Madam Speaker, I am pleased to speak to Bill C-20 because I am pleased to be recorded as standing up for the young people in this country. They are wonderful, naive, innocent and darling young people. They are cherished, not all the time, but most of the time our children are that way. We go through the terrible two's and stuff like that, but apart from that we want to protect our children because they are innocent and vulnerable.
There are perverts out there who take advantage of our young people in the most despicable ways. They do despicable acts against our children. They make videos, photographs, and other material so they can continue in their warped, senseless mind to derive some kind of enjoyment from what they perpetrate on these innocent young people. It is shocking. I have never seen any of that stuff myself. I have only heard that it exists. I cannot imagine how bad that stuff is, and how shocking and revolting it must be.
One would think that in a democratic society that cherishes the values and the human rights of our people, and the fact that we have a charter of human rights which guarantees our freedoms and protects us, there would not be a debate in the House about protecting our children. My colleague from Wild Rose has worked on this issue for many years. He has been trying to get the government to move the agenda forward. This has been worse than pulling teeth for my friend from Wild Rose. The government then comes along with a little bill that, when analyzed by our critic, is neutral on the family impact assessment. It does not move the ball forward and it does not move it back; it is neutral. That is shocking.
We depend upon the courts to protect society. There was a case in Vancouver a couple of years ago where the pervert who produced child pornography was told by the court that because it was artistic merit it was okay for him to possess it.
Photographs, videos and all that stuff was created by some little kid's pain. It was created to give some guy with a warped mind some kind of titillating enjoyment. I cannot understand why we must keep asking to shut this down. We should just shut it down. It is fairly clear to me that if there is some kind of offence against a child, be it a photograph or a video depicting a child in some kind of demeaning situation, be it violent or brutal or some kind of sexual exploitation, that is wrong and illegal. The individual involved should be prosecuted and sent away for a long time. It seems fairly straightforward.
As responsible adults we have been charged with writing the laws for this country. Why do we have this big problem with protecting our children? The perpetrators know it is wrong. We know it is wrong and the courts know it is wrong. Somehow or another the courts did get it wrong because they said this guy's rights were violated because he was being prosecuted for owning this stuff. How many kids were violated in order for him to produce that stuff? It was artistic merit so therefore he was entitled to keep it.
We have allowed this society to get pretty sick. Maybe society is getting a bit too perverted and tolerant of the anything goes lifestyle where any kind of sexual lifestyle is tolerated. Perhaps we are even going to give it the blessing of some kind of legal status. If we end up with same sex unions and other kinds of unions, the next thing we know it would be polygamy and people would say it is their right to have two wives, five wives or ten wives.
If it is okay for people of the same sex to have some kind of legal union, what is wrong with people saying that they would like to have two or three wives? They would say it is their right to have that too. The court would say yes, and then we would have turned full circle. We would be right back to exploitation and domination of women which I had thought we had left behind.
I cannot understand why the government cannot just say if it involves kids, it is pornography. It is wrong and illegal, and that is it. There is no defence. It is that simple. We must protect our kids and I hope the government gets the message.