Mr. Speaker, I want to ask the hon. member a question after a short observation.
He seemed to infer in his speech that it is quite possible there would be objections to raising the age of consent because there may be some segments of our society where the cultural norm is to allow children to participate in sexual activity at a much younger age than 14.
First, I would be interested in knowing if he has any information about the segments of our society that allow that to take place. I personally do not know of anyone who would be happy for that to take place. Second, if indeed that was a standard that we were using in terms of the age of consent, is he really inferring that we could have some kind of patchwork quilt of law-making across the country where we would allow one segment of society to have its own rules and another segment of society to have other rules? Do we not make laws so that they apply equally across the country?