Mr. Speaker, the bill in fact does not address compensation for victims of child sexual abuse at all. The attitude of the government has generally been to leave that to the provinces. Ontario has the most extensive compensatory program in the country, but it has an absolute maximum of $25,000 that could be paid out for victims.
I have done a lot of work on this. When I was in law school, I wrote a major paper on child abuse including child sexual abuse, and I have done a lot of work on this particularly in the early part of my career as a lawyer. The figure of $25,000 would not even cover the counselling for children who have been seriously sexually abused, especially if there was extensive violence and over an extended period of time.
With the number of cases province-wide, we do not have enough people, child psychiatrists or child psychologists in particular, to be able to provide them with treatment. There is a whole bunch of areas where we could be doing much more work to assist victims and to deal with both monetary compensation and also trying to get children reinstated into society as full functioning human beings.