Mr. Speaker, the hon. member has asked a lot of questions and I will not pretend to be able to answer them all. However, the fact that so many questions can be asked about what this means points to some of the difficulties that I expressed about the motion. I do not know exactly what it would mean or what the motion would mean. I know what Alliance members have said about what it means but that is not what the motion says.
It is legitimate to be concerned as to whether or not this would have the effect of criminalizing sexual activity between people who are under the age of 16. It does not for instance register the caveat, as I think exists in the law now, if there is not a big age difference between people involved and that sort of thing.
I heard the member say that is taken for granted within the motion. Is it? Perhaps the motion should have said that to begin with.
Having said all that, what the member raises in terms of physicians instructing young people with respect to birth control or sexuality et cetera is the sort of thing that could be done without depicting or describing children engaged in sexual activity. There is probably a way around that, but clearly the member raises some important concerns.
What it reflects, and I do not say this about the member's question but just generally, is that as a society none of us are certain about what level of responsibility we want to assign to young people at various ages. There are mixed messages coming from the House in a number of ways.
On the one hand we have people arguing that children as young as 11 should be held responsible by criminal law for break and entering, property thefts or other crimes. There is a certain amount of cognitive dissonance here. On the one hand we want to drive down the age of responsibility when it comes to a bunch of things that are regarded as criminal and on the other hand we want to drive up the age of responsibility when it comes to sexual matters.
That may be a good thing depending on how we do it and what it includes. There is a kind of confusion in our collective mind about responsibility and when it kicks in and whether it kicks in at different ages with respect to different kinds of activity.
Outrage is appropriate to some degree when it comes to some of the terrible things that go on, but humility is also in order in the sense that this is not an easy question and there is clearly a lot of confusion with respect to the whole notion of responsibility and how it should be described and how it should be enforced.