Mr. Speaker, I do in fact see it that way. I was struck by various testimony given in the Senate. That testimony will certainly be heard again by the House committee responsible for discussing the issue, whether it be the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights or the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security.
Kent Roach, the Prichard-Wilson Chair of Law and Public Policy at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, gave evidence to the committee as an individual in support of the bill. This is another example that will be used by the government to say that all these great scholars, all these great legal minds, all these great defenders of public rights agree with the Conservatives. We are not opposed to motherhood and apple pie, but at the same time some parts of the bill pose huge problems. For instance, the idea of punishing young people instead of rehabilitating them is of enormous concern to Professor Roach.
If the government is serious, then it must ensure that the bill is amended or improved and that the questions that the subject matter experts have about it are cleared up and that these concerns are resolved, so we can say that we are no longer behind the times, because he said that we lag behind many other countries because our official policy is that once a terrorist, always a terrorist.
All the same, I am not naive. I practised law for 25 years. You see all kinds of people. Nevertheless, I am still optimistic that there are good measures that can punish and rehabilitate the same time and take people's unique differences into account. We should not treat a young person or child as we do a 50-year-old terrorist with a 30-year career as a terrorist behind him who works in the terrorism market. They are not the same thing. There are children who have been indoctrinated by their parents, and the parents are authority figures to their children. It is hard for a child to say no to his father or his mother. All of these cases must be studied in depth.