Bill C-250 not dead yet

By Frank Stirk

OTTAWA, ON -- Bill C-250 -- which would criminalize "hateful" comments about a person's sexual orientation -- may have died as unpassed legislation when Prime Minister Jean Chretien prorogued or ended the current session of Parliament, but its critics caution it is too early to claim victory.

"I can be thankful that it's gone at least for now. But the fact that it kind of died by default means that it's probably coming back at us," says Brian Rushfeldt, executive director of the Canada Family Action Coalition.

In fact, it appears that new procedural rules for dealing with private member's bills like C-250 mean that it can be easily revived after the House of Commons resumes sitting in January.

Canadian Alliance justice critic Vic Toews says all that NDP MP Svend Robinson -- the bill's sponsor -- has to do is to re-introduce the bill at the stage that it was in the legislative process when Parliament prorogued.

"C-250 is now in the Senate," he says, "but I think our rules would permit him then to certify [to the House of Commons] that he's re-introducing it in the same form as when it died, and then send it automatically back to the Senate."

Passed by MPs on September 17 by a vote of 141-110, the bill was introduced for first reading in the Senate a week later. Yet by the time the session ended seven weeks later, it had gone no further.

Gwen Landolt, national vice-president of REAL Women of Canada, says much of the credit for stalling C-250 must go to Liberal Senator Anne Cools.

"She was just like a warrior with a sword, beating off the barbarians day after day after day," she says. "She was never out of the Senate for a moment when it was in session, because she was afraid that the bill would come to a vote."

Other senators who later joined Cools in speaking out against C-250 were Liberal Tommy Banks, Conservatives David Tkachuk and Leonard Gustafson, and the lone Canadian Alliance senator, Gerry St. Germain.

If the bill does return to the Senate for the second time, its fate will ultimately depend on Paul Martin, who will by then be Canada's new Prime Minister.

"It certainly is not a given that it's going to pass or pass quickly in the Senate," says Janet Epp-Buckingham, director of law and public policy with the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada.

"We are expecting that the senators are going to have a bunch of legislation that's revived from the government side, so they may well be inundated with other things to deal with that are higher priority."

Rushfeldt also believes that concern about the potential threat of C-250 to freedom of religion has increased significantly since the bill was first introduced.

"If we do our work, hopefully we'll have enough senators with enough common sense to say this thing is going nowhere," he says.

But Sean Murphy, western director of the Catholic Civil Rights League, says for most Christians, the reasons for opposing C-250 are not so clear-cut.

"One of the things most Christians have difficulty with when considering this bill is: why would a Christian object to a bill that would prohibit the incitement of hatred? The answer is, in principle, I don't think we do," he says.

"However, if you're going to pass a law, you have to write it very carefully, and that certainly has not been done in this case. They haven't, for example, even defined 'sexual orientation.'"

Toews agrees that substantial public opposition will still be critical to guarantee the bill's final demise.

"If Paul Martin sees C-250 developing into a fight, it's not one he wants to pick before an election. Then the choice that he can make is simply to have the Senate stall the bill and no decision will be made," he says.

"So the best strategy is to keep pressure on the senators, asking them to amend the bill or defeat it." If it passed with amendments, then it would have to be sent back again to the House of Commons.

And if C-250 does not pass the Senate unamended by the time Martin calls an election -- possibly in April -- "then it truly is dead," Toews adds.

"So it's about two-and-a-half months that we need to kill."