Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I don't know why we seem to be second-guessing this particular piece of legislation, as much as it appears that we are. The House has already adopted the bill, in principle. So our committee exercise here is really just trying to ascertain whether the actual provisions of the bill are ready for prime time, and I don't see room for a lot of disagreement.
This committee table has seen lots of child pornography over the years, as disgusting as it was, but it has been here more than once, going back 10 to 20 years, and we passed very robust child pornography laws. We passed them. In fact, the Supreme Court rolled one of them back partially. So this has been ongoing.
I haven't heard a homicide detective who said he or she really enjoyed the fruits of their labours. They don't like the work environment. It's tough sometimes in law enforcement. That's just the way life is. The same thing is true with child exploitation. In fact, we can pass all the laws we want, including this one, but we're still going to need enforcement. We have very robust homicide laws. We still need enforcement, investigation, prosecution, conviction, sentencing.
So the same is going to be true, even though we pass this law. It doesn't mean there isn't going to be another incident of child exploitation.
We passed an Internet luring law here five years ago. I don't know why there's a sense that there's no legislation out there. Mr. Frizzell suggested that we're into this whole new world. Parliament has responded and we passed that five years ago. I don't know what the statistical outflow of that is, but the law's been passed. Now we're into the enforcement phase.
I want to ask a question of Ms. Scanlan. I'm looking at some Justice statistics. The public record could benefit from the response. It has to do with enforcement prosecution of the existing child sexual exploitation...section 153. The records from Juristat, from the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics, show that 62% of the charges brought by police and prosecutors under section 153, over the last 10 years, have been withdrawn or stayed--62%. Sorry, in the most recent year it was 62%, but it's varied from 51% to 62%.
I'm curious at the very high level of withdrawal of charges in that envelope. It's very high. Usually when you think of a case going to trial, you think of three-quarters of them going through--80%--not having 62% withdrawn. Are you familiar in your work with that level of charge withdrawal or stays by prosecutors, and if you are, what would be the reason for such a high level of truncated enforcement?