In fact, it should not even be in the text of the bill.

At third reading my intention is to go to my constituents and ask them how I ought to vote. Some people feel there is a contradiction between voting one's conscience and vote consulting one's constituents.

I want to indicate here that I heartily disagree with this bill. People know where I personally stand, particularly on the issue of freedom of religion. However, it would be arrogant of me to suggest to my voters, to my constituents, that on an issue of such great importance my conscience is somehow superior to the consciences of each of the 113,000 people I represent in the House of Commons. That is not the case. I am proud of them. I am proud of the good sense and conscientious, thoughtful and general sentiments that have been expressed over and over again in the hundreds of letters and many petitions that I have received on this subject, and that I have taken many hours to read and review personally.

If all members of Parliament of all parties showed the same good sense, goodwill, openness and respect that my constituents, and the constituents of all members, have shown, this debate would be a much more civilized debate than it has turned out to be so far.

[Points of Order, May 2nd, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, this arises from members' statements. I am seeking unanimous consent of the House in this matter. I brought up the issue of the dangerous state of repair of a bridge in Napanee and mentioned that the Minister of Transport had not responded to a portfolio of photographs that had been sent to him by the municipal council on this matter.

I would like to ask for the unanimous consent of the House to table this portfolio, a copy of what was sent to him by the town fathers, and as well this piece of rock which fell from the pier of the bridge and demonstrates the perilous--