Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
I am very pleased to appear before the committee as you begin your review of Bill C-54, the Protecting Children from Sexual Predators Act.
Our goal with this bill is twofold. First, it seeks to ensure that all child sexual offences are treated seriously and consistently for sentencing purposes. Second, it proposes reforms that seek to help prevent the commission of sexual offences against children.
This bill's sentencing reforms target mandatory penalties for all sexual offences where the victim is a child. The sexual abuse of any child is a serious offence, and it must be clearly denounced. Our government believes that child sexual offenders must receive sentences that reflect the seriousness of their crimes and the danger they represent to our children.
As members of the committee will know, acts of child sexual abuse can be charged under child-specific offences or under the general sexual offences that apply to both adults and child victims. Though these two groups of offences address similar conduct, they do not impose similar penalties where the victim is a child.
For example, some of the child-specific sexual offences impose mandatory minimums, but none of the general sexual offences impose mandatory penalties. In addition, the variations in sentencing often result in conditional sentences of imprisonment--house arrest, as it's often referred to--for some offences but not for others.
The effect of this varying treatment is that not all child sexual assaults are treated equally seriously by the system. In fact, given that 80% of police-reported incidents of child sexual assault in 2008 were charged under the general sexual assault offence in section 271 of the Criminal Code, this means that the overwhelming majority of child sexual offences do not carry a mandatory minimum penalty. This bill changes that.
There are currently 12 child-specific sexual offences that impose mandatory penalties. Amendments made in 2005 to those offences resulted in mandatory penalties being added to only some of the child-specific sexual offences and to none of the general sexual assault provisions. These changes produced a random and inconsistent approach to mandatory penalties such that they do not all adequately reflect the serious nature of the offences.
In order to fix these inconsistencies and ensure that sexual predators receive sentences that reflect the extreme seriousness of their crimes, this bill proposes to add seven new mandatory penalties to offences that currently do not impose mandatory sentencing. Three of these are child-specific offences: the bestiality provisions, the Internet luring of a child, and the exposure to a child under 16 years of age. The other four are general sexual offences, and the mandatory penalties will apply where the victim is a child under the age of 16, the age of consent.
They are section 155, incest; section 271, sexual assault; section 272, sexual assault with a weapon, threats, or causing bodily harm; and section 273, aggravated sexual assault.
This bill proposes higher mandatory penalties for seven child-specific sexual offences that already carry mandatory penalties. This will ensure that the mandatory penalty is not only commensurate with the offence in question but is also consistent with other mandatory penalty offences.
For example, Bill C-54 would increase the current mandatory penalty for section 151, sexual interference--which carries a maximum penalty of 10 years on indictment--from 45 days mandatory to one year mandatory. In this way, the higher mandatory penalty would be consistent with the new mandatory penalty proposed for section 271, the general sexual assault offence.
Bill C-54 also seeks to prevent the commission of a sexual assault against a child. It does so by proposing the creation of two new offences and by requiring the courts to consider imposing two new specific conditions that would seek to prevent a suspected or convicted child sex offender from engaging in conduct that would facilitate their sexual offending.
The first new offence proposed in this bill would prohibit anyone from providing sexually explicit material to a young person for the purpose of facilitating the commission of a sexual offence against the young person. Child sex offenders often provide such material to their intended victims with a view to lowering their sexual inhibitions; in other words, they do this as part of the grooming process of their victim.
Today, if that material constitutes child pornography, irrespective of the purpose, it is already prohibited. Bill C-54 does not change that. But where the material in question is not child pornography--in other words, where it depicts adults engaged in explicit sexual activity as defined by the new offence--the Criminal Code does not currently catch this unless the material meets the very high threshold definition of obscene material under section 163.
Bill C-54 will change this. It proposes to prohibit providing sexually explicit material to a young person for the purpose of facilitating the commission of a sexual offence against that child. This new offence would carry a penalty similar to that for the existing obscenity and corrupting morals offence in section 163.
Bill C-54 also proposes to prohibit anyone from using telecommunications such as the Internet to make arrangements with another person to commit a sexual offence against a child. In addition, this bill proposes other needed consequential amendments, including, for example, adding the two proposed offences to subsection 7(4.1) of the Criminal Code, which provides Canadian courts with extraterritorial jurisdiction to enable the prosecution of Canadian child sex tourists. Both of the proposed new offences would carry mandatory sentences of imprisonment.
Lastly, our bill proposes to expand the powers of the court to prohibit a convicted child sex offender under section 161 of the Criminal Code and to prohibit a suspected child sex offender under section 810.1 from engaging in conduct that may facilitate their commission of one or more of the enumerated sexual or abduction offences. First, the list of offences would be expanded to include four prostitution offences where the victim is a child; second, the courts would be specifically directed to consider imposing a condition prohibiting the offender from having any unsupervised access to a young person and from having any unsupervised use of the Internet.
The imposition of these conditions would help to prevent the offender from being placed in a situation where he has access and opportunity to sexually assault a child, and from having unfettered use of the Internet and other technologies that are so instrumental in the commission of child pornography and other child-sexually-exploitive offences.
These are the key elements of this bill. As do all law-abiding Canadians, our government knows that the sexual exploitation of children causes irreparable harm to the youngest and most vulnerable members of our society. Our message in Bill C-54 is strong and clear: to those dangerous sexual predators who abuse children, from now on you will go to jail.
Thank you very much.
