Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to stand and thank a member of Parliament, my Alliance Party colleague from Lethbridge, for putting children and their safety first and most important in decision making in this place. I know you are aware, Mr. Speaker, that this is something I have been pushing for quite some time with regard to the terrible atrocities that are going on in this country, where people are abusing children left and right through child pornography. They are child cripplers and child abusers, yet in the 10 years I have been here we have not had any legislation of any nature coming forward from that side of the House to deal with these problems.
I cannot understand how people can deliver throne speech after throne speech, budget speech after budget speech, talking about all the wonderful things the government is going to implement to protect our children, and still make the same comments in the same speeches as we go from year to year. Nothing is happening.
Thank goodness we have people like the member for Lethbridge who, when he says he wants to do something to protect our children, does it. I am glad he was lucky enough to hit a draw in order to present it. I have several bills, along different lines, to protect children and I cannot seem to get the luck of the draw. It is unfortunate that this is the way it operates.
What I cannot understand is why anyone in the House, on this side or the far side, does not say when we have a bill before us that does protect children, “Let us do what we can to work together to make sure that is what happens”. Instead I can guarantee that members will stand on their feet, vote no on this and that will be the end of it. We will hear no more in the future from anyone over there or anywhere else because it has already been dealt with in what I think is a very unfair fashion.
We should start recognizing the important things in this country that we want to and have to deal with. We should put the protection of children on the table and say, “Yes, this is one thing we can all agree on”. For heaven's sake let us work together and start doing all we can to protect our children's safety, because there are tens of thousands of young kids in Canada who are being abused. More and more every day are being added to the list because we just do not do anything.
Here is an opportunity to take one small step to protect kids. We should support the bill and fix whatever might be wrong with it to make it better to implement. We should work together to do that and not just say no to a principle and an idea that is so essential. I for one am really tired of a group of adults, grandparents and parents, who sit in here year after year and do not bring forward anything to deal with the problem, except Bill C-20 which is supposed to get rid of artistic merit and does not because we are going to replace it with “public good”. It is all nonsense. Let us start getting some common sense in our brains and be determined. We should sit in our chairs and say that children in this country are in dire need of being better protected and let us make up our minds that we are going to do it.
I thank the member for Lethbridge for making the effort. It is too bad that we have people who will not support an effort of this nature.