Mr. Speaker, I am rising today on behalf of my party to oppose this motion. As usual, from the lack of knowledge that comes from the Conservative side of the House, I am not doing this on the basis of what the Conservatives think.
They should be aware, and obviously most of them sitting over there are not, that the amendments that were moved by their justice critic in committee were supported by myself, as a representative of my party, to change the age of consent but at the same time to build in protection. As opposed to again what the Conservatives normally do, I thought it would be best if we dealt with the facts of the situation we are confronted with in this country which is the need to have a defence in the legislation that would not criminalize a large percentage of our youth population who are engaging in sexual activity with other youth of roughly the same age.
I heard from the last speaker, who obviously is not being briefed by his own justice critic, about the present age of consent and the defence of a person being within two years of that age. That was not the amendment and that was the reason we opted to support the Conservative amendments.
The Conservative amendment would have a gap of five years. I believe the justice critic for the Conservative Party moved the amendment to five years as opposed to two, which seems to be satisfying the mover of this motion. If we were to look at the statistics of sexual activity among youth in this country, one would be criminalizing approximately 42% or 43% of male youth who are engaging in sexual activity if we went with the two year gap. In fact, there is that much of a difference.
There is always the stereotype that it is the male who is older. In fact, in 33% of the cases the female is older and in 43% of the cases it is the male. We had a potential for criminalizing literally hundreds of thousands of youth. The figures we were able to gather showed that roughly 800,000 youth in the age group of 14 to 16 are engaging in full sexual activity.
We would be potentially criminalizing somewhere in the range of 40% of them if we simply adopted this motion. That is what we are confronted with. I realize those facts may be somewhat disturbing to certain people, but that is the reality and as legislators we must deal with that reality.
We were very clear. We supported the amendments to raise the age to 16 and build in this other defences, so that we would not be criminalizing a large percentage of our youth.