Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to participate in this first debate of a private member's business item in this new Parliament. As my colleague earlier mentioned, it is great to have the private members' business underway. I know the quality and content of debate in the House will improve immeasurably with this new content added to that of the government's orders.
First, I do not feel I can support the member's bill and not because I do not support the objective of protecting children. However, it is not clear to me, and I will try to explain in the few minutes I have. The bill probably will not achieve the objectives.
The member has explained that he wants to bring the punishment within the threshold contained in the bill that would revise the conditional sentence legislation before the House. I understand that part. However, simply doubling the penalty, if that were his objective, with a view to ensuring that the convicted person would do hard time, does not in my view accomplish his objective.
All the sentencing options on convictions still remain within the section with which he is dealing. He has simply increased the indictable provision from five to ten years. He has not addressed the summary conviction provision which allows a judge to convict or a prosecutor to proceed on summary conviction. Summary convictions are punishable by a prison term of up to six months only and a fine of $2,000. By doubling the penalty, does not get the member and his colleagues to where they want to go.
Let me state right off the bat as well that I do not agree to doubling sentences just for the heck of it. We could double the sentence for all kinds of offences and say that we are being tough on crime. Going to the list of all the offences in the Criminal Code and doubling them for the sake of doubling it, is not going to get us anywhere. What about the parent or guardian procuring sexual activity of the child? The maximum penalty there is two years. Maybe we should double it, triple it, quadruple it or maybe have a life sentence. We could do that.
Then there is the householder permitting sexual activity on the premises of that person. That is a two year maximum penalty. What about corrupting children? There is a term not exceeding two years if one is convicted of carrying on activity that corrupts children.
The hon. member, while he is justifiably concerned about the new luring risks on the Internet, has missed a whole lot of other sections, about 100 of them, where the penalties are all in a range within which we have lived for many years. I do not have to go through the whole code. I know the member, if he has done his research as he has said, would have looked for the offences of disorderly conduct, nudity in a public place, causing a disturbance, interfering with a minister from carrying on his or her religious duties, obstructing a minister, trespassing at night and vagrancy. All these things have penalties punishable on summary conviction or penalties of two years to five years.
In addition to that whole piece of what is an appropriate sentence for a particular criminal offence, this provision will not remove the other sentencing options that are available to the court, for example, probation. That option is still available to a sentencing judge. I am not saying that is the sentence he or she is going to give, but it is still there even though the member is trying to get rid of the conditional sentence option.
I would say a conditional sentence is often superior to a probation, but conditions can be attached to both, or a fine. The fine option has not been removed either as a sentencing option.
I was going to talk a little bit about the new government's attempt to make Canadians feel like there is a whole lot more crime than there used to be and that the only way we are going to be secure in our homes and neighbourhoods is if we throw everybody in the slammer and increase all the sentences. However, on listening to the member it appears to me to be fairly clear that was not his intention, that he is really just trying to bring this sentence within a range so that it could be dealt with under the new conditional sentencing provisions.
I will not go into my diatribe on what I would call the neo-con politics of fear. However, if all of these sentencing options are available to judges now, then in order to accomplish his broader objective of deterrence and denunciation, which I believe are part of his objective, then this bill and the provisions that he is urging upon us are going to have to be tweaked two or three different ways.
I suggest to him respectfully that this whole process of trying to use the Criminal Code as a means of reducing crime is a much more complex piece. Simply doubling penalties, creating mandatory minimum penalties across the board and great big wholesale reforms is not a method that I can accept as one that is going to achieve the objective we seek of denunciation and deterrence to crime and dealing with criminals in a way that achieves the various objectives that society has. By the way, all those objectives are set out in the Criminal Code now. Thanks to the sentencing bill that was passed here in the early 1990s, there is a whole regime of sentencing objectives.
The member may wish to urge upon us some new sentencing objectives. That would be quite rational and it may be that we could tweak this. But I know that the sentencing provisions deal with the whole issue of child victims. As far as I can recall when the House dealt with it, nothing was left out of the sentencing prospectus that we urged upon the court.
Please remember that prior to that point in time in the early 1990s, there was no sentencing provision. All the sentencing guidelines had been developed by the courts themselves. That was the first time Parliament in this country said to the courts, “When you sentence, Mr. or Ms. Judge, here are the criteria,” and they were listed in an order. In fact we changed the order as the bill moved through the House and through the Senate.
I accept the member's objective. I and every member of the House want to do what we can to protect children from predators, on the streets, in the schools, on the Internet, wherever they are. I am sure every member in this place wants to do that. This bill has adopted a method which I just do not think is going to get us to where the member would like to be. Therefore, my preference as a private member is not to support the bill but to urge him to continue focusing on this envelope of public policy with a view to improving it. We will probably be doing that into infinity because the Criminal Code always has to be adjusted to adapt to current conditions.