Madam Speaker, I should put on the record the motion that my hon. colleague has alluded to and for which, unfortunately, he left out a phrase. The motion stated:
...protect our children from further sexual exploitation by immediately eliminating from child pornography laws all defences for possession of child pornography which allow for the exploitation of children.
The important part is “which allow for the exploitation of children”.
We have allowed the public good defence. Why? Because police officers need it. We do not want to be charging police officers if they are in touch with this material. The public good is important because the people who have to prosecute, the people who have to take these things before a court and get the convictions where warranted, need the public good defence. That is part of it. It is already there.
I might say that we are here at third reading debate and third reading debate means that we get to vote to get this bill to the Senate. But guess what? I am actually standing to respond to this member's speech not on the real third reading debate but on a hoist motion, which has removed this so we could not vote to send it to the Senate. Why? Because those members wanted to procedurally delay it in the House. The hoist motion is to put it back into the committee.
It has already passed the committee. It has already passed the second reading and report stages in the House. This bill is needed. It is needed not in six months. It was needed yesterday in our courtrooms. It is needed because there are protections for the children who have to go court, protections to help them do their witnessing and their testifying. It is needed because the judges need these new laws to help them in light of decisions by the court.
Let me tell members that we craft things such as “public good” to respond to decisions such as Sharpe to make sure that what we can do will stand up. This is not some figment of one person's imagination. It is very easy to read the litany of the crimes in a newspaper, but we know that it is more important and is our responsibility here to pass the laws that help. That is what we could have been doing instead of delaying this bill.
I have been here as the parliamentary secretary listening to hoist motion debates and it is not pretty. We could have gotten this bill through had we had the cooperation from the other side.
I want to talk a little about what exactly public good means. It means, in this defence, that any material or act in question must serve the public good and must not exceed what serves the public good. That means, unlike the existing defence of artistic merit in the subsection in the code, the proposed public good defence would require a two stage analysis. Does the material or act or serve the public good in any of the recognized areas? If so, does it go beyond what serves the public good? No defence is available where it does not serve the public good or poses a risk or harm that exceeds what serves the public good.
We have to act responsibly. It is difficult to craft something that stands up in the courts and still does the job. We have crafted a bill. We are not trying to delay this bill. We are not trying to delay the protections. This bill is very, very important. I think what we should do now--