It seems to me that what I'm doing here in my position is, one, I'm agreeing that we should raise the age of consent in this country across the board to 16.
We should make some exceptions to that, significant ones in the five-year near-age defence. That's going to catch a significant number of relationships. We saw the numbers: 40,000 to 50,000 will be caught; that is, the near-age defence will protect those relationships.
What we're down to is a very small number of relationships for which I also want to provide a defence. One is the married, on an ongoing basis, people who have gotten married. You can see it any number of ways, even some coming in as refugees from other countries already married, not voluntarily. I know that in the immigration laws we don't recognize those marriages if one of the members of the couple is under 16, but if they're refugees, they may get into the country. So we'll have some of those.
We will have some, and I'm going to use the Territories as an example, where marriage may in fact be.... Granted, we're going to be into a constitutional fight for those. And again, we're talking small numbers.
Then we're going to have, and this is where the larger numbers are, probably 200 to 300 a year.... I don't see those common-law relationships stopping, as much as we're trying to protect it, and in the vast majority of cases those relationships are just going to be slightly over the five years, like the case that you heard from Winnipeg.