Mr. Speaker, I had not realized the connection the member for St. Albert—Edmonton had directly with Alison Azer and the children in St. Albert. I always thought of them as children from Vancouver Island. It remains heartbreaking, especially when one is close to them. Alison is an amazing woman.
I think we are making progress by calling it parenting time. I had a horrific case of a child who was kidnapped by a non-custodial parent and taken to New Hampshire, where the courts looked at a custody order from the Province of British Columbia as if it had come out of a Cracker Jack box. They did not give a fig what the courts in British Columbia said. They said that the non-custodial father breaking the orders of the Province of British Columbia had no bearing for them.
There are international conventions, and I had B.C. involved with them, on the return of children in this kind of situation. It is very difficult. My point is that I do not think the wording will be definitive. It is a matter of the Canadian government getting behind the treaty and working to get children who have been kidnapped by a non-custodial parent and getting the reciprocal government to recognize that right under the treaty. The clarity the Minister of Justice or the Prime Minister could use in a situation like that would be to say that in the context of our Divorce Act, “parenting time” conveys rights that the other parent does not have.
I think we will work through it just fine. The benefits of not using the word “custody” and “access” in our family law legislation federally far outweigh the risks of another jurisdiction not understanding our law. If we could not get the United States of America to understand that British Columbia's Supreme Court was actually a responsible court, with jurisdiction, knowledge and clout, and the language at that time was the same, I think we are going to have problems whenever we have transboundary issues with children.