Mr. Speaker, absolutely, I do believe in prevention. However, I believe that prevention for certain criminal offences is more difficult than for others. We can prevent theft by taking certain steps as citizens to discourage people from taking things from our houses.
When it comes to people who prey on our children, they are pedophiles. In my past and present experience, I have talked to psychiatrists who treat people with pedophilia, and there is no real cure for it. How do we prevent a pedophile from engaging in what we consider to be an aberration and a terrible act against the most vulnerable in society?
Most of these pedophiles are what we would consider to be very intelligent, meaning that they know how to gain trust in order to get at their prey, which is our children. They put themselves in positions of authority, so we as a society have brought in measures to make sure we check the criminal background of people like teachers and boy scout leaders, anyone who has access to young people. We could say that this is prevention, somewhat.
The real prevention is letting the people who are pedophiles know that if they commit this crime, there will be consequences and they will be serious consequences. Additionally, if they do commit the crime and go to prison, we will do everything we can. We cannot necessarily cure them of that problem, but we will give them the tools with which to do so, through counselling and having psychologists and psychiatrists do their best to treat them, so that they can subdue these tendencies they have.
However, that takes a long time. That is why we are bringing in this legislation.