I want to give you an example here.
I'm chair of the education and training committee of the Canadian Anti-Counterfeiting Network, and I've been going to a public school for four years now. An elementary school teacher invited me four years ago to come in and tell her class what I did for a living. She told them I was the “protector of toys”.
So I speak to kids who are six, seven, and eight years old, and I must tell you that in the entire practice of law, nothing I've done has given me more satisfaction than speaking to those kids. You know what? They get it.
For instance, I stood up there, showed them a plush toy, which they call a “stuffie”, and said, “This one for sure has no pieces of metal inside. It has a tag. According to our law, it must be made of new material.”
I asked them—22 children in a circle, four years in a row—“What does it have to have inside?”
“New material only.”
“I can't hear you.”
“New material only!”
One night, after one 30-minute session, these delicious, delightful children went home and spoke to their parents, and we got a call from one of the parents. Her six-year-old daughter had gone into her room, looked at all of her stuffies--she had dozens of them--and found all the ones that she thought were counterfeit. She put them out in the hallway, closed the door, and called her mother.
The mother called to ask me, first of all, what I could possibly have said. We asked her to describe the toys, and every toy she described did not have a tag. It did not say “new material”. Some of them just said “Made in China”. We told her they were all counterfeit.
So the child got it, and the mother was incensed: why did she, as the mother who was there to protect her child, not know that it had to have new material only? She didn't know it. But it's the law.
So I think we can educate, and I think we can have the government come up with an education program. People will stop buying when they realize the health and safety issues, the link to organized crime, and the fact that these factories--for example, plants making ink-jet cartridges and purses--have three- and four-year-old children mixing chemicals in foreign countries.
That's child labour, and I'm not talking one year less than what they should be; I'm talking many years less. We can't condone that.