Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to ask a question of the hon. member. I know he has spent a considerable amount of time as a lawyer and is in the practice of ensuring that young people are protected by the law to the maximum amount. However I ran from my office to ask him a couple of questions about his interpretation of the Shaw decision with respect to Sharpe, in particular about his belief that the Shaw decision did not run afoul of the direction of the Supreme Court of Canada and that there was in fact no error in law.
Could he square for the House of Commons the comments made by Shaw, which I believe went beyond the interpretation of the Supreme Court of Canada, that materials in question detailing abduction, rape and sexual torture of young boys as adult males “may well be designed to titillate or excite the reader if the reader is so inclined and arguably glorify the acts described therein”.
Would the hon. member not conclude, as I did, that such material ran afoul of the SCC explanation that the prohibition against material which viewed objectively sends the message that sex with children can and should be pursued ought to be prohibited?
Shaw also pointed this out in his decision with respect to artistic merit in throwing out the community standards. The use of metaphors, allegories, themes, incredibly the victim's fortitude in enduring sexual abuse by pedophiles, was found by Justice Shaw to be a theme, a plot sufficient to establish the requisite artistic merit for justice. Based on this, would the hon. member not agree that, because of what happened with respect to Sharpe's writing to possess the requisite artistic merit to constitute a defence of the charge, that once again this would appear to be yet another example of an error as Justice Shaw ignored the objective standard imported by the supreme court into the artistic merit defence?
There are two clear questions that I think raise the eyebrows of many of us who have spent a bit of time looking at the Shaw decision and his apparent taking of liberties of the direction of the Supreme Court of Canada. Would the member not then feel that his earlier comments in reference to the motion of the Alliance Party were somewhat premature and perhaps did not show a sufficient amount of due regard to the actual decision of Justice Shaw?