The tough cases always make for the best points and the worst points at the same time.
I'll speak directly to the Graham James situation. Graham was convicted in the mid-1990s for hundreds of sexual assaults on Sheldon Kennedy and another unnamed person.
Three of us then came forward 15 years later. There were hundreds more offences. Graham was out on bail and decided to play around as long as he could, and was in a position where he agreed to some things and not others. We're talking about hundreds of sexual assaults.
This is difficult for me to speak to. I printed off the Court of Appeal decision. I actually cried when I read it again today in the airport. You have the Court of Appeal of Manitoba saying that the starting point for a major sexual assault perpetrated on a young person by one in a position of trust is four to five years.
I have thought very long and very hard about what I want to say to the Manitoba Court of Appeal, and I'm going to offend everyone in this room, so close your ears right now: “Fuck you, Manitoba Court of Appeal.”
That's the problem we have. We have justices out here. We as a society don't understand the pain that lingers with those who have been subjected to child sexual assault.
God bless my friends on this panel who talk about coming out of prison and the difficulty reintegrating into society. Until this government has funded an organization and an operation like Sheldon Kennedy and his group have set up in Calgary in every metropolitan area in this country, that group should not get a single dollar.
Those people have more therapy funded for them in prison than I've ever received. Graham was deemed to have been rehabilitated because he didn't reoffend between the time he was let out after the Sheldon Kennedy conviction and jail time and our time. Well, it took me 30 years to come forward.
We speak out of two mouths here. We say that most sexual assaults aren't reported, and then we're given statistics where all of a sudden the recidivism has gone down because such and such hasn't happened.
We have no idea what real statistics are in place when it comes to those who commit sexual assault. I applaud the government for taking steps to try to improve moving forward, but this doesn't get better until we, as a society, better understand the prison that victims live in coming out of child sexual assault. Help these prisoners who are among us first.