Mr. Speaker, I rise today to respond to the private member's bill of the member of Parliament for Abbotsford.
I want to begin my remarks by putting things into context from my perspective.
As a teacher, I was involved with training young people about media awareness. I had the pleasure to work with the Media Awareness Network, which is based in Ottawa. Its work has been picked up and used as a model throughout the country. In fact, it is internationally renowned. What it does is educate young people. As its name suggests, it brings to schools, to children and to young people the tools they need to navigate not only the Internet, but various other media as well.
This is really important. All we have to do is turn on the television, walk down the streets and see the billboards, or look at our magazine stands. I believe we have taken the wrong direction in our society in how we display children and women and how we have sexualized and turned women and children into objects. Part of luring is about objectification, how we have commodified human beings.
I have two young boys. Sadly, it is something that I have had to educate them about at a very early age, about why we have magazines displayed that objectify women in advertising to sell products, when it has nothing to do with the product. We have this kind of pollution put in front of us and seemingly as a society we okay it or we do not do much about it.
With Media Awareness Network, we were able to teach students from the elementary level to high school and show them what kinds of media were out there and how to interpret some of the images. Let us be honest, it is quite confusing for someone who is four, five or six years of age to see some of these images in magazines, on television screens and on the Internet, and to try to understand how that relates to what they see in their everyday lives.
Quite clearly, if one were to take all the images that are thrown at our young people and children, put them in a context and say that this is reality, I think we would find that most children would be very confused and very disturbed if they were not given the guidance that most parents and teachers give. They need to be told that this is not reality, that this is a version of someone's reality and it does not reflect our human family and our human dimensions.
I wanted to start off with that because in essence what we are talking about is the objectification, the exploitation, the sexualization of young people, of children and of women, and we have seen that in the past. That is the heart of this issue. It is how we can tackle what really has become the commodification of human beings.
With that in mind, what we did with the Media Awareness Network was put young people onto the Internet and have them show us the kinds of sites and images that they saw on a day to day basis. This had to to do with advertising, the kinds of things that kids are confronted with all the time. We pointed out there were places that were dangerous and what they should do if someone talked to them on a chat line, how to prevent being lured and why these people do this. Again, it is very confusing for young people. Quite rightly, we hope, young people trust others. Sadly, there are people who exploit that.
What we really need to do is give them the tools to ensure they are not victimized. On that I guess I am a little surprised at the government's approach to this. On certain days we will hear the government say that this kind of behaviour is the fault of poor parenting. In essence, what it saying is that the government will be the parent because the parents are unable to do this. The government will make sure it does it. It will have the big hand of the law and take care of everything.
I am sad to say that this is not good enough and it is intellectually incongruent with what this political party asserts most of the time.
I also have to mention this weeks cutbacks to literacy to help grassroots organizations, schools, community organizations and libraries. They work with young people to give them the tools they need to ensure they are aware of what is out there, the kinds of predators, the pitfalls when one turns on a computer. They need to know there are people out there of whom they should be weary.
I find it strange that we have a government that on the one hand is saying we need to have a law like this, I would suppose, and without prejudice, because it would take care of the problem of luring children. On the other hand the government seems to be taking away all the tools that have been provided to prevent this. Ultimately, the way to deal with problems such as luring children is to prevent hee crime from happening.
I want to turn my attention to what has been done to date in other jurisdictions and what can be done. For the Ottawa police service and for many other police services, one of the problems they have right now is they do not have the tools to deal with the Internet being used as a tool, be it for luring children or for other crimes. Yet as Canadians, we are probably best suited to deal with this problem. We are at the top of the class in developing software and other IT tools to track this kind of phenomena. We have seen that when we have had to deal with and seriously take on concerns around terrorism.
On the other hand, when we are talking about police services and their ability and financial and human capacity to deal with Internet crimes, it seems as though it is an afterthought. That is not because they have not identified it. I happen to know the people on the police services board in Ottawa. I happen to know that this is a concern around the country, and I am sure other members know this. One of the problems police services are having right now is they do not have enough person power. They do not have enough of the IT tools that are necessary. Particularly, the police do not have people who are trained and who can remain in those positions.
This is the kind of approach we need. It is the kind of thing we need to do to prevent these kinds of crimes from happening. We need to be able to identify predators who are on line. Then we can arrest these people and make sure something can happen before the crime happens.
My major concern about the bill is not enough attention has been paid the prevention of crime. I extend that to an analysis on the approach the government seems to be taking on crime in general. Getting tough on crime is hard to argue with in some instances. However, it begs the question, what is the government doing to protect people and prevent these crimes?
If we are unable to have a debate and to put in the tools to prevent crime, then we are not fulfilling our responsibility and our jobs as legislators. Ultimately, we have failed our communities and we have failed children.