Mr. Speaker, most members in the House will know that when it is a private member's bill, the NDP does not press anyone to vote other than according to their own beliefs. That of course will apply to this bill should it ever get back here for a final vote.
When I am faced with a bill like this, I always raise this issue because it is really important. The Liberal government would not do it and I do not see any particular inclination by the current Conservative government to do it either.
However, this country badly needs a total revamp of our Criminal Code. We probably needed it for the better part of 20 years. So when I see a bill like this that is dealing with a very minute part of the Criminal Code, I get on my soap box and push for that once again. We badly need to do it.
In the course of doing that this would be one of the sections under consideration, whether the penalty of five years for luring children is adequate and appropriate, whether it is in line with judicial decisions up to this point, and whether the charter is of any concern to increasing it from the 5 to 10 years as proposed.
This is a good example of why we need that omnibus bill because when we are looking at making a decision in this regard of doubling a penalty, as is being proposed in Bill C-277 by the member for Abbotsford, we would have to put that in the context of the entire Criminal Code. Certainly, when our courts look at this and we have heard this from other speakers, they look at proportionality.
The proportionality issue takes into account other offences of a similar nature. If we have a number of other offences where the penalty is still low, in the range of the five years or perhaps even less, then the reality is that the charter will kick in and our courts will have a tendency to strike this down as not being proportional.
Dealing specifically with this section and the crime itself, the justice committee spent a great deal of time dealing with the issue of child pornography in the last Parliament. As part of that, we looked at the crime of luring of young children and some of the evidence that came out was interesting. I want to say to the member for Abbotsford that we took extensive evidence about pedophilia and there is no way of classifying the luring offence other than as a crime of pedophilia.
One of the things that was very clear from the evidence which came from some of the highest trained psychologists and psychiatrists in this country who deal with chronic offenders in this area, and we also heard it from the police and the prosecutors, was the great difficulty of dealing with these individuals and that traditional concepts of deterrence and penalty had no meaning to them.
On one occasion they described an offence where there had been a fairly extensive investigation of three separate individuals at three different addresses. They broke into two of the addresses and apprehended the individuals, but one of them was able to get a warning off to the third one.
In spite of that warning, when they arrived at the third residence which was several hours later, the individual was still on the computer. He was so, as they put it “hard wired” in terms of his needs, if I can put it that way, that he would not shut the computer down. He did not flee. He simply stayed there and was apprehended.
That is the kind of deep psychiatric and psychological mental illness that we are dealing with. If we were to say, as my colleague from Abbotsford said, that we should double the penalty, it would not be a deterrent. The reality is that with this type of criminal there is no deterrent factor. We could make it 50 years or we could make it life, and it would still not make a difference.
What came out of the evidence that we took over that extended period of time, which was several months, was that the only successful way of dealing with this was, of course, through prevention. I know the member made a very good point about the computer program where people are, in effect, monitoring. That was first introduced by the Government of Manitoba. It has now been copied by three other provinces. In fact, Manitoba picked it up from England.
Specifically, it is a monitoring process. We are asking everybody who is on the Internet to, in effect, be part of the prevention system. If people identify a site, they can get it to the police immediately or, which happens rarely, if they can identify the individual children who are being targeted, they can pass that information to the police. It has been extremely successful in England, as it has been in Manitoba. It is just beginning to be effective in some of the other provinces that have implemented it.
I do not in any way want to demean the sincerity with which the member for Abbotsford approaches this problem and I am sure that every member in the House feels the same way. Our absolute first responsibility as members of Parliament and legislators is to protect our citizenry and, in particular, to protect those who are most vulnerable, our children.
If the government is really serious and if the member really wants to maximize the protection that we provide to children from these types of criminals, there is another route we can go. I have raised this a number of times in committee and several times in the House.
We have very sophisticated technology. I am being told that because of some of the work that I do in public security. We have some of the best in the world in terms of tracking people who use the Internet for criminal activities. That technology is being used now by Canada and by a number of its allies in fighting terrorism.
That same technology, which is available in this country and could be deployed in fighting this type of crime, whether it is child pornography or child luring over the Internet, is a great tool that we could be using with our police forces to fight this crime and to prevent it from ever happening.
If we were to talk to victims of crime, whether it be the parents or the children in this type of crime, and give them a choice between the crime never happening or sentencing the perpetrator to an extended period of jail time, they would always take the first one because they do not want to be victims. They do not want to have to live with the psychological scars that come from this type of crime in particular. If we could get the justice minister and the finance minister on side, plus our public security people, there is another methodology and we could be doing much more to intercept.
One of the interesting things we learned is that Bill Gates and his company have donated a substantial amount of money and services to begin to develop these types of tracking programs where in fact we can both intercept and track back to the source this type of communication.
The reality is that our security services have even better developed technology, much more effective technology both in identifying and tracking, so that we could get to the perpetrators before they get to their victims.
I have not decided whether I am going to support this bill or not, but I would urge the member to take into account some of my comments and press his colleagues in cabinet to consider spending money to develop a system for the purposes of fighting child pornography and child luring.