Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to debate this issue today, not because any of us in this place enjoy talking about the issue of child pornography, but because it is important to bring some scrutiny to this legislation.
Child pornography in Canada is a scourge. I am concerned that Bill C-20 does not even come close to addressing some of the real issues that face people who have been the victims of child pornography or parents who are concerned about the impact of child pornography and the fact that it might put their own children at risk.
I want to start off by acknowledging the work of some of my colleagues who have done a fantastic job of bringing this problem to light. The members for Wild Rose, Calgary Northeast and Provencher have all provided meaningful and important input on the issue. They have helped raise the level of debate and raise the issue on the public agenda, because it is a serious issue.
Ever since that court decision some months ago that basically said that artistic merit could be allowed as a defence if somebody were being prosecuted for pornography, Canadians have been rightfully concerned about how well protected their children are. There are a number of things the government could have done if it were serious about addressing the issue.
Maybe the best example is to talk about the recent roundup of child pornography that occurred, not just in Canada but in the U.K., the United States and other places around the world. There were something in the range of 2,000 incidents of people downloading child pornography in Canada. However, because of the difficulty of sorting through the law as it stands now, only about 50 to 100 have been arrested and much less than that have been charged because the police must go through every single downloaded image to see whether or not it fits the standard of artistic merit.
That is true. My friend across the way is laughing, but it is true. It slows the process down unbelievably.
The fact that we have only been able to arrest 50 to 100 people tells us that the resources that are necessary for the police to address this issue have not been made available by the government.
The government talks about crime and dealing with it. I do not know how many times the issue of the firearms registry has to come up but I will raise it again. It is another example of where we have resources misplaced. We put all kinds of resources into a ridiculous registry which in and of itself will do nothing to deal with the issue of crime and in doing that will take away all kinds of resources that could have been used by the police to deal with issues like child pornography.
Every time legislators decide to spend a dollar on something that means that they decide not to spend it on a hundred other things. In this case, the government spent $1 billion on the firearms registry thereby guaranteeing that there would not be $1 billion available to deal with the issue of child pornography and to give police officers the resources they need to cure this scourge that has become epidemic in Canada.
People are vitally concerned about it. Ever since the Internet arose it has become easier and easier to spread child pornography. People are rightfully very concerned about this. There are so many aspects to this and I wish we all had more time to discuss it because it is a serious issue.
One of the things that concerns Canadians is that when the court decision was made in the case of John Robin Sharpe that allowed artistic merit as a defence of possessing child pornography, the failure of the government to act quickly was a sign that it was not going to act very forcefully in the end. They were right because Bill C-20 does not provide that protection to victims and to people who are potentially the targets of child pornographers because it leaves the definition of what is allowable so wide open one could drive a truck through it.
The public good, what can that possibly mean? I am afraid it will mean all kinds of things to people who have crafty lawyers and a little bit of money.
I can guarantee that we will see the public good challenged in the courts again, just like it was with the previous legislation. There is a very good chance of overturning all kinds of legitimate convictions under the laws surrounding child pornography because of that public good clause. The government is erring on the side, I am afraid to say, of child pornographers at the expense of innocent victims.
I do not understand, after the hundreds of thousands of names that appeared on petitions, how the government could not have received the message. Surely it understands that this is an issue that Canadians feel very strongly about. They are concerned that the Liberal government has caved in, that it did not steel its spine when it was time to do it to protect children.
A moment ago my friend for Port Moody—Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam spoke and made a good point. He said that tied up with that whole issue is the issue of raising the age of consent. He pointed out that if we were to raise the age of consent in Canada from 14 to 16, we would bring an additional one million young people under the protection of the law. That is an important point.
In Canada today one has to be 16 to drive a car, but under the current law a 14 year old girl could have sex with a 45 year old pimp and it would be completely licit and within the bounds of the law. We cannot allow that to happen.
I was so disturbed when my party brought forward a motion in this place asking for the age of consent to be raised and permission to do that was denied by the Liberal government. It should have been part of Bill C-20. If the concern were to protect young people from predators that should have been part of this legislation. Sadly, it is not.
My colleague from Lethbridge and I went to the border crossing at Coutts a year ago. We were told that one of the big problems was sorting out the men who were coming into Canada to hook up with young people who they had lured over the Internet. This is a real problem that was brought to our attention.
I know the government has started to address that but it has only gone part way. It would not be near the problem if it would raise the age of consent to 16. If it were to do that then law enforcement officers would have another tool in their arsenal. Parents who are powerless to stop their 14 year old son or daughter from getting involved in something like that would have another tool to ensure that the lives of their children were not completely ruined. That is what it comes to.
I appeal to my friends across the way to consider carefully what the public is saying about this, what some of the government's own members are saying, and certainly what many members in the opposition are saying. This leaves the door wide open in a couple of different ways for predators of all kinds to choose their victims among Canada's citizenry.
For those reasons government members should err on the side of caution and vote against Bill C-20.