Mr. Speaker, I have listened with attention to the speeches made today by my hon. colleagues, and I, too, would like to take a few minutes of this House to address this issue.
Of course, unlike the hon. member for Rosemont, I do not know the child or his family personally, but I was closely involved in a similar case several years ago.
Back in 1982, when my daughter was in kindergarten, one of her little classmates disappeared. The child in question, Tina Lynn Malette, had been abducted by her father. A short time later, the family contacted me. I was then a member of the provincial legislature. I wrote to all the school boards in Ontario, then to those in Quebec and finally, in April 1983, we found out that Tina was in Tunisia. This is somewhat similar to the case that our colleague across the way has just described.
Like today, there was no extradition treaty covering such cases and Tunisia had not signed any conventions either.
What was difficult for everyone involved, including your humble servant, is that I knew the child and her family personally. I lived through this situation; her classmates, including my daughter, even asked me where Tina was.
We worked for years. I remember going to see the Tunisian ambassador to bring him petitions signed by 7,000 Canadians asking him to take whatever steps were required to return the child to Canada. In the beginning, the ambassador did not know or at least claimed he did not know where the child was, but later everyone knew where she was. She was in Tunisia. It was no secret.
Worse yet, the child's father had no legal authority over her. First of all, the parents were not married, not that it would have made much of a difference in this case. Second, the father and mother had been separated for years, and the mother had sole custody of the child. Third, he was not officially recorded as the father in the birth register, although he was the father, a fact the mother did not deny. So this is an abduction very similar to an abduction by a total stranger.
Just moments ago, I tried to reach Tina Lynn Malette's aunt on the phone, seeing that she is a neighbour of mine. I still do not know if the child's whereabouts have been established yet. I checked a little while ago. I keep inquiring. Today, my daughter is 19 years old and a university student. She has never seen Tina again, and neither have I nor my neighbour for that matter-the one I just referred to, who had custody of the child when her father kidnapped her, on the pretext of a Sunday afternoon visit. He had no visiting rights by the way.
In a nutshell, these are the facts of this case. I am sorry for telling such a sad story, a story that may even sound discouraging to those close to the child our hon. colleague opposite just told us about.
My goal in bringing this case to the attention of the House is certainly not to discourage this child's parents, but rather to share with this House my sadness around this kind of situation and also to show how frustrating it can be for those involved. In this, I share the sentiments of our colleagues, who raised this matter today. I hope that the governments that have not signed such treaties will do so.
I would also like to take this opportunity to say how important it is, in the field of international relations, for everyone in this House to take an interest in this question of extradition treaties and so on.
Some of us in this House, and this happens at certain times, try to take a somewhat isolationist approach. I am thinking of a certain political party, and I apologize for being partisan at such a sad time. They even try to get themselves exempted from delegations of parliamentarians who are exchanging points of view between countries. If only there were no other reason, but there are several others, on which we must reach agreement and come to an understanding between the countries of the world. It is for the very purpose of ensuring that there are laws to prevent this sort of situation from happening again in future.
At the risk of being pessimistic, there will probably always be countries in the world that will refuse to sign treaties and ensure that there is the good understanding necessary for relations between countries, of course, but, above all, to ensure the safety of children here and elsewhere.
In conclusion, we should all work together to put an end to this sort of problem, to resolve it to the extent that all governments are interested in doing so, and I hope that ambassadors, emissaries of other countries who may read the debates of this House, or even hear them live, will take note of what has been said by all members today.
I think that it is the wish of all parliamentarians to put a stop to situations allowing certain stronger parents, in conditions that are advantageous to them, but not to their children, to carry out abductions like this, to cause the difficulties about which our colleague, the member for Laval East, spoke a few minutes ago, the cultural difficulties faced by Karim Noah, and by Tina Lynn Malette when she left South Peele, Ontario, Canada, to go and live in Tunisia, and God knows whether she is still there.
A few years ago, my daughter had an opportunity to correspond with Tina Lynn, to send her a letter and a photo, although she had not seen her for perhaps ten years. Today, I no longer even know where Tina Lynn is.