Mr. Speaker, I think there is some passion in the speeches today because many of us share the concern about child pornography and pornography in general and also the concern about the inability, it seems, or the unwillingness of governments to deal with it. People continue to cry out for action. As the member has just said, it can sit on the books for years and everybody clucks their tongue and says that somebody should do something, yet they will not do anything. They will not act.
It is almost a shame-faced reaction on the government side. We had a quorum call a minute ago because there were not enough people in here to listen to this. The Liberal members do not want to hear about this. They just wish it was not real. They are not in favour of it, but they wish it was not real so they put their heads in the sand and hope it just goes away.
I sat on the heritage committee. A member from our party on the committee said that it is not just the Internet pornography. There is stuff on our own broadcast system that is so offensive that he said he just wanted to show us a video clip that he took from the CBC. It was from late at night, sure enough, but still, it was so offensive that he was inundated with letters saying that it could not be real that we were going to show this and use government money to rebroadcast it. Members of the committee said that it was not their job as legislators to have to watch it. In fact, they refused. They said, “If you bring it in here we'll walk out of the room because we don't want to see it”. It was not that it was not real; they did not want to deal with it.
I would like to get the member's opinion on a couple of things. We talked about Internet rebroadcasting, but also about broadcasting and rebroadcasting in general. The problem with it is that because of the big time zone changes in the country, broadcasters shy away from dealing with this issue. They say that all they can do is rebroadcast it. They do not pick the time at which it is shown. What happens is that pornography, although it is bad enough that it is shown at midnight, ends up being shown at 8 p.m. in my neck of the woods or vice versa.
I would like the hon. member to comment on that. I do not think that is right. I think we should force not only Internet providers but broadcasters to screen that garbage off the television, certainly during prime time.
The second item is something the hon. member for Wild Rose and I talked about behind the curtain. Maybe what we need to do here is shut this place down for a day and get the 301 people in this place to look for five minutes at the garbage that is actually child pornography. We can see grown, hardened police investigators in tears after having been forced to look at this stuff. Maybe it is time we bumped it up from a theoretical debate to an actual screening, if members think they are man and woman enough to look at it, of what kind of garbage we are actually talking about.
I think that if parliamentarians, who are supposed to set the pace here, had to see this stuff, not that I want to because I think it wrecks one's mind, if parliamentarians were forced to look at it for a minute or two, as the member for Wild Rose said, we could take out the part of the bill that deals with child pornography and it would be strengthened, ratified, passed and given to the police forces of the country in a minute. In a day, we would be done with it.
Finally, I will conclude by asking that the member speak on the defence of artistic merit. When the Sharpe decision came down, we would have thought that seasoned and hardened police officers who have to deal with this smut day in and day would be toughened up, but they said there was stuff in there that was so offensive they could hardly look at it. Yet the decision of the courts is that if one can even show a smidgen of artistic value somehow that makes it okay.
That does not make it okay. This is one of those cases where we say that when the rights of the children come up against the rights of a pornographer, then the rights of the children trump the rights of the pornographer every single time and we should make sure of it. It is not a matter of hoping for the best, of saying that it is the law of averages and, hey, we lose a few kids, but what the heck.
It is not like that. There are times when one says, when it comes up against these other rights, it is time to take action. The discussion should take place quickly in the House. We should move to strengthen the hands of the courts and strengthen the hands of the police officers. All parliamentarians should stand together to say that enough is enough. There has been enough chatter and now is the time to move.