Yes, because as you will admit as well, Mr. Lee, the communication offence is actually related to a number of offences set out in the Criminal Code. There are different subsections to section 172.1 referencing different age groups--14, 16, and I believe 18 years. For the most part, those offences relate to communicating for the purpose of committing an offence, in most cases a sexual offence.
I suppose my response to you would be this. We have to treat offences against children somewhat differently since, unlike adults, children don't have the same level of maturity as we have to be able to identify risk, to be able to remove themselves from or protect themselves against risk. They will often not have the ability to discern between what is safe and what isn't. When you couple that with the fact that, more and more, we have children who are in home environments that don't provide the necessary supervision or monitoring that would protect these children, I would suggest to you that the maximum sentence we make available to judges in sentencing predators needs to reflect that.
I would hope our argument would not be that we will only impose a maximum sentence of 10 years or more when a child is actually harmed. If indeed the communicating with a child clearly indicates an intent to harm a child, I believe that a maximum sentence of 10 years is appropriate in those circumstances.