Mr. Speaker, it is an honour and a privilege for me to speak today to Bill C-15A regarding the Senate amendments and to the larger picture with which we have to deal, child pornography.
This is an issue that is very close to my heart. I have a daughter whose career is counselling people who have gone through severe sexual abuse from quite early ages. I have heard some of the horrific stories from her of the results of that abuse and the life changing experience that causes. As my hon. colleagues have pointed out, there is no healing from that.
I certainly appreciate the comments that were made about the need to write the laws in parliament and to see our judiciary back them and enforce them rather than write them. We need to address these issues because of the tremendous, traumatic experience it is for those who are allowed to slip through the cracks.
I thank my hon. colleagues for their presentations and their willingness to stand up and speak to these things.
The bill does do some good. There is new legislation that creates the offence of luring a child by means of a computer system and it uses the same ages that the criminal code already sets out for determining the ages that make using the Internet to lure a child a crime. Accordingly, it is a crime with a maximum punishment of five years to use the Internet in these cases. The age is 18 for prostitution, child pornography, sexual assault, sexual touching or incest where the accused is in a position of trust. It is 16 for abducting an unmarried child from his or her parents and 14 for sexual interference, invitation to sexual touching and some other things.
I am not a lawyer but I know enough to know that the term luring is open to interpretation. I know what luring is when I am at the trout stream and I am tossing out the lure to draw the fish to my hook but I am not so sure that we can clearly define luring when it comes to sexual predators.
I recently heard about an incident that happened here in Ottawa a number of months ago where a person from another jurisdiction, where the age of consent was higher than in Canada, became acquainted with a 14 year old. He developed a relationship with the 14 year old and invited her to meet him. He came to Ottawa, set up in a hotel and the 14 year old met him. I am sure it could be argued that was the cultivation of a relationship. The distraught mother, having found out something of what was going on, sent the police. Although they found numerous sex toys in the room, they could do nothing because the 14 year old had gone to the hotel to meet this man of her own free will.
Luring was a crime then and it is now but how do we define luring? There are weaknesses here in some of the things we do. We get into the habit of saying things in legalese and it sometimes is more confusese than legalese. We should be able to use common sense and understand that the girl was lured for sexual purposes. It was a tremendous travesty of justice and of the law breaking down and not really protecting her like she should have been protected.
The amendment coming from the Senate adds the following to the legislation:
A custodian of a computer system who merely provides the means or facilities of telecommunication used by another person to commit an offence under subsection 163.1(3) does not commit an offence.
We certainly agree with the protection of those who are innocent third party people who become involved in an offence in an innocent way. In fact, this is the one thing we can commend. We wish that this kind of principle was followed in some other bills like the species at risk act and even in the cruelty to animals act. We believe there needs to be a certain level of knowledge and a certain level of intent before a criminal act is actually performed. Therefore we have no problem with that and we are glad it is there.
Then we move on to this great mysterious line which includes some other words. It goes like this:
Where the accused is charged with an offence under subsection (2), (3), (4), or (4.1), the court shall find the accused not guilty if the representation or written material that is alleged to constitute child pornography has artistic merit or an educational, scientific or medical purpose.
What do some of those words mean? First, perhaps the most innocent of those words it would seem would be “educational”. However, in a meeting on the Hill this week where the material was presented to us by some of the members of the Ontario police and the porno unit from Toronto, we were shown copies of the drawings that were done by Mr. John Robin Sharpe. The judge referred to those drawings as having some merit because by watching the sequence of drawings in sort of cartoon form he said that one could notice there was a tremendous ability for the victims to survive and therefore there was some kind of artistic merit. Perhaps he could have said that there was some kind of educational merit to those drawings because they in fact demonstrated that the victims could survive.
I believe that is stretching it way too far. I believe that is stretching the term educational too far. I believe it is stretching artistic merit too far. I would ask the judge, and I would ask you, Mr. Speaker, whether there would be, for instance, any artistic merit in a sign being carried by a demonstrator on the front lawn of parliament that promoted hate toward, let us say, Muslims, Jews, parliamentarians? If the sign being carried promoted the aspect of killing, hating, wounding or abusing other members of society would the judge say that it was such a beautiful sign, done in such magnificent colours, that it was the most beautiful, colourful sign he or she had ever seen, and that it had such artistic merit that he or she would allow the protestor to carry it? I do not think so. I do not think that would happen.
Yet in that court, looking at those repulsive drawings, a panel of judges of this land could actually say that there was artistic merit. Why would the Senate want to send an amendment sticking those undefined, undetermined words and qualifications back into this legislation? Why would we do that?
I would suggest when it comes to artistic merit, when it comes to educational, scientific or medical purposes, perhaps there are some higher standards on which we should judge whether or not it is right to allow it.
For instance, the supreme court decision in the John Robin Sharpe case, when it defined or allowed for artistic merit, did not take into account the true and accurate reflection of community standards. Yes, I understand that the judge even wrote in his decision that there was no moral standard or community standard that could be applied. Again it is part of the abominable process that allows us to ignore the decency of common people.
Why can we have such laws and judgments that in themselves degrade, depress, demoralize and destroy our own country? Why is that? Why would we again write them in Bill C-15A? What is wrong with applying some community standards?
I would suggest that the court's application of artistic merit did not put a priority on the protection and the rights of children. How can we do that? How can we allow some artist, and I do not care if he is Michelangelo, to come up with material whose sole purpose is to promote the abuse of children?
Let us face it. That kind of pornographic material, especially kiddy porn, is designed to desensitize not only the predator but it is used to slowly expose the children who are targets and victims to the pictures and to the idea of being involved with adults in sexual activity until the children's minds are desensitized to that activity, so that they will be receptive and can be brought in to participate.
These children do not have the ability to weigh out and think the way an adult is supposed to think, although some question of that ability is being pointed out at some levels of our government. We must protect the children. They have no way of knowing where they are going once they start down that path. Those drawings are designed to draw them aside. The Internet is filled with that kind of stuff and if I have time, I will mention more on that.
The supreme court decision did not reflect the spirit of intent of even the term artistic merit. I can understand allowing room for the artists to do things. I do a little artwork myself. I have paintings hanging in my own house that I have painted, but there is nothing like that hanging on my wall. Perhaps I might have a hard time getting someone to judge my paintings as worthy of artistic merit. I am not a great artist but I am kind of proud of what I do. May I say that even my wife likes it, so that makes it pretty good.
There is an understanding here that some room needs to be given for artistic merit. There are some cases where examples need to be depicted for medical or educational purposes. I understand that wholeheartedly. However, to push it out and over the precipice to such an extent that we have done with artistic merit is absolutely absurd. Why would we stick that back into the legislation we are writing to try to protect children over the Internet?
A moment ago my hon. colleague across the way referred to the statistic that was given to us this week by the Toronto child pornography unit. My ears heard its statement this way, that it was so bound up with one case in the courts that it was frozen from examining the 400 others just in Toronto that the unit needed to examine. In the case the unit is working on now, it has confiscated 400,000 images.
Do members know what has to happen in order to prosecute the case? Do members realize that every one of those 400,000 images has to be viewed by the prosecutor's staff, classified, categorized and listed? Then in court, the 400,000 pictures have to be shown to the defence and the defence has to go through them.
We were told that the department was absolutely paralyzed for five to six months because it was using its entire staff simply to categorize these pictures. We are talking about something voluminous, something huge. We are not talking about if, maybe and perhaps these things might happen. The Toronto unit alone has confiscated 750,000 pictures since January 1.
There is a terrible problem out there. We certainly do not need to reinforce the opportunity for this to happen by allowing artistic merit or a lack of the definition of “luring”, little things like that, to give an opening to those who would traffic in child pornography. We do not need to do that.
Mr. David Griffin of the Canadian Police Association said these words, to the best of my being able to write them down, “If you hear the kind of sentences given out by judges to people guilty of these crimes, it would make you sicker than the pictures”. That is where I am coming from. I am sick of the lack of proper treatment of those who are ruining and destroying the lives of our young people by involving them in the production of pornography by feeding them pornography in order to use them in other ways.
We have to tighten this up. This is not yet enough. We need to go much further than this legislation goes. We owe it to the children, to the parents, to the future of this nation to put out legislation that would demonstrate some sort of backbone in parliament.