Mr. Speaker, since I came here in 1993 I have talked about waiting and waiting for something to happen in regard to protecting our society from these kinds of predators and of doing a better job of it. What I am hearing today from the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice is exactly the same rhetoric we have heard for 10 years.
Here we suddenly have the answer but it has been in the Criminal Code all the time. The parliamentary secretary said that we have the toughest child pornography laws in the world. If they are the toughest in the world, could he explain to me why the Toronto police department has 1,700,000 pieces of child pornography in its possession that it has to investigate and determine whether it has any artistic merit? If we were to add the hundreds of thousands of other articles from all across the country, are we the toughest in the world when we have 1,700,000 in one city in the country?
I cannot believe for a moment that he would say that we have the toughest laws in the world.
I would like that member or any member on that side of the House to give me one example of where a child pornographer has received a 10 year maximum sentence, just one. I can give him hundreds of examples of conditional sentences and home arrests. I would ask the member to just give me one of a 10 year sentence, the toughest in the world.
This is back to the old rhetoric that we have heard for 10 years. It is no solution and, praise the Lord for the lawyers, the courts will be crammed with people saying that they did it under the public good. They will be busy. Every lawyer in the country will pocket a lot of change because we do not have the intestinal fortitude to say that child pornography is no good for anybody in the land and that collectively we should stamp it out in the House. We do not have enough brains to say that our children deserve that kind of protection.
Why do we have this continued rhetoric? Why is the government trying to convince us that we have the toughest laws in the world when we have millions of pieces of this junk in the country?