I just have to respond to Mr. Dechert, who seemed to suggest that opposition parties call elections. He seems confused about it. As I understand it, one hundred percent of the time it's the Prime Minister who goes down to Rideau Hall and asks for the dissolution of the House for purposes of an election. There must a be a new constitution out there.
Anyway, Minister, thanks for being here today. I would have thought with all of your words about the importance of this and other legislation you would have been able to give us more than an hour, but I've got my five minutes, and I know you have to hustle back to your office to work on some more bills' short titles.
I'm going to ask you about one aspect of this. It is rather technical. It has to do with the potential for entrapment. It has nothing to do with the core purposes of the bill, which I'm sure all the members agree with.
In clause 15 of the bill, and that's really proposed new section 172.2 of the Criminal Code, there are some new provisions that do three things. They add a presumption dealing with what the accused believed about the age of the underage person, a presumption. Then proposed subsection (4) removes a component of the mens rea defence when it says it doesn't matter what you thought you knew unless you took reasonable steps. It doesn't matter what you knew.
Then the next proposed subsection of the bill takes away a further defence to say it doesn't matter whether there really wasn't a victim at all and it doesn't even matter whether there was a real person at all. In other words, there could be a totally artificially constructed scenario for purposes of entrapment.
I have no illusions. The police will be going after some bad guy, in all likelihood. They don't waste time on innocent guys. But let's say there is a bad policeman out there, and he decides he's going to entrap somebody. Let's just say. We all know there aren't very many bad policemen out there, but let's say there was one, and he or she decided to entrap. This sequence of proposed subsections sets up, by statute, an entrapment. It's not like you use an entrapment to investigate a real offence. It is actually setting up statutorily an entrapment scenario removing defence, imposing a presumption, and then saying it doesn't matter whether it was a fake person or a real person. Whether or not there was a real person, you're still guilty, not of committing an actual criminal offence, but facilitating, setting up, inviting.
To me, we are setting up in our Criminal Code an artificially constructed entrapment mechanism, where the person accused may have statutorily removed from him or her certain defences.
Now, the court can say it still can't accept this person as guilty as charged, but I don't like the look of this.
Have you walked through this? Have your officials walked through this? I understand why we want to get tough laws, but the procedures have to be constitutionally fair, and I'm nervous about this one.