Thank you, Mr. Minister, for being here today.
I want to especially thank you for placing the concerns of parents regarding their kids as a top priority on your agenda. Bringing this bill forward indicates some of the things I've been talking about for the 13 years that I've been here, and I'm very pleased to finally be able to address that with a minister of the Crown in order to get some changes made.
I also want to commend you on the $600 million addition to the budget to fight child exploitation. That's an indication to me that the things that need to happen are really going to happen.
I realize the technicalities that are being talked about. I was principal of a school for the better part of my life before coming here. I want to share with the minister that Mr. Comartin's figures that approximately 13% could be engaged in sexual activities at ages 14 or 15 could be fairly accurate. Compared to what I had to deal with in the school I was at for a number of years—it was a small school, but we had 14-year-olds and 15-year-olds, and I can name specifically five times where individuals of 14 and 15 were engaged in sexual relations with adults over five years older than themselves.
Each one of those situations ended in tragedy—I'm talking two or three years down the road, beyond the initial contact—devastating tragedy. They were children of friends of mine, so I know what I'm talking about regarding what it can do to families and to young people, what it can do. No, maybe it doesn't happen in every case, but I saw it, I felt it, and I was part of it. It has to stop. It just has to stop.
So I want some assurance. In every one of those cases that I mentioned in my particular situation, we tried to involve the police to remove the 14-year-old or 15-year-old from the situation. The police couldn't do anything; they were handicapped. Parents forcefully tried to move in and remove their children from those situations. Each one of them was charged with trespassing and, in a couple of cases, charged with assault for entering a premise, trying to bring their child out of something that they hated to see them involved in. Had they been successful, the tragedies wouldn't have occurred. That's why I think it's so important that we really address this seriously.
Will the authority be returned to the parents to have control over decisions made by 14-year-olds and 15-year-olds with regard to their sexual activities with people five years older or more?