Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague. I was not expecting this question, which makes me think about one of the matters for which I am responsible. I do not have it with me, but I know it by heart.
It is true that people operate now using all these chat rooms on the Internet. You go to these sites and you chat, as it is called, by typing messages with someone on the Internet.
One of my clients was victimized by this kind of thing. She found herself in one of the countries of the Maghreb, which I will not name in order to avoid any possibility of her being recognized, washing dishes when she had been promised that she would be a hostess for a so-called prince or oil minister. To get her out of that country took us more than two years of activity. What she told us after getting out was truly incredible.
We hope that this bill will make it possible for victims to complain, for their complaints to be heard and analyzed, and most importantly, for victims to be protected.
Organized crime today uses many systems, especially the Internet. People from Australia, Denmark, Finland, the former eastern bloc countries, people from all over the world, can chat in the space of a minute. Dates are arranged that way. The government has to find ways to intercept these wrongdoers or, at the very least, when a complaint is filed, trace the steps back to the person who set the trap. There is no other word for it; it is a trap set for victims.
I personally doubt very much that Internet dates are so productive. Even though it has been confirmed that extraordinary encounters have taken place over the Internet, unfortunately many bad encounters have ended in the death or serious injury of one of the participants.
I will touch briefly on an incident that occurred in New York. A man ended up in a hotel room at a wild party with some people. Three days later, he was missing a kidney. He does not know who took it. This all came about because he responded to an invitation on the Internet to go to a party at a certain location.
We have to be extremely careful. I want to thank the hon. member for Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel for this question. By all accounts, having legislation in place will not resolve the problem. However, we are going to provide the tools for attacking this problem, but we still must be careful and pay attention to meetings that may be arranged over the Internet.