Madam Speaker, once again it is a pleasure to rise and speak to the issues in regard to the motion today.
Just before I get into that, though, I must say that some of the members I heard speak here today have been very effective at confusing me. I heard one member say that we must abide by and live under the Constitution of Canada and then deplore section 33, which is part of the Constitution, if I am not mistaken. I do not understand where the member is coming from. She deplores section 33 but she loves the Constitution of Canada. That section is part of the Constitution. Maybe one of these days we will have to meet somewhere and she can explain that one to me.
By now everyone will know that I am going to stick to one issue that is on the agenda of this supply motion. That, once again, is child pornography, an issue that is burning at the bottom of my heart and which I think must be dealt with and must be dealt with quickly.
I think everyone in this House, the 301 members of this place, would agree that they do not want any child pornography to exist; I do not think we would find one member who does not. I also think they would agree that in their own ridings probably 90% or more of the people deplore child pornography and would like to see it abolished and banned in its entirety. I do not think there is any quibbling about that.
The question is, do we as a Parliament have the ability and the authority to achieve this? In my opinion, we most definitely do. It would take leadership. It would take determination. It would take a commitment to put all party differences aside and work together to deal with an issue which we know beyond a shadow of a doubt is affecting thousands of children across this country alone, not to mention what it is doing internationally all across the world. The people most vulnerable to abuse are the young people, the kids. I am talking about kids all the way down to the age of two months who have been identified as victims of sexual abuse or sexual predators and pornographers.
If we were to stop and think about that for a moment, I am sure we all would like to say we would like this to disappear tomorrow, we would like to see it gone. We know that is not going to happen, but I think that collectively we can work together to make an effort to do our very best to get that show on the road to abolish and ban it in its entirety, because that is one thing that not only Canadian children but all children across the world deserve: to be free from child predators and this kind of abuse.
As well, if I have heard this once I have heard it a hundred times: “The trouble with the member for Wild Rose is that he is not interested in getting to the root causes of these kinds of problems”. The root cause of these kinds of predators existing and being active across this world is, as has been determined by a number of psychologists, a number of psychiatrists, people working in the medical field, people on the front line and by predators themselves, the root cause of most of these abuses is child pornography. So let us stop the rhetoric about getting to the root cause. It has been pretty well documented and determined that child pornography is the root cause of this kind of problem. We have discovered that now, so let us stop the rhetoric about getting to the root cause. We know what the root causes are. We have good evidence of that.
Let us go after the root cause. The root cause being child pornography means that 301 members of Parliament, on behalf of probably 32.5 million Canadians who would love to see this happen, must come together on that one issue and stop muddling that issue by putting it in a bill such as Bill C-20 with other issues that are going to take a lot of discussion and time. Let us separate it, set it on its own and say we are going to deal with that.