Thank you, Chair.
Thank you very much for your presentations. I have a couple of questions that follow on suggestions or recommendations that were made by witnesses earlier this morning. Before I ask them, I'd simply like to address the issue of the lack of consultation with teenagers.
Normally a government that is thinking about bringing about a substantive change to a particular legal framework or law conducts what's called pre-consultations. It actually informs the public that it's thinking of changing a particular law, and it asks for people and organizations to write in, to e-mail, and to send in their views, and there's a deadline. Once everything is received, it's all collated, and the basic views that are received are summarized.
The government then organizes panel discussions, round tables, or whatever, with a representative number of stakeholder groups. Only then does the government actually move forward with actual legislation, which is then tabled in the House, etc.
I'm not aware that this government did that. I am aware that the complaint we hear regularly on other bills is that there was no pre-consultation and the traditional process was not respected. That is an issue you may wish to take up directly with this government.
My questions follow on the recommendations of previous witnesses and are on the issue of the discriminatory section, section 159, which criminalizes anal intercourse if you're under the age of 18. It's criminal right now, even with the age of consent at 14. It doesn't change anything for anal intercourse, regardless of what the age of consent is; if you're under 18, it's a criminal act.
First of all, that has been judged to be unconstitutional by a number of provincial courts, and at least by the Court of Appeal for Ontario, but it hasn't gone all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada. It should be null and void. The government should in fact repeal the whole section, and it had an opportunity to do so with Bill C-22. Had the government done the pre-consultation, perhaps they might have heard from sufficient witnesses and legal experts that they would have included it.
Under our rules here in Parliament, because that section isn't touched by Bill C-22, it means that if we attempt to bring an amendment that would repeal section 159, it would be deemed out of order. Some witnesses have suggested that we should in fact amend section 150.1 of the Criminal Code, which is dealt with in Bill C-22, by adding section 159. I'd like to know if you have any comment on that. That would be a stop-gap remedy until the government, in its wisdom, finally repeals section 159 in its entirety.
There's a second point that I would like your comments on. There has also been a suggestion that rather than having a hard and fast law saying that if the difference in age is five years or more it's automatically deemed a sexually exploitive relationship and there is no defence, it should be presumed to be a sexually exploitative relationship, in which case it would allow for that to be rebutted. You would then have the possibility of someone who is 22 years old with someone who is 16 years old, and they would be able to rebut that. That's my second question.
If I have time—