In terms of enforcement, when it comes to the Criminal Code, the administration or the prosecution is provincial, because these are Criminal Code offences. I suppose what the Government of Canada could do is give more support to that.
There is the issue of passports. Right now there are no exit controls of any sort. When you leave Canada, you don't see an official; you only see an official when you enter. There are some people who may have court orders stating that they shouldn't be travelling abroad, but there's no mechanism to know that they've actually left until they have left. This has been an issue.
I think there was a law enacted recently that there is a possibility of your passport actually being taken from you if you've been convicted of a sexual abuse crime. I think that is helpful, but I would say that this, unfortunately, is an area where there's a lot of criminality, and the police tend to get overwhelmed.
I know this particularly with child pornography. There's just so much of it out there that they have to be selective in what they're going after. Part of it is having the technological wherewithal to figure out what's going on, because of course all of this is done secretly. Child pornography is different from, let's say, hate propaganda, where the idea is to spread it as much as you can. With child pornography, child sex trafficking, or child sex tourism, people are trying to do it quietly, without detection, so it involves much more of a police effort.
There's a problem here also, of course, because child victims are not very vociferous victims. They're not visible, and they're not able to articulate or speak up. When somebody robs a grocery store, it's visible and the grocery store clerk is very annoyed, but with a child, it's not visible and the child is unable to speak up. That tends to have an impact on police priorities. They don't get the kind of community pressure about giving this the priority that they should because of its low visibility and the inarticulateness of the victims.
I think there has to be some compensation for that. I think that, frankly, these committee hearings are useful in that respect, because they do give a higher priority to the issue. The committee will finish at some point on this issue, but the Government of Canada continues indefinitely. This is something that the Government of Canada could and should be doing, giving a focus, giving a priority, giving attention, and giving visibility to this issue.
Of course, I believe very much in child leadership, youth consultation, and so on, but this is an area where we can't just leave it to children. I think adults have to compensate in some ways for the fact that many of these victims are simply unable to speak for themselves.