Bill C-26 (Historical)

Tougher Penalties for Child Predators Act

An Act to amend the Criminal Code, the Canada Evidence Act and the Sex Offender Information Registration Act, to enact the High Risk Child Sex Offender Database Act and to make consequential amendments to other Acts

This enactment amends the Criminal Code to
(a) increase mandatory minimum penalties and maximum penalties for certain sexual offences against children;
(b) increase maximum penalties for violations of prohibition orders, probation orders and peace bonds;
(c) clarify and codify the rules regarding the imposition of consecutive and concurrent sentences;
(d) require courts to impose, in certain cases, consecutive sentences on offenders who commit sexual offences against children; and
(e) ensure that a court that imposes a sentence must take into consideration evidence that the offence in question was committed while the offender was subject to a conditional sentence order or released on parole, statutory release or unescorted temporary absence.
It amends the Canada Evidence Act to ensure that spouses of the accused are competent and compellable witnesses for the prosecution in child pornography cases.
It also amends the Sex Offender Information Registration Act to increase the reporting obligations of sex offenders who travel outside Canada.
It enacts the High Risk Child Sex Offender Database Act to establish a publicly accessible database that contains information — that a police service or other public authority has previously made accessible to the public — with respect to persons who are found guilty of sexual offences against children and who pose a high risk of committing crimes of a sexual nature.
Finally, it makes consequential amendments to other Acts.

Tougher Penalties for Child Predators Act

[Joy Smith, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

Mr. Speaker, it would take a former police officer to ask a question like that. I thank my colleague.

Having said that, the member talks about the difficulties of policing and being in ICE units. How do police officers sit for hours watching a TV that shows the rapes, and hearing the children's cries? They know that they have to go and find out where those children are, because many of the predators film what they do. How do they go into an establishment and pick up a child when they have finally found her, and take her out after she has been sexually abused for a very long time? When they take the hand of that child, that hand is the same as the hand of their children. I know when I rescued a 14-year-old, her hand reminded me of my youngest daughter's hand when I took it.

Those police officers connect personally with what happens. I know, years afterward, they still hear the cries, the dreams still come. I know my own son talked about it, that when he went to sleep he could hear the cries of the children and he could not get the door down, and that was a recurring dream. That happens to a lot of ICE officers. The policing of this kind of thing is very challenging.

[François Lapointe, NDP, Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup, QC]

Mr. Speaker, if I am not mistaken, the son of our colleague from Kildonan—St. Paul worked on child pornography investigations. First, if that is the case, I commend his son. It must be a very hard job to have to search through the evidence in these sorts of cases. It really must be very difficult. I applaud his son for the work that he does.

However, I disagree with one of my colleague's comments. I did not understand it. The Conservatives themselves admitted that $10 million was not used. That money should have been used by the police units tasked to investigate pedophilia cases. Our colleague was saying that the money was not spent because—and surely his argument is valid—it is very difficult to find police officers who are willing to participate in these investigations and that those officers then have to be given a lot of training. I understand all that. It must be a long and difficult process. However, what I do not understand and what I would like my colleague to explain is why, rather than sending those millions of dollars elsewhere, was the money not kept and heavily invested in recruiting and training these people, if it is so difficult to get the job done?

[Joy Smith, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

Mr. Speaker, that is a very good comment. This government put forth a national action plan against human trafficking for exactly that, for training for police officers. The laws in Canada are very new on human trafficking and some of them are newer on child exploitation and sexual offences. When the member mentions the money that goes into that, our government put lots of money in to try to meet the needs that are out there because the need is greater than what has been addressed today. We need trained police officers.

I also want to point out that public safety did put in $2.5 million to combat child sexual exploitation. Those dollars were used for programming, for awareness and for all those kinds of things as well. It is not only that $10 million, but there are other dollars that have gone in to help on the other side of it too.

[Jamie Nicholls, NDP, Vaudreuil—Soulanges, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to say that I am splitting my time with the member for Laval—Les Îles.

The stats are troubling. One out of three girls and one out of six boys will be sexually abused before the age of 18. These statistics mean that right now in Canada there are five million girls who have been sexually abused and 2.8 million boys. That number is too high. That is a statistic that should trouble everyone in Canada.

That is part of the reason why we are supporting Bill C-26 going forward, but we do not believe that the bill goes far enough and I will explain why. Some 95% of child sexual abuse victims know their perpetrator in some way, a statistic from the Badgley commission in the eighties, and 68% are abused by a family member, someone within their family: stepfather, father or an uncle. When we think of these statistics, the problem becomes much more complex.

I am the father of a 10-year-old girl. I have another daughter on the way. She is due to be born in June. These statistics are troubling to me as a father. It is something that is always on my mind. It is always a worry that one day something might happen to my daughter.

New Democrats have zero tolerance for child sexual abuse. I would like to think that zero tolerance for child sexual abuse does not mean that we only get the predator after the perpetrator has abused the child, because that, in effect, is what the bill is addressing. For everything that is addressed in the bill, the sexual abuse has already happened. My hope as a father is that we could get rid of child sexual abuse before it happens, before any child in this country is abused.

There is nothing in Bill C-26 that will stop a child from being abused. I will explain why. The reason is that once the police put a predator in jail, the predator has abused a child. Once a perpetrator's name is in a database, the perpetrator has abused a child already. The abuse has already happened.

My question to my colleague, who may or may not be listening to me speaking about this, is that we have to find the solution to stopping sexual abuse before it happens. We have to reduce this problem that is in our country.

That said, we do support measures to remove child sexual predators from general society to protect the children they may further abuse. We even went to the point during the debates on Bill C-10 to approach the House leader and the minister responsible to say that we would take all the measures for child sexual predators out of the omnibus legislation and fast-track them through the House right away, make them into law right away. Unfortunately, the other side did not accept that. We thought that the need to pass them was pressing and that is why we proposed that. We would agree with putting these predators away so that the abuse stops.

However, we have to start talking about real action and we have to back up this action with actual funding, because tough words will not solve the problem. We also have to keep an open mind when we discuss this, because child sexual abuse is a wicked problem. It does not have simple solutions.

The statistics I cited at the top of my speech should make members think. Often when abuse happens in a family, the child is unwilling to speak because it may be a father or a stepfather. In the children's minds, they are trying to protect their family in one way, and yet they are trying to protect themselves. It is a very confusing experience for a child.

The Child Molestation Research & Prevention Institute in the U.S. says:

Professionals - physicians and therapists - can never put an end to sexual abuse; neither can the police or the courts. Why? Because they come on the scene too late. By the time they get there, the children have already been molested.

Therefore, the question we should be asking is, how do we prevent child abuse? We need to have frank discussions. The member across mentioned education, but part of the education piece that needs to happen is how to talk within families about abuse. It should not just be talking about the predator being a stranger outside of the family who is somehow going to infiltrate the family to abuse the children. Often the abuser is within the family already. Therefore, we need the tools to have these frank discussions about issues of abuse and issues of consent. As I said, 95% of the people are known to the children and 68% are often a family member.

At the core, sending molesters to jail as a solution to child molestation will always fail our children because in order for a molester to be jailed children will be abused. This is again from the institute. It is the same with treatment. When people who perpetrate child sexual abuse are identified for treatment, they have often already abused the child.

The member across the way also said that what we think of child sexual predators is not always the case. It is not one ethnic group and not one social class. There was actually a study done. It was called the Abel and Harlow child molestation prevention study. It looked at 4,000 admitted child molesters, men from the ages of 18 to 20. They found the following statistics: 77% were married; 93% were religious, men of faith; 46% had college educations; and 65% had normal steady work. After stating that, what does a child sexual predator look like? Physically, it could look like many of the men in this chamber. It is not what we imagine it to be on the outside.

They look like normal men on the outside, but on the inside they have a disorder that has been identified under the DSM as pedophilia. Pedophilia is an awful mental disorder. We do not discuss attacking this disorder enough. Often pedophilia is identified in the teenage years in men. There are signs that appear that can be signals. If we flag them soon enough, we might be able to prevent sexual abuse from occurring. If we could identify in the teenage years the signs of this disorder, then we could actually attack it right at the root.

This is where we have to attack it because then we could actually prevent these men, and sometimes women, from actually committing the sexual abuse. We have to focus on the cause. We have to develop a prevention plan to prevent sexual abuse from ever happening.

Bill C-26 does a wonderful job of looking at what to do after someone has abused a child. We would put them in jail and put them in a database. However, we really need to take action on finding a way to prevent child abuse from ever happening in the first place.

The way we are going to do that is to have a frank discussion. We have to stop portraying this as a stranger that is going to perpetrate sexual abuse on a child. We know the statistics. There have been many studies done. We have to really put the resources toward the root of the problem and start having frank discussions within our families and with our neighbours about the roots of sexual abuse.

We need to start to put our energy into this, so that those seven million children in our country, that I cited as the next generation, will have even less abuse and eventually, hopefully, we can eradicate this problem from our society entirely.

[John Barlow, Conservative, Macleod, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the member for his impassioned speech. As a father of two daughters, as well, I can certainly understand where he is coming from.

He did touch a bit on the crux of the issue. He said we do not know who these people are. They could be any one of us, and certainly, dealing with pedophilia and child sexual assault is multi-faceted.

Why does the member think that serving sentences consecutively and having an increase in maximum prison sentences for sexual offences in Bill C-26 is not going to stop additional attacks on children?

Certainly, we can start at the root of the problem, but this is also going to address repeat offenders. That is also very important. Why does he not think this would address that?

[Jamie Nicholls, NDP, Vaudreuil—Soulanges, QC]

Mr. Speaker, as I said in my speech already, New Democrats are supporting the legislation. I also said that imposing jail sentences does stop the further abuse. I do not think I said anything in my speech that contradicted the fact that we need to stop further abuse.

The crux of my speech was that we have to actually stop abuse before it happens. This bill addresses elements after the abuse has happened. I would like to see legislation put before the House that would actually reduce the prevalence of abuse, get to the root of it, and stop people from abusing, rather than addressing it after the fact and being reactionary after the abuse has already happened.

[Adam Vaughan, Liberal, Trinity—Spadina, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the problem with a crime and punishment agenda is that it requires crime and only responds with punishment. I would be interested in the member's comments on the notion that the most prevalent cohort of child sexual offenders are people who are offended themselves. In other words, only criminalizing and only punishing attacks victims themselves.

I would like to know what the member's thoughts are on how that relates to preventive strategies as being a way of eliminating this horrible blight altogether.

[Jamie Nicholls, NDP, Vaudreuil—Soulanges, QC]

Mr. Speaker, there certainly is a cycle of abuse. I knew people in my childhood who were abused and I knew that their parents were abused as well. Therefore, the parent was both abused and the abuser. It is tragic.

The thing about the crime and punishment agenda is that yes, it is necessary to protect our society from these predators, but at the same time, sometimes the crime and punishment agenda takes away from the frank discussions that we should be having about the cycle of abuse and the effect it is having on us as a society.

It takes resources away from what we could perhaps do in preventing abuse from happening in the first place and treating this as a serious matter in families.

[Alexandrine Latendresse, NDP, Louis-Saint-Laurent, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I want to sincerely thank my colleague from Vaudreuil-Soulanges for his speech.

I think it is important to commend the courage it took to deliver such a speech. Everyone agrees that in our society, people who sexually abuse children are among the most ostracized, and everyone also agrees that these offences are the ones we try the hardest to combat, and rightly so. However, there was one really important point in his speech that he repeated several times. Yes, of course, we must put those people in prison and the penalties must be very stiff; we do need to send a clear message. At the same time, however, every time we send someone to prison, that means a child was abused somewhere. If there is something we can do to prevent it from happening in the first place, instead of patting ourselves on the back for sending someone to prison, then that is really important.

I wonder if the member could come back to that for the few seconds he has left.

[Jamie Nicholls, NDP, Vaudreuil—Soulanges, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I can honestly say that that is what bothers me the most. These bills come into play after the abuse has already taken place. A child has already been abused. For once, could we work on preventing the abuse from happening? Could we put an end to these offences altogether?

[The Acting Speaker, Barry Devolin]

Resuming debate. The hon. member for Laval—Les Îles has only two minutes remaining.

[François Pilon, NDP, Laval—Les Îles, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I will start by saying that we will be voting in favour of Bill C-26. Based on the questions raised since this morning, the other side is still undecided.

As several of my colleagues mentioned this afternoon, the bill deals with the incarceration of sexual predators. We seem to be forgetting about the children. Children who have been abused are scarred for life. Clearly, incarcerating sexual predators is a good thing. However, the ideal solution would be to prevent sexual predation. As the member who spoke before me said, there is nothing in this bill to prevent sexual predators from committing the abuse. Of course they will not be able to do so once in prison, but there will be other sexual predators, because this type of abuse has always existed. We have to treat these people.

I am in a good position to talk about the damage done to abused children. My sister provides emergency foster care for youth protection services. She fosters children who must be taken away from their families on an emergency basis. Quite often the children she cares for have been taken away from their family because they were sexually abused by their own parents. These children believe that they were taken away from their families because they did something wrong.

This could all be avoided if, instead of introducing a bill to put sexual predators in jail, the government tried to prevent this type of abuse at the source.

The House resumed from March 25 consideration of the motion that Bill C-26, An Act to amend the Criminal Code, the Canada Evidence Act and the Sex Offender Information Registration Act, to enact the High Risk Child Sex Offender Database Act and to make consequential amendments to other Acts, be read the third time and passed.

[François Pilon, NDP, Laval—Les Îles, QC]

Mr. Speaker, today I am pleased to rise to finish the speech that I started on Wednesday about Bill C-26, which is back before us today.

Previously, I was talking about how important it is to punish those who commit sexual abuse against children, and that is why we will vote in favour of Bill C-26.

It is imperative that we eradicate this scourge. As parliamentarians, it is our responsibility to prevent these crimes from happening. As I said on Wednesday, even a single case of child abuse is one too many. We must therefore take a preventive approach, which Bill C-26 does not do.

Since 2006, the Conservative government has taken steps to protect children, and we commend those measures. Among other things, they made it illegal to provide sexually explicit material to a child for the purpose of facilitating the commission of a sexual offence, strengthened the sex offender registry, increased the age at which a young person can legally consent to sexual activity from 14 to 16 years, put in place legislation to make the reporting of child pornography by Internet service providers mandatory, and made it illegal to use computers or other means of telecommunications to agree with or make arrangements with another person to commit a sexual offence against a child.

I was hoping that those measures could have been effective. However, when he appeared before the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights concerning the supplementary estimates, the Minister of Justice said that sexual offences against children have increased 6% over the past two years.

That statistic is extremely troubling. It also shows that the government is taking a rather minimalist approach. One thing is clear: paying lip service is not enough. The lack of financial resources, in terms of both enforcing existing laws as well as preventing these crimes, makes any new legislation pointless.

For instance, the NDP has always supported the circles of support and accountability program, or COSA. However, the government recently announced that it was cancelling funding provided by Correctional Service Canada. This is penny wise and pound foolish, since it will have a huge negative impact on this prevention plan and community services to victims, which are already operating on a very meagre budget of just $2.2 million.

We also learned recently that, over a period of five years, the RCMP did not spend over $10 million that was earmarked for the National Child Exploitation Coordination Centre and other essential government projects to fight child pornography.

The cuts, made in part as the RCMP's contribution to the deficit reduction action plan, were imposed even as the number of public reports of child abuse was increasing at an alarming rate.

Tougher prison sentences and stricter measures are certainly effective ways of preventing repeat offences, but they do nothing to eliminate the problem in the long term if the necessary human and financial resources are not assigned to prevention programs and efforts to raise awareness among the public and the authorities about this absolutely appalling type of crime.

As I said, we will support Bill C-26, since the NDP has always had a zero tolerance policy when it comes to any type of sex crime. That is another reason why we are disappointed that the bill did not go further and propose truly effective measures for protecting our children and tangible preventive measures to make our communities safer.

In that sense, we are disappointed that Bill C-26 does not include any new funding or financial resources. Tougher prison sentences are a good start, but they are not enough. Our communities need resources to deal with the sexual abuse of our children, and Bill C-26 offers nothing new to that effect.

The other thing we take issue with is this government's lack of co-operation and refusal to do non-partisan work on a bill that we all agree on. All of us, as parliamentarians, could have worked together on this bill and pulled together to eliminate this terrible problem of child sex abuse.

Victims and the general public would have benefited from the government being more open-minded on such an important, non-partisan issue. The Conservatives ignored the recommendations of the associations, experts and professionals who testified in committee. It is sad and shameful to see the government turn such a serious and important issue into a partisan issue.

Nevertheless, in closing, the NDP will support this government's Bill C-26 simply because we believe that the measures proposed in it are a good start.

However, the NDP would have liked to take this further, particularly when it comes to prevention and allocating financial resources to the authorities and stakeholders in the field.

We hope that in future, the government will take expert and stakeholder opinion into account in important legislation like this. This is not about winning an election. This is about the well-being of our children, and political partisanship should have no part in that.

[Guy Caron, NDP, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his excellent speech. I know that the lack of allocated resources has been a regular bone of contention. It has been a recurring theme in all the criminal justice bills.

There is also the matter of prevention. My colleague talked about that in his speech. I know that there is an existing initiative, proposed by a woman in my riding, to launch an awareness campaign about pedophilia, among other things, and the fact that this problem still exists to this day, unfortunately.

I would like my colleague's opinion on the need for such an awareness campaign. Does he have any advice for the government, not only about the resources needed for such a campaign, but also about how to ensure that such a campaign reaches all of Quebec and Canada?