Mr. Speaker, I am happy to enter into the debate.
To carry on with the theme of the member for Okanagan—Coquihalla and the citation he raised, it was also said, “Whatever you do unto the least of these, you have done unto me”. That is also very much a lesson to all of us.
All of us here in the House take children and the protection of children as a special obligation or at least we should take it as a special obligation. We should realize that failing to do so will be partly how we will be judged as an organization in the years to come. Did we get the job done? Did we do what was necessary to protect our children?
The Liberal government's track record to date on the protection of children has not been good. I think of the efforts by my colleague from Langley—Abbotsford who brought forward a motion demanding that the House move ahead with the sex offender registry. That is just one of many things we could talk about, the Divorce Act and many others things.
Specifically on that one issue, the member for Langley—Abbotsford brought forward the proposal in a supply day motion. The House debated it and we passed the motion. We basically forced the hand of the Liberals because they never would have done it on their own. They finally brought forward a sex offender registry of sorts but it does not apply to anybody who is in jail. It is not retroactive. From here on they will be more concerned about making sure sex offenders are registered so we know where they are, what they are doing and making sure they are not reoffending and so on. However the ones who are already in jail start off with a clean slate.
It is ridiculous. It shows a lack of understanding of the chronic abusers of children who need to be monitored and need to be protected from themselves. More important, we need to protect the innocent children. We could not even get that right. Even after we passed a motion in this place to protect children, it got watered down. The Liberals use weasel words. They do half measures, half steps and in the end the provinces pass their own legislation because the federal legislation is not effective. There is a hodge-podge and a grab bag of solutions from coast to coast in different provinces because the provinces gave up. They waited for the federal government to show leadership and it has not done it.
Another example is the law we passed that deals with people who travel abroad to have sex with children. That is seen as a problem and the international community condemns it of course. We all stood here and condemned it so the government passed legislation saying that people who had these so-called vacations for sexual purposes with children would face the courts, face the law and face the wrath of the Canadian parliamentary system.
We warned the Liberals when they brought in that legislation that it was completely ineffective. We told them it would not work. How many prosecutions have there been under that law? How many convictions? There have been zero convictions. How many prosecutions? Not a one. Why? Because they are half measures, watered down, half-baked ideas that do not put the children first, but put so many obstacles and so many steps in front of law enforcement officials that they have not even tried to prosecute somebody on something that is, according to the United Nations and other international groups, a chronic problem in places like Thailand and other countries. There has not been one prosecution and not one conviction. The record is abysmal.
When we think of priorities, things the Liberals could be doing and should be doing, there should be emphasis on law enforcement and intercepting pornography. We have talked a lot about that today. What has the government done? It has eliminated the ports police. The ports are where people bring pornography into the country, and the government took the police out of the system. Now there is a conduit for pornography to come into the country. The government thinks nothing of it. It says it is not important enough.
The record on this is abysmal. It is especially abysmal because we are dealing with child protection. The Liberals cannot point to a single thing they have done. They cannot even get the Divorce Act right, which is a simple thing. We talked about protecting children.
We had an all party committee that gave a report called For the Sake of the Children , which had specific recommendations on how to protect kids in the case of family breakdown. The Liberals cannot even implement the For the Sake of the Children report in the House because they water it down with half-baked measures and little timid steps and say that maybe they can think about it. Nine years I have been in this place and they are still talking like that: It is just pathetic.
I do not know why they do not take some bold steps so that maybe a year or two later they could say they would have to have to back off on those steps a little, that maybe they were a little too strict, or maybe they would have to fight with the courts about it and find proper way. They do not even take a measure. They do not push it in the courts. They do not challenge court decisions. They sit back and wait for something to happen as if it will solve itself. Instead, the problems continue to get worse. It is a sad state that describes well Liberal inaction, lack of vision, lack of purpose, and no sense of the role of a parliamentarian, which is first and foremost to protect those who cannot protect themselves.
We are supposed to be grateful because Bill C-20 is at least tabled in the House and is at least called child protection. I am not convinced that it actually is going to do the job of protecting children. It is a timid first step. It does not boldly go where no one has gone before; it is a timid little step. For example, they are saying that, and the exact wording is here, they are going to change the law to protect kids who get abused when someone is “in a relationship with a young person that is exploitative of the young person”. They are saying that this will be an extra tough rule that they will bring in now.
There is already a law against people abusing positions of trust and authority. We already have laws on the books to prosecute and throw people in the hoosegow when they do that sort of thing, but they are just not effective. They are not working.
My colleagues have read out examples about people who abuse the trust of children, who spread pornography that is showing more abuse of children, who are recruiting people into this pornography business. Who knows what effect this is having on families and children? We can only imagine. What do they get? They get conditional sentencing.
I think we just throw that phrase out expecting people who are watching to understand what conditional sentencing is. Conditional sentencing, let me say to folks, means that a person does not go to jail. If a person has been watching pornography at home and spreading it around to other Internet users, conditional sentencing means that the person gets to go back into that home and spend more time there. That is the penalty. It is no penalty at all.