Madam Speaker, in regard to Bill C-2, it is fairly obvious that children need protection in this day and age. We live in an age that is much different from bygone years. Children are very vulnerable to sexual exploitation. Pedophiles and people who are bent on this and attempt to violate the rights of our children are very well organized.
However, in addition to the children, there is another group that needs help in this area. The people who need help are the parents.
Prior to 2000, I practised law in a general practice situation. I had a very difficult situation to deal with in the mid-1990s. A nice young couple in their mid-thirties came into my office. They had a 14 year old daughter who had taken up a relationship with a man in his late forties. They went to the police, who said there was nothing they could do.
I told those people at first blush that the law would provide parents with the means and ability to provide for their children and protect them. I told them to return at a prescribed time the next day and in the meantime I would do some research and would have answers to their difficulties. I spent a fair amount of time researching the topic and the Criminal Code and provincial family services legislation and so on. I thought surely parents would have the power to protect a 14 year old daughter from what was clearly an exploitive situation.
I am a parent myself and I think most people in this House have been parents at one time or another. As parents, we know that 14 year old people are not at a stage in life where they can make those sorts of decisions. They need more maturity and education before they embark on making those sorts of decisions. I think it is an area for parental control.
In any event, when those parents came back the next day to see me, it was a very troubling experience for me. I had to tell these folks that the House of Commons was not able to provide them with the relief or remedy to deal with this sort of situation. I was the messenger and quite often in that business the messenger is the one who takes the heat.
One of the reasons I am in the House is that this is where we create the laws of the land. We are letting down these folks by not dealing with that particular issue. It would take very minor changes to the existing law to protect children by changing the age from 14 to 16. Basically, to use a phrase, it would be the stroke of a pen and we would have a million children in the country who would be able to be protected by their parents. Parents would have the law on their side. Right now they do not have the law on their side. They have their hands behind their backs. The law has tied them. They are incapable of protecting those children, who are at a very vulnerable age.
I can assure members that people who are in the sex trade and exploit young people are very aware of this loophole. They exploit it for everything they can get. I think it is incumbent on Parliament to act on this matter and do something that I think can make a difference in that area.
Another area I wanted to address is the area of the defences. Any time Parliament creates a criminal offence or deals with a criminal offence and then decides to set out the defences in the Criminal Code for that offence, besides the normal common law defences, it had better be careful on the wording of those defences.
Anybody in the House who has graduated from a law school and knows anything about our court system will know what a good defence lawyer can do with ambiguous, loosely worded defences. “Art” is a mile wide and a mile deep; it is in the eye of the beholder. Good defence lawyers I know who are given that kind of leeway are going to have a heyday.
The accused does not have to prove that there is a legitimate purpose. The defence does not have to do that. Anybody who graduated from law school knows what the defence has to do. Even laymen would know that. I think even you, Madam Speaker, would know the answer to that question. All the defence has to do is raise one thing called reasonable doubt.
I am sure this is what happened in Robin Sharpe's case. He had a good lawyer, who took this artistic merit argument and said, “We do not have to prove that there is artistic merit here. All we have to do is prove that there could be. Look at this. There could be artistic merit here. If you find that, Mr. Judge, you have to acquit the accused. That is the law”.
I am very troubled by this. There may be legitimate purposes and I am not going to deny it. The justice minister said that police are in possession of child pornography for the purposes of investigation. I can accept that, but this concept of art is just way too wide. Surely we have some legal minds in this country who could tighten up this thing and close the door to defence counsel running roughshod over our court system and allowing pedophiles and sexual exploiters to walk out of the courtroom and carry out this sort of activity against our young people.
The population of young people in this country is getting smaller and smaller, but it is our future. They are the people who are going to carry our heritage into the future. It is incumbent on lawmakers in the House to take the bull by the horns and take the measures that will adequately protect our young people, so they can become people who can enjoy and optimize their God-given talents in this society and not have to live with some haunting nightmare for the rest of their lives if they manage to survive some of these ordeals with sexual predators.
I am amazed about something from the last session. We had a motion to change the age of consent from 14 to 16. It seemed to me an obvious thing for us to do in the House. Liberal members, by and large, refused to vote for that motion. Then they were appalled during the election campaign when it was said that Liberals were soft on child pornography. This was a very simple measure that would have provided some real protection and some real teeth for police and parents in protecting children at that vulnerable age. I was not the one who made the decision to vote against that motion, so let me say that if the shoe fits, wear it.
I am very disappointed, quite honestly, that some of the people in the gallery who report on our business here do not do a fairer job of trying to report these very serious issues to the public at large. They treat them as minor and insignificant issues. Children being exploited by sexual predators is a very, very serious matter. It will cause irreparable harm to those people. We should be protecting them.
Conditional sentencing is another area. I think that when people do very terrible things to other people the number one criteria of our criminal justice system should be providing protection to the public. Liberals do not understand that a legitimate purpose of our criminal justice system is to provide protection to our law-abiding citizens who want to carry on with their lives. These people have broken the social contract. We cannot live in a free and democratic society when people do not respect the rights of other people and children. When they break that law, there has to be a consequence. The consequence is that they are incarcerated and are not on the streets to bring mayhem and harm to our most vulnerable people.
I think Liberals watch too many Hollywood movies. They get taken up with the Hollywood culture. In fact, a lot of Hollywood is run by people with a small-l liberal philosophy. I think that in their minds there are a lot of Jean Valjeans in this society, that is, falsely accused people, but they do not look at the victims and casualties of these kinds of policies.
The scales have to tip back to protecting our most vulnerable people, especially our children. The government has seriously let us down on this matter.
I thank you very much for your attention, Madam Speaker. I think you were even nodding at some points and I very much appreciate that. I just wish I could get more of your colleagues to agree with me.