I know that the bill says we want to deliver a message to Canadians that we take the sexual assault of children seriously. For goodness' sake, can anybody in this room tell me that there are people in Canada who don't take the sexual assault of children seriously? We simply do not need to add another law to do that. What victims want is for the offences to stop, and they want the people responsible for them to receive treatment. Sending them to jail for increasingly long periods of time, as you, sir, have just pointed out, has not worked in places where we've conducted that experiment, such as the United States of America.
On February 7th, 2011. See this statement in context.