Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the remarks of my esteemed colleague who just spoke. He has been attorney general in his province and has worked in the law field for some time, so he has had a lot of discussion and dialogue with the authorities, with justice officials under his purview and his watch in the province of Manitoba, and he serves our Conservative Party very well as our lead critic in these matters.
The bill we have before us, Bill C-12, is one about which different people have wanted to speak out. People are outraged that we do not have it right in respect of the piece of legislation that we have here today. This whole controversy about the artistic merit defence actually began some time ago in reaction to the court case of John Robin Sharpe, a notorious child pornographer.
The bill purports to make amendments to the Criminal Code to safeguard children from sexual exploitation, abuse and neglect. We think the bill has not done this in the appropriate way and to the extent that it should. Therefore, as Conservative Party members, we have objections with respect to the Liberal government bill before us today.
The Supreme Court of Canada said in the Sharpe case that artistic merit should be interpreted as broadly as possible. That very much concerns us. We do not have any other direction from Parliament, the highest court in the land, if we will, so therefore we have a broad latitude in the statement from the Supreme Court on the John Robin Sharpe case. That statement helped shape the decision that allowed John Robin Sharpe to be acquitted for two counts of possession of child pornography with the intent to distribute.
That material, containing some very violent writings targeting vulnerable children, was considered by judges to have artistic merit. Since that time, this side of the House, particularly the Conservatives, has called on the federal government to eliminate that particular artistic merit defence.
Under this now slightly changed bill, Bill C-12, the existing defences of child pornography, that is, artistic merit, educational, scientific or medical purposes, are reduced to a single defence of public good, but this still has not solved the problem because of how wide and a little bit vague this term is.
Despite the attempts of the former justice minister, the member for Outremont, to sell us the bill and convince us on that basis that the artistic merit defence was eliminated--and technically speaking that would be true--he admitted in the justice committee that it is still included under the broader public good defence. Therein lies the difficulty. As he said in the justice committee, artistic merit still exists in the sense that a piece of art essentially will have to go through this new defence of public good and go through the two stages, and of course there is always the first question: does it serve the public good? That is in the committee records of September 25, 2003.
In the Sharpe case, the Supreme Court of Canada also briefly--