Mr. Speaker, I am honoured to be able to stand in defence of children today. I share the concerns and the outrage of many of my colleagues at the total inaction on the part of the government to protect children.
The member who just spoke for the Liberal Party has urged us to support Bill C-20 because, in his words, it is a step in the right direction. Well, I am going to urge all members of Parliament, including the Liberals, to vote against Bill C-20 because it is such a tepid step. It is almost nothing. It is as if we were on our way to Edmonton from Ottawa. We are facing west but we are going to take only a small step forward. We might as well vote against it because it really has not done anything.
In fact, if we were to analyze Bill C-20, we would find that all it does is change the words for some of the defences that are used when charged with this crime and it does not strengthen anything. In fact, in some areas I believe it substantially weakens it.
I have on occasion been told that real men do not cry, that real men do not eat quiche, and things like that, but I have to confess, and I do this rather unashamedly, that I have in the last couple of years actually cried on occasion for our country because of the lack of leadership in a whole bunch of areas but mostly because of the lack of moral leadership. We have no moral leadership all the way from the Prime Minister down to the ministers and the backbenchers on the government side.
We have Shawinigan shenanigans but it does not matter. The Prime Minister just says that he is doing his job. Yet we have accusations and charges. A whole bunch of people are under investigation into the misuse of money in Quebec on advertising. That is okay. That will blow over. The Liberals will get their party people to do the spin doctoring on that and that wave of negative reporting will disappear and they will move on.
That is unconscionable. There is no moral leadership, no moral anchor. We no longer have a leadership that guides in what is right and what is wrong. It has degenerated to the point where when it comes to things as obscene as the sexual abuse of children, here we are, a bunch of men and women, adults, most of us moms and dads, many of us grandparents, and we are not ready to stand up and say that we are not going there, period.
The other night I woke up. I was not at home. I was visiting my suffering mother in Saskatchewan who was recovering from the shock of having buried her husband of 67 and a half years and healing a broken hip. I guess I was probably a little emotional, having spent some time with her cleaning up some of the things in the house. This became part of my newspaper column in the local paper in Sherwood Park. It happens to me occasionally that I wake in the night and cannot go back to sleep. That happened at 2:23 a.m. I got to thinking about a whole bunch of things, including the imminent resumption of Parliament, I was wondering what would be on the Liberal agenda at the time and I contemplated what would be my highest priority.
Thinking about my family and my grandchildren, I had an inspiration which I wrote down. It was about 2:30 when this happened. The wheels were turning. I got out of bed, warmed up my computer and wrote my newspaper column at 2:30 in the morning. This was my inspiration. This was how I worded it, “Notwithstanding any Liberal interpretation of the charter, any person who knowingly creates, possesses, stores, distributes, sells or gives away any depiction, description or image of any child in a sexual abusive act or state in any form whatsoever, including but not limited to photographs, writings, computer images or files, is guilty of a federal offence and subject to imprisonment of a minimum of 25 years”. That was what I came up with at 2:30 in the morning a couple of weeks ago.
That is how passionately I feel about this. My young grandchildren should be protected. Everyone's children and grandchildren look to this place for leadership. Is it here? No. The government wants us to support this tepid, half a step bill that it labels child protection. It is not willing to say that this is simply not acceptable and that if people do it they will not be permitted to get away with it. I do not know why we are so timid in this area.
The other thing that occurs to me is that the Liberals are playing politics with this. I will explain how this is happening. Watch what happens in the next election. I do not know about my colleagues, but I will be voting against the bill because it does not touch the problems. It is not because we are not facing in the right direction. It is because we are not going anywhere.
I can already see the Liberal political tactic. In the next election the Liberals will ask the community of Elk Island not to vote for the incumbent because he voted against Bill C-20, the child protection legislation. The Liberals have done that before and they will do it again. They are planning an election campaign on the backs, if I can say it that way, of our innocent children. That is despicable. I cannot believe we have degenerated to such a low level.
I do not see any reason in the world why we cannot invoke the entire Charter of Rights and Freedoms. There was a lot of wisdom in the people of that day. In one step they put in the notwithstanding clause in order to protect against a court that would misinterpret the intentions of Parliament. Surely the writers of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms did not say that they wanted to have it in order to permit people to become predators of our children. We are irresponsible in this Parliament if we do not invoke that clause in the charter which was put there specifically so we could do that.
I would have much more to say except for limitations of time, but I would like to move an amendment as this point. I move:
That the motion be amended by deleting all the words after the word “That” and substituting the following therefor:
Bill C-20, an act to amend the Criminal Code (protection of children and other vulnerable persons) and the Canada Evidence Act, be not now read a second time but that the order be discharged, the bill withdrawn and the subject matter thereof referred to the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights.
I will say in closing that the purpose is to strengthen the bill so that we can stand up in front of future generations and say that we actually did something tangible for the children of our country.