David Anderson

[Curling, February 10th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, everyone who follows curling realizes the unique contribution Saskatchewan makes to the game, but this weekend was truly extraordinary. On Sunday, the Saskatchewan junior women's team of Marliese Miller, Teejay Surik, Janelle Lemon and Chelsey Bell, coached by Bob Miller, defeated Nova Scotia 6 to 4 to win the Canadian junior women's curling championship.

This followed the tremendous victory Saturday by the Saskatchewan junior men's team. Steve Laycock, Christopher Haichert, Michael Jantzen and Kyler Broad, coached by Barry Fiendell, won the Canadian junior men's curling championship by defeating Alberta 9 to 5. These young people have a memory that will last a lifetime.

Congratulations to both teams and wish them the best at the world junior curling championships, March 22 to 30 in Flims, Switzerland.

[Canada Transportation Act, February 10th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, we have another tremendous initiative by the member for Lethbridge who is interested in protecting children.

Before I get into a discussion of his private member's bill, I just want to point that all Saskatchewan celebrates today. I know my colleague loves curling. We were able to watch the Canadian juniors one evening last week. I had a good time with the young people and met some of the teams. I want to make everyone aware that on Saturday the Saskatchewan junior men's won the championship and yesterday the junior girls' won it. Once again we have made a tremendous contribution to Canada and to the sport of curling. I know my colleague will appreciate that.

I am sorry to see once again a situation where we have paralysis by analysis. My colleague has brought forward an issue which is worth talking about. We hear all the reasons, particularly from the government members, why this will not work. I find it unfortunate that when finally someone tries to protect children, we have parties who do nothing and want to do nothing.

Last week we discussed the child pornography bill. One thing that concerns most of us on this side of the House is the definition and defence for child pornography is being broadened, not narrowed. We want that material banned. We want our children protected. The government for some reason is unable to do that.

The phrase “paralysis by analysis” comes to mind because there are all the reasons on that side of the House why we cannot move ahead and why we should not do this to protect our children, but no reasons and no suggestions about what we might do.

This is a great start to deal with the problem. We all recognize that there is a problem. On average, 66 children are abducted by strangers in Canada every year. That does not sound like a big number until we start to break it down and realize that more than once a week a family within Canada is affected by having their children abducted.

I listened to the member speak earlier. I wonder if there is anything more that would tear parents and families apart such as having a child abducted from their family. If we can do something to deal with that issue, we need to take a look at it. There are over 400 children a year, which is more than one a day, who are taken by non-custodial parents from parents who have been given custody of those children.

This grassroots private member's bill was inspired by a constituent who, as we heard earlier, on the day a young girl in Lethbridge was kidnapped, was travelling with her own daughter. When she got on the plane, she thought there should at least have been some check to ensure if the girl who was with her, who was about the same age as the young child who had been abducted, was in fact her child. The airline declined to do that, but she felt it was important that there be some protection for children in those situations. My colleague from Lethbridge has seen fit to bring forward a bill to deal with that.

Currently there are no I.D. checks required for children travelling with adults within Canada by air. We are all used to having our I.D. checked. We have to have photo I.D. when we get on the main airline in Canada. We are used to that situation now, but there is no I.D. check required for children travelling domestically. There is one required for children who are travelling with adults when they depart Canada by air or when they are crossing the border to the United States by car. I have had this apply to my own family. We travel with my nephews and nieces and often my kids travel with their uncles and aunts. We write a letter stating that I am the legal guardian of this child and that so-and-so has permission to travel with the child. It is not a complicated affair to put that in place.

The loophole in our domestic air travel can easily be taken advantage of by any adult who wants to travel and is willing to travel unlawfully with minor children. We need to something to deal with that.

Bill C-314 is really a preventive measure. It addresses two areas. First, it addresses the issue of non-custodial parents. We hope this requirement will act as a deterrent for non-custodial parents who want to move their children across this country to get them away from the parent who has been given custody.

Second, because of the Internet and the proliferation of it, we see it provides an increased opportunity for adults to contact minors for the purpose of meeting them. It seems that hardly a week goes by where we do not read about adults who have gone online, posed usually as a young person, tried to gain the confidence of the young persons, then have met them and have began to transport them.

As my colleague has mentioned, we have some controls in place at the borders to prevent people from coming across the borders with these young people who should not be with them. However we really have nothing within Canada to deal with this. It is important that we take a look at how we can protect our children and what we can do to ensure that people do not take advantage of our kids. This requirement really acts as a deterrent in that situation. Realistically this will not stop child abduction. People who want to break the law will do it anyway. However this would put in the way one more deterrent or barrier for people who try to interfere with our children.

I find it interesting that Child Find in Alberta has been informed about the bill and has some understanding of what the member is trying to do with it. It is one of the most authoritative organizations of that bill. It has committed itself to backing the member and trying to make it work.

The other parties raised some interesting points this morning about some of the logistics of how we would do this. I also think we can make this far too complicated. Persons who now travel out of the country can have a letter from the guardian of a child giving permission for the child to travel with that adult and that seems to work fairly well.

I do not think this has to be costly. One thing brought up by the government was that it would be expensive. We have not been in favour of the entire air registry to be put in place, which will be very expensive. I find it interesting that the same government, which thinks it can make an air registry of every traveller in the country work, is not willing to also try to identify some of the principles and expectations to look after our children. It is an interesting concept that the government is willing to spend money galore trying to keep track of adults, just as it has spent money on the gun registry. It has spent well over a billion dollars trying to track every gun in the country but there is an absolute unwillingness to find out what is going on with our children.

Our suggestion today is that it would be well worth sending this to transportation committee so it can flesh out the details and put forward amendments. The bill is worth the consideration of the committee. It needs to take a look at it. There may be some improvements it can make. It needs to be taken to that level.

I ask members to consider the bill, and that the committee deal with it.

[Divorce Act, February 4th, 2003]

Madam Speaker, I would like to ask my hon. colleague a couple of questions about why he feels the government has been unable to bring in good legislation.

The bill is lacking in so many areas. Yesterday we talked about another bill that was lacking in so many areas. The government seems unable to provide leadership. I used the illustration yesterday of watching an old horse die. No matter what it is fed, it gets thinner and thinner and stumbles and staggers around. We see it in so many areas.

We saw it in the gun registry yesterday and again today, with the report which says that we have thrown away $400 million of Canadian taxpayer money. It is gone and we cannot possibly get it back. We have seen it with the GST fraud. The minister seems unable and unwilling to take responsibility for what has happened. We have seen it in the inability of the government to take a solid position on Iraq. We have seen it in other areas such as agriculture with the APF. The minister now does not have programs in place when we need them. I could list a number of other areas as well.

Could my colleague comment on why we have this litany of failures to provide decent legislation for Canadians?

[Criminal Code, February 3rd, 2003]

One of my colleagues says it sounds like Lightning. Actually, it sounds also like the government. I believe the government is stumbling. We see it in almost every aspect of the government today. We saw it during question period and afterward in a number of different areas. We see it in areas such as the gun registry and the fact that the minister himself has gone outside and has paid a company to produce a report that he hopes will be favourable to his department.

We saw it in discussions about GST fraud. This is a government that for 10 years has been unable and unwilling to even deal with the issue of people defrauding the general public of taxpayer dollars.

We saw it during the last week or so with the government's inability to take a position on Iraq that anyone could possibly understand.

We see it in agriculture with the APF and an agriculture minister and a department. It is within two months of a new seeding season and they do not have the programs in place. They have had two years to put those programs in place.

We see it with a public works minister who is busy appointing committees and getting MPs to delay the release of reports, trying to delay as long as possible an inquiry into the government's contracting and its actions there.

We also see it for the one who would be the leader, the member for LaSalle—Émard, who was in Alberta this past weekend. I thought it was the height of hypocrisy to hear him speak about how he wanted to put money into the military after he gut it for 10 years. He wanted to call the government to accountability on the gun registry, when he was the one who had been funding it to the tune of a billion dollars over the last 10 years.

In Bill C-20 we see another example of a government that is completely disinterested and unable to come up with good legislation. Today we have heard from perhaps two members out of 170 on the government side. They do not seem to even be interested in coming to discuss the issue and debating it with us.

I guess the government's best response today, and I do not even know if I should go there, was from the member for Ancaster—Dundas—Flamborough—Aldershot. He said that his biggest fear was that this law would somehow interfere with freedom of speech.

I found it interesting that the best example he could use was Romeo and Juliet . I find it typical of small “l” Liberals. They take an extreme example and then try to make a rule from it. In this situation we have heard someone talk about child pornography, then equate that somehow Romeo and Juliet is tied to that.

Police officers who came and spoke to us did not talk about Romeo and Juliet . They talked about small children and babies that were forced to have oral sex with adults. They did not talk about Romeo and Juliet . They talked about small children who were being raped by adults. They did not talk about Romeo and Juliet . They talked about small children being held down while adults masturbate on them.

It makes me very angry when I hear someone say that the issue in this legislation is freedom of speech. It is not. It is child abuse and child exploitation. There is no excuse. What do we have to do? How long do we have to talk about this? How long does it have to go on before there is action on this issue?

We try to keep this as clinical as possible and keep it as far away as possible. However, when the police come here and show us that material, we know that something needs to be done. Perhaps that material needs to be shown at a Liberal caucus meeting some Wednesday. Maybe then they will realize these are real kids who are being destroyed by these people.

What is wanted? When we go to Canadians, the first thing we hear is that they want a clear definition of pornography. We are the people who are supposed to legislate the law in the land.

It is good to ban child pornography but we need to do something with it. What is it? I will read the past definition of what child pornography, the defence for it and how it changes.

The previous version of child pornography, as found in subsection 163.1 of the Criminal Code, reads:

--(a) a photographic, film, video or other visual representation, whether or not it was made by electronic or mechanical means,

(i) that shows a person who is or is depicted as being under the age of eighteen years and is engaged in or is depicted as engaged in explicit sexual activity, or

(ii) the dominant characteristic of which is the depiction, for a sexual purpose, of a sexual organ or the anal region of a person under the age of eighteen years; or

(b) any written material or visual representation that advocates or counsels sexual activity with a person under the age of eighteen years that would be an offence under this Act.

The condition is it has to be an offence under this act.

The defence, which everyone is getting more familiar with all the time, is that where the accused is charged with an offence under the subsections, the courts shall find the accused not guilty if the representation or written material that is alleged to constitute child pornography has, those famous words, “artistic merit”, or an educational, scientific or medical purpose.

The changes are actually fairly small in terms of the definition. We are just adding a part to it. At the end of the section, we will simply add that it also includes:

any written material the dominant characteristic of which is the description, for a sexual purpose, of sexual activity with a person under the age of eighteen years that would be an offence under this Act.

I want to point that out because it does not say that it has to be just anything that involves this.

The defence is changed to:

No person shall be convicted of an offence under this section if the acts that are alleged to constitute the offence, or if the material related to those acts that is alleged to contain child pornography serve the public good or do not extend beyond what serves the public good...

My colleague, the member for Port Moody—Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, said this earlier. There is no definition of public good in the legislation. We need to talk about that. The Supreme Court has already ruled on this. It has extended the definition of public good beyond the old definition. The public good includes issues that deal with religion, administration of justice, administration of science, literature, works of art, or other objects of general interest. It looks to me like the government has actually broadened what will be included in the definition of child pornography, not narrowed it.

We have asked the government time and again to ban this stuff and get rid of it. We do not need it around. Then it comes back with a bill that, according to a five to two Supreme Court decision, will broaden the definition of what will be allowed and broadens the number of exemptions for this material. Canadians want a clear definition. They do not want to be fooling around, they want this stuff banned.

Canadians also are asking for a ban on child pornography. Every member in the House who has been paying attention to their constituents has probably brought one of these petitions forward. It clearly states, “Your petitioners call upon Parliament to protect our children by taking all necessary steps to ensure that all materials which promote or glorify pedophilia or sado-masochistic activities involving children are outlawed”. We have seen hundreds and hundreds of these petitions and tens of thousands of signatures. The government must at some point begin to listen to its people.

The public demand, brought about partially through the Sharpe case and through widespread public revulsion, is that people want this material banned. They are not interested in artistic merit or anything else with regard to this material. The average person just wants rid of it.

We also hear that police officers need help. We heard it in the media and we heard it when they came here to talk to us. They brought some of this material for us to see, and they need help in a couple of areas.

First, they need help in dealing with the evidence. Presently they have to go through every image they confiscate. Some of these collections, from what we are told, have 200,000, 500,000 or 750,000 images. Police have to take the manpower to sit and go through every one of the images, detail them and ensure that every one of them fits the criteria that the government set out. We say they need some help with this. They need a situation where they do not have to go through this material ad nauseam.

Presently when police seize a huge quantity of drugs, they take one packet of it and that constitutes a fact in which people believe that the rest of the shipment contained the same material. We need that sort of thing for our police.

Second, and I will have more to say on this later, is Internet issues must be addressed for the police. This material is international in nature. There needs to be an international initiative taken to get some control of it. Russia, I am told, is one of the conduits for it, but this is just a banquet table for perverse appetites and something needs to be done about that.

What people really want is protection for their kids in what is seen as a crazy world.

[Criminal Code, February 3rd, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I will ask members this question. Have they ever had an old horse that was on its last legs and its ribs were sticking out? It did not matter what was fed to the horse, it could not gain weight, its haunches were showing, it had these big knobby knees and the more it walked, the more it stumbled and the closer it got to its last days.

[Assisted Human Reproduction Act, January 29th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, we are back again speaking about the assisted human reproduction act. It came before us previously as Bill C-56. We are talking now mainly about the Group No. 4 amendments. I want to make some general comments before I get into the specifics of the Group No. 4 motions and amendments.

One of the reasons that we need to have a discussion about this important issue is that we are setting the stage, not just for a single bill but for a legislated attitude toward people. We are setting up a bill that sets out a legislative attitude toward other human beings in our society. The conclusions that we reach in the House about our attitude and our decisions about other human beings will have great consequences.

For example, we have seen throughout this century what happens when governments and ideologies decide that individual human beings are not unique and that they are only basic economic units. I had the opportunity in university to sit under three years of teaching that bombarded us with Karl Marx's political theory that all events can be analyzed from a particular economic perspective, and that human beings then must fit into that perspective and into that analysis. Individuals are never seen as unique in that ideology. They are seen as a commodity that needs to be used.

Interestingly enough, through the last century we have seen that theory lived out through various socialistic and communistic governments on this earth. In the last century there has been more brutality from those regimes than anywhere that we have seen in the history of mankind. It is important that we have a unique view of the uniqueness of human life and what it means.

I can think of a couple of examples. In Stalin's Russia, one of the results of his decision to get control of the middle class farming communities was that he was willing to starve them until they disappeared. He had no concern for the uniqueness, the individuality or the greatness of human life.

In China, even today, we see that it subjects its individual citizens to the wishes of what it would call the collective. We see this show up in different situations where there is brutality toward people who may believe differently than their leadership does.

In the Sudan we see another socialist regime that is only too happy to wage war for money. It has little responsibility toward its own people and it seems to care little about the human life of its citizens.

It is important that we decide what our attitude and our view will be toward human life. Where there is a weak position taken regarding human uniqueness and individuality, there is definitely a loss of compassion for others. I would suggest that we are not as immune from this as greatly as we think we might be.

We see a number of places where the government already refuses to deal with issues that involve the value of human life. We spent a day earlier this week talking about child protection and child pornography. I would suggest that the unwillingness of the government to deal directly and decisively with child pornography is one such example of a government that is refusing to deal with those issues that say that human life has ultimate value.

Last spring we had the opportunity to meet with the police officers who deal with this material. After seeing their presentation I would agree with my colleague from Wild Rose that there is absolutely no excuse for allowing this to continue.

I was embarrassed the other day by the NDP's position that as long as people can create things out of their own imagination, that there needed to be some reason to defend that. After talking to the police officers who have to deal with the child pornography issue on a daily basis, I guess I do not have the tolerance that others might. This material is repugnant. It is abhorrent. The failure to deal with the issue really touches at the heart of how the government views the people who are its citizens.

We need to take a look at a couple of questions. One of them is, when does human life begin? Although present law says that human life begins at birth, that is a ridiculous position from a scientific perspective, and it really is nonsense. I was reminded of that the other day when I saw one of the beer companies' advertisements. They had a picture of a fetus in the womb on their poster. The point that was made was “When you drink, she feels it”. I thought it was interesting that beer companies will accept the fact that fetuses and embryos are human beings but our government refuses to do that.

Clearly, I would suggest that the point at which being becomes human is when the union of the genetic material takes place and when we have the completion of the DNA package. Whether we want to embrace that or not, scientifically that is the only point where human life really begins.

Scientists have thrown out a couple of red herrings. One in particular is when they say that they have picked a 14 day period and after that 14 days is the arbitrary decision that now this is human life. That decision has not been based on science. It basically has been meant to avoid the scientific discussion and to stay away from the discussion of when does human life really begin.

I would suggest that scientists generally have failed the test of speaking clearly on when human life begins. Because of that, they run the risk of disqualifying themselves by not dealing honestly with this issue. It has become for many scientists more of an economic than a scientific or ethical decision. They want to have the open field. They want to have the free rein to run the experiments. They do not want to deal with the moral choices that need to be made so they try to avoid doing that at all costs. It is important that someone in the country address this issue and I would suggest that it is the responsibility of Parliament to deal seriously and decisively with it.

I think we can accept that human life is put together at conception when the DNA material is put together, but there is a second important question that needs to be asked. What is human life worth? Throughout history we have traditionally valued human life from its natural beginning. There has been much discussion of it over the years but most belief systems, most religions and most philosophies have accepted that until the last few years.

In places and times we have seen the devaluing of that idea and that value. I guess one of the prime examples would be Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany where there was a prevailing ideology that he set forth, and that was that not all people were worthy of living out their natural lives. He targeted particular groups. We know that he targeted racial groups, the weak, the handicapped, the visually identifiable groups and in lots of places skin colour and complexion was enough to be questioned and persecuted.

I am reminded of a saying that no one does what they think is wrong. We all justify our behaviour and we are prepared to do that. We need to remember that Hitler's focus was on genetics; it was just on a different stage of development. We need to be very careful where we go with this issue, with this bill and how we begin to treat other human beings and human life.

I want to talk a bit about what is the result of taking a low view of human life. If we cannot come to an agreement on what human life is worth, we will always have inevitable consequences from that. One thing that happens if we set a low view of human life and we do not say that human life is unique right from its beginning, is that we always devalue the defenceless and the ones who do not have a voice. I think we have begun to see this already in the Netherlands where many who are in hospitals do not even know that they are being euthanized. They do not have a voice. They do not have the ability or the strength to say no. Because of that they are not given the voice to say no.

As I mentioned, it seems there is an inability to deal with the child pornography issue. This government cannot bring itself to deal with the issue. It shows a willingness to live with a bad and I guess some people would call it an evil court decision. A casual attitude to human life begins to manifest itself in so many different areas and I hope we are not beginning to see that in our own country.

A casual attitude to human life also shows a willingness to assign different degrees of worth to different human beings. We had the issue a few years ago, and it will continue, with Tracy Latimer, the choice her father made to end her life and the government's uncomfortable silence about that issue. As we look at the issue of human life, I hope it will not progress to include others who have what some people would say no use in our society, and that is the handicapped and the elderly.

I know my time is running out and I will have an opportunity to speak to this issue later. However we need to reconsider what we do here, take it seriously and treat it very carefully as we move into this area and issue of what we do with human life.

[Agriculture, January 28th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, the minister has admitted that the APF is a failure. It will not meet its deadlines. He and his department have spent two years planning a new agriculture policy framework and the government is once again failing farmers.

Twenty-two farm organizations have written directly to the Prime Minister about their concerns about the APF. Farmers realize that the minister is wrecking NISA. Farmers fear they will be stuck again with CFIP in 2003 and they are facing reduced crop insurance coverage.

The minister knew years ago that these farm programs were ending and needed to be replaced. Yet he can still not get new programs in place. Why?

[Agriculture, January 28th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, here is another joke for the Liberal government. For three years the agriculture department has been in chaos. Programs are dysfunctional. The agriculture policy framework is a failure. Staff morale is at an all time low. This bureaucracy has completely failed agricultural producers.

Now we understand that this year's farm programs will be delayed by one year. There are only 10 weeks left until farming begins. What past unworkable program will the minister be dredging up and forcing farmers to endure in 2003?

[Criminal Code, January 27th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I suppose I am not surprised, but I am a bit ashamed to hear the NDP defending any presentation of child pornography.

I was surprised to hear the member comment that we have overly moralistic forces in our society that must be stopped in their attempts to prevent child pornography. He also mentioned a couple of times that he did not like Sharpe's work. However he said that genuine artistic merit must be protected. He also said that the risk of harming children must outweigh the benefits of the material if we outlaw it.

The minister told us this morning that the measure for checking whether the material would be illegal would be did it serve the public good. I would like the member to answer a couple of questions.

First, what part of child pornography does the member feel would serve the public good? Second, at the end he mentioned that the Canadian Civil Liberties Association seemed to think that child pornography was all right if it was made up. What are the member's views about video imaging, computer enhancement and the material that is on the Internet which does not portray children being abused but comes from people's imaginations; that is they make it up, put the material on the net and make it available to people? Does the member defend that as well?

[Petitions, December 13th, 2002]

Madam Speaker, I would like to present a petition on behalf of the member for Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke whose constituents from Eganville, Foresters Falls and Dacre request that Parliament recognize the Canadian Emergency Preparedness College is essential to training Canadians for emergency situations, that the facility should stay in Arnprior and that the government should upgrade the facilities in order to provide the necessary training to Canadians.