One of the great difficulties of legislating in the area of sexual age of consent is that the law itself is not very well understood.
Mr. Quist from the family institute raised the percentage that 90% of people are in support of this bill. I think that may well be because the existing provisions are so poorly understood. The general public doesn't understand that there are laws against sexual exploitation of children, doesn't understand that there are laws preventing persons in positions of trust, power, and authority from having sexual contact with minors. A great deal of the public concern over sexual exploitation could be dealt with by educating the public on the existing ages of consent. It's a comprehensive, complex scheme.
The single unified message that's going to go out with Bill C-22 is not the close-in-age exemption; rather, it's that the age of consent is being increased from 14 to 16. And that will send a message about children's sexual autonomy that is wholly undesirable; it will signal a bit of a cultural shift towards moralizing, towards a kind of fundamentalist approach towards sexuality that's highly undesirable.
So it's that general tenor, not the specifics of the regime, that really will be manifest at the cultural level.