I'm impatient not with the House of Commons as an institution, but with the way in which it is operated. This doesn't prove I don't believe in participatory democracy.

There's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation. What's done in private between adults doesn't concern the Criminal Code.

Because I am a deep believer in the civil society, I think we should be prepared to pay the consequences of breaking the law and that is either paying the penalty for it, or leaving the country.

I think that the history of the past hundred years has shown us that, by and large, the one linguistic group to whom separatism is being preached is not moved by the arguments which are used.

This is the beauty of the democratic process: it permits that subjective view of justice - which everyone holds - permits that subjective way to express itself peacefully through discussion, through reason and through the voting process.

Canada is a country whose main exports are hockey players and cold fronts. Our main imports are baseball players and acid rain.

What is considered sinful in one of the great religions to which citizens belong isn't necessarily sinful in the others. Criminal law therefore cannot be based on the notion of sin; it is crimes that it must define.