By Lily Nguyen
Calling it nothing personal, Ottawa Centre MP Mac Harb says he will continue his fight to remove the words “illegitimate child” from federal legislation in the coming session of Parliament.
“It’s not a good idea for us to stigmatize a child. It creates a special category. We tell an individual you’re not in the norm,” he says.
His private member bill to change the definition of a child born of unmarried parents passed first reading in the last session of Parliament.
But the bill will expire unless he makes a statement to reintroduce it within the coming session’s first 30 days.
Harb is an unmarried father, but says his sponsorship of the bill has nothing to do with his two-year-old daughter, whose name he didn’t want used.
“I would not want to discuss my daughter,” he says. “She’s just a child. She can’t defend herself. We’re dealing with national issues.”
Bill C-345 represents just one aspect of Harb’s fight for the rights of children. If it doesn’t pass, he has about 40 other bills dealing with similar issues, including making the definition of “child” more consistent. Currently, a child can refer to anyone under 12, under 16 or under 18.
Although Harb says he is confident his bill will become law eventually, Tamra Thomson of the Canadian Bar Association says there isn’t much chance of that.
She points out that of the more than 200 private member’s bills currently in the system, only four or five got past the first stage and were debated in the House of Commons.
On the off-chance the bill is passed, Thomson says the change to federal legislation like the Criminal Code would only be symbolic.
“My reading of the bill is there would be no change to the law at all. It is simply to change the expression of illegitimate child to something that has not that weight attached to it.”
That wasn’t the case when the government of Ontario amended provincial legislation about 20 years ago to remove the phrase. Thomson says provincial law previously made a distinction between children born within or outside a marriage to determine such things as a child’s inheritance rights. Federal legislation makes no such distinctions.
But even if the bill’s effects are only symbolic, Harb says that is important enough, especially to his constituency.
“Centretown, perhaps more than any other constituency anywhere in Canada, has a very high rate of people who live on their own, where children don’t have two parents,” he says.
Dr. Mark Totten, of the Youth Services Bureau, says his organization sees about 7,000 children a year, many of whom belong to non-nuclear families.
Although Totten says Centretown is now the constituency with the highest number of children born outside of marriage, he agrees the bill is worthwhile. He says it deals with the broader issue of people thinking “the best kind of family is mom, dad, legitimate kids.”
On the other hand, Harb says, even if the words are removed from federal legislation, it won’t make much difference to the children involved.
“It’s not going to make the typical kid feel a whole lot better. They’re not going to give a damn.”