Just so we're not going too far down a trail, if we change the age of consent now, someone is not going to be able to go back 20 years and say that when they were 15 they were in a relationship with somebody who was 21, and now that the age of consent is 16, that was an offence back then. It's the law that applied at the time. Even in those scenarios that Mr. Petit has mentioned where we go back 20 years, it had to have been a criminal offence at the time.
We can't--and we don't--retroactively with this bill criminalize people. And in fact we don't retroactively criminalize relationships that are currently entered into, because there's the transition.
So I think a lot of the concerns I'm hearing raised are not triggered by this bill, actually. There's not going to be a retroactive criminalization of past relationships, and current marriages or common-law relationships are also protected. And the bill works in consistency with provincial solemnization-of-marriage laws, as well. So a lot of what I'm hearing is actually addressed in the bill.