Thank you very much.
Professor Sankoff, first of all, thank you for your leadership in this area and thank you for intervening in the R. v. D.L.W. case. I think it's great.
You started by saying that we have in Canada, sadly, among the worst laws on animal cruelty in the western world. Thanks to the leadership of Mr. Erskine-Smith, we tried to make a dent in that in Bill C-246, but the Liberal majority voted it down. Maybe after the election we can get back to the basics on that.
Your analogy to polygamy was intriguing. You talked about how there's a possibility in an individual instance of no harm to the individuals involved, but society says the risks are high enough and the vulnerability of the children are great enough that really we should proceed notwithstanding the lack of any particular harm in a given case. You use that as an analogy to bestiality, which I thought was a very apt one.
I'd like you to talk a bit more about that from the perspective of harm to the animals, which you focused on, almost like animal rights, Professor Singer's work and all of that. It's as distinct from the difficulty, as you pointed out, of proving psychological harm and all the other things.
Talk a little bit about that and see if that vision can be implanted in the current law as proposed in the narrow compass of Bill C-84.