Garry Breitkreuz

[Criminal Code, June 19th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, a lot of statistics were cited and I wish I had time to go over each one.

The member made quite a point about police confiscating or getting a court order to remove 180 firearms from a residence. A key thing that the Liberals do, the Bloc does and some of the NDP members do is confuse registration and licensing. What we need and what the police would like is to have more resources to deal with this, but there is a difference between laying a piece of paper beside every gun in the country, which is gun registration, which is what we are dealing with in this legislation, and the licensing of every firearms owner.

The courts have made over 200,000 prohibition orders in this country but they are never enforced. Why? Because the police do not have the resources at this point to do it.

If the member were in government, which he is not, he would have to make the decision on the best way to spend our money: do we put $1 billion into a paper pushing exercise that does not affect the criminal, or do we put it into enforcing the laws of this country, such as prohibition orders? Why do we not have more police to check the people who are not supposed to own firearms? That to me seems logical.

I want to quote what a former provincial Liberal candidate had to say. By the way, Brian Ford was the Ottawa Police chief and he was upset. This is from the Ottawa Sun of May 17, 2006:

Ottawa's former top cop says he supported the gun registry because he didn't know the Liberals were lying to him. "I was assured by government -- it's on budget"—

The budget was $2 million and it has gone 500 times over budget. He publicly supported the registry as chairman of a Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police committee. He said, “They were lying to me. It bothers me. I was telling people what I believed was the truth”.

That is what we need to have come out. We do not need all this rhetoric, theorizing and explanation about how it might work.

I want to refute something else the member said, that gun control is working in some countries. England went to very strict gun controls recently to the point where it banned all handguns. Gun crime has increased. One cannot simply implement these laws and say that passing the law is going to work. We have effective laws in this country. People are not allowed to carry handguns. Let us start putting police on the street to—

[Criminal Code, June 19th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, that question strikes to the very heart of what has been happening with regard to this over the last decade or more.

Politics has overridden factually based evidence. The previous government was successful in creating the impression that this was somehow gun control when in fact it was not. The gun registry was not gun control, yet that government could get votes in the cities from people who took the Liberals at their word. Because of the words they used, people felt that might be the case.

What we need to do is get back to legislation that is based on effective crime control. I think the Auditor General is the key person who could help us in this.

The country of New Zealand, I will point out, tried to go down this road and about a decade ago scrapped its gun registry. It had no effect on crime in that country. New Zealand saw that and did away with it, yet we are still trying to promote something that is not a tool that will affect criminals in any way. As my colleague has pointed out, the police know this very well.

[Criminal Code, June 19th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the question. It almost answers itself, but the key point is that this registry and the licensing affect only law-abiding citizens, people who are trying to comply with the law. My hon. colleague has pointed out, I think adequately, that people are frustrated with the fact that they cannot do what they would like to do and lawfully use their property.

It has no effect on the criminal. In fact, that is the key problem. We are spending so many resources on a paper-pushing exercise and creating a huge bureaucracy when in fact if we were to ask police what they would like to see, they would say they need more police on the streets in the right areas, combating criminals, gangs and drugs. That is what they want.

Coming back to the question that was asked of me previous to this one, the amnesty does not waive the law. The legislation we are dealing with today is what will repeal that law.

[Criminal Code, June 19th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to lead off on this debate because of all the work I have done on this file in exposing the fraud that was perpetrated on Canadians and the impression that it was somehow gun control when in fact the gun registry was not gun control.

Let me begin with some of the opening comments that my colleague from the Bloc has raised. First, the member said that one of the charges I made was that the firearms registry is not reliable.

Approximately seven million guns out of all the firearms in Canada have been registered in the system. How many firearms are there in this country? A reliable estimate indicates that the minimum number is 16.5 million. If seven million have been registered and at a minimum there are 16.5 million in the country, and probably closer to 20 million, we have barely scratched the surface.

I will let that sink in for members here. If we are trying to put a piece of paper beside every gun in the country, we have barely begun, and this at a cost of approximately $2 billion. So how can the registry be reliable? The police want a tool that will be effective. It is not effective when only a fraction of the guns have been registered.

I can explain how these numbers were achieved, with import and export numbers, the number of guns manufactured in the country, and a reliable estimate by the justice department before all of this was put in place.

The Auditor General also pointed out, and I think my hon. colleague knows this, that 90% of registrations had errors, so what happens if the police go to a system like this and let it in any way affect what they do? I do not think there is a policeman in this country who will allow this registry to affect what the police do.

When the police go to a home, they do not trust any of the information they pick up on their CPIC system, their computer system, because of what the Auditor General said, which is that 90% of registrations have problems. Police want effective tools that will help them in their fight against crime.

[Criminal Code, June 19th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to be able to lead off the debate on Bill C-21. I have been waiting 12 years for this day. That is when we started putting an end to the Liberals' infamous $2 billion boondoggle on the firearms program. This is the day we start to dismantle Bill C-68 and return our gun laws to the way they were in 1995.

There was no evidence that those gun control laws were effective, but at least they were only costing taxpayers $12.8 million a year, not $100 million. This is the day we start putting an end to the Liberal gun control laws that do not work, do not save lives, do not reduce violent crime, do not improve public safety and do not keep guns out of the hands of criminals.

Finally, this is the day we start putting in place weapons control laws that have been proven statistically to save lives, to reduce violent crime, to improve public safety and to help to keep deadly weapons out of the hands of criminals.

I want to warn Canadians of the blather they are going to hear from the other parties on this issue, likely today. Their gun control proposals sound too good to be true and they are. They may sound good, but they are not sound policies. Policies that are driven strictly by emotions may actually do more harm than good. They may divert resources away from more useful endeavours. Emotions may encourage us to act to solve a problem, but they can be harmful if they make us act irrationally. Because Bill C-68 was not based on factual evidence, it has done more harm than good.

I intend today to expose that flaw in our response to crime in Canada. Canadians need gun control policies that are effective as well as cost effective, but Liberals have not let logic, facts and truth get in the way of a good sound bite or a scary political advertisement at election time. The truth is they want votes more than they want effective gun laws and this is hurting our nation.

This is not a right versus left issue on the political spectrum. It is a right versus wrong issue to crime control.

Let us start with the colossal overspending by the Liberals on implementing the Firearms Act. On April 24, 1995 then justice minister Allan Rock appeared before the Standing Committee on Justice and promised Parliament and the Canadian taxpayers that implementing the Firearms Act would cost $2.2 million over five years.

On May 17, 2006 the Auditor General of Canada reported that the Liberals had spent more than a billion tax dollars over 12 years to implement that program, and guess what? It is still not completely implemented.

In a letter to me dated June 15, 2006, the Auditor General confirmed that her audit of the firearms program costs did not include enforcement costs, compliance costs, economic costs, and unreported indirect costs to other departments. She also confirmed that the Liberal government's cost benefit analysis of the firearms program and the Liberals' 115 page economic impact study are still cabinet secrets as they have been since 2003 and 1999 respectively. So we still do not know the real costs.

In his 1993 report, the previous auditor general, Denis Desautels, criticized the government for moving forward with new gun control regulations without “important data, needed to assess the potential benefits and future effectiveness of the regulations”, and recommended, “it is essential that the Department of Justice evaluate the effectiveness of the program again”. But it never did.

Political posturing overrode common sense. Mr. Desautels' findings 12 years ago seem very similar to Auditor General Sheila Fraser's report in May 2006. Paragraph 4.36 of her report states:

In particular, the Centre has not set any performance targets and has provided few examples of its outcomes. Instead of reporting the key results achieved, the Centre describes its activities and services.

Paragraph 4.38 added:

The Centre does not show how these activities help minimize risks to public safety with evidence-based outcomes such as reduced deaths, injuries, and threats from firearms.

That quotation is the most important part of my speech because it exposes the tactics used by those that defend the gun registry. This appalling lack of evidence of effectiveness was also confirmed by the Liberal government's response to order paper question No. 19 on November 29, 2004. Statistics Canada's statement was in bold text and underlined that the specific impact of the firearms program or the firearms registry cannot be isolated from other factors.

In fact, their own statistical evidence proves that the Liberal gun control policies and programs have been a dismal failure. Last December the Library of Parliament obtained a special set of tables for me from Statistics Canada showing firearms related statistics for the total number of homicides committed in Canada between 1997 and 2005.

Consider these Statistics Canada findings: Of the 5,194 homicides committed between 1997 and 2005, only 118, or 2.27%, were committed with a registered gun. Of the 5,194 homicides committed between 1997 and 2005, only 63, or 1.21%, were committed with a firearm registered to the accused murderer. Of the 5,194 homicides committed between 1997 and 2005, only 111, or 2.14%, were committed by a person who held a valid firearms licence. Of the two million licensed gun owners in Canada, only 111, that is 0.00555%, used their firearm to murder somebody.

This analysis shows what almost everyone in Canada knows, with the exception of the opposition parties in this House, that criminals do not register their guns and cannot be bothered to qualify for a firearms licence. Sadly, these statistics prove the main point I have been making for the last 12 years, that laying a piece of paper beside a gun does not prevent it from being used to murder someone. These statistics represent a failure of gun registration and gun owner licensing as cost effective measures to save lives, improve public safety or keep firearms out of the hands of people who should not have them.

On November 8, 2006 Statistics Canada released its 2005 homicide report. Here are some of the highlights which show that criminals are the real problem, not the type of weapons they use against their victims. There are two things to keep in mind as I read the highlights from the StatsCan report. Number one, the RCMP have been registering handguns since 1934 and fully automatic firearms, sawed off rifles and shotguns have been banned for decades. Number two, in 1995 when the Liberals passed Bill C-68 they banned some 555,000 handguns and required the licensing of all gun owners and the registration of all rifles and shotguns.

Two billion dollars later, this is the result according to Statistics Canada in 2005: We have the highest homicide rate in nearly a decade. The firearm homicide rate is the same as it was 20 years ago. Sixty-six per cent of murders in 2005 were committed without a firearm; 58% of the firearms homicides were committed with handguns; 9% were committed with banned fully automatic firearms, sawed off rifles and shotguns; and only 30% of recovered firearms were registered.

Here are the more relevant homicide statistics that parliamentarians should be focused on: Sixty-four per cent of the accused murderers had a criminal record, 6% for homicide. I have to ask what were these people doing back on the street? Seventy-three per cent of the accused murderers had been drinking or on drugs. Thirteen per cent of the accused murderers were mentally ill; 45% of the murders occurred while the accused were committing another crime; and 22% of murder victims were involved in illegal activities.

Let us turn to an example of the opposition parties using false statistics in an attempt to keep our government from replacing useless gun control laws with truly effective ones. That is why we are here today.

In June 2006 the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security debated a Bloc motion calling for the retention of the long gun registry. A number of opposition MPs repeatedly quoted a statistic to justify their defence of the gun registry. The researchers in the Library of Parliament later proved there was no evidence to support their claims. They claimed “71% of the firearms assaults perpetrated against women involved long guns”. That is a false statistic. The Library of Parliament researcher could not find the source for that statistic but she did find two different sets of statistics to contradict it. The researcher reported:

With regard to your request concerning statistics presented during the 8th meeting of the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security, specifically the statement that 71% of firearms assaults perpetrated against women involve long guns (rifle and shotgun), compared to 29% of the assaults perpetrated against men, I have not been able to find the source of these statistics.

I do not have time to read the whole Library of Parliament quotation, but it clearly notes that the number was not 71%. It was 17.1%. Those were misleading statistics by the opposition. While we deplore domestic violence regardless of the type of weapons used, there are far more effective measures the federal government could take up to help spouses living in violent households.

While doing research on domestic violence, we keep finding news stories about women's shelters not being able to accommodate abused women showing up at their doorsteps. The Library of Parliament sent me the most recent statistics Canada reports on shelters for abused women that showed the tragic truth ignored by the Liberals for years: “On the snapshot day, about one-fifth of all shelters referred about 221 women and 112 children elsewhere. Two-thirds of those referrals were made because shelters were full. Eight in ten abused women in shelters were there to escape a current or former spouse common law partner”.

While the Liberals were wasting over a billion tax dollars on the gun registry over the last 10 years, hundreds of women and children were being turned away from women's shelters every day. I do not need to remind the House of the massive cuts to social transfer payments to the provinces that were made by the previous Liberal government during the 1990s.

Another analysis of domestic violence just completed by the Library's parliamentary research branch showed spousal homicides committed each year have remained virtually unchanged over the last 10 years. The futility of it all is driven home by the fact that 70% of the women murdered by a family member over the last 10 years were murdered with something other than a firearm. These domestic violence reports expose 10 years of Liberal deception on the firearms file.

Women should be outraged that they were treated so shoddily when one of the solutions to combat family violence was obvious and blatantly ignored for so many years.

If we were telling people the truth, they would be telling us that helping abused women is more important than simply laying a piece of paper beside our guns, but then the opposition parties will claim that the police use the system thousands of times a day. Members have likely heard that claim.

Here is what the Auditor General, Sheila Fraser, said on May 31, 2006, when she appeared before the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security:

I believe that the indicator of the 5,000 hits a day is more of what we call an activity indicator than an indicator of effectiveness. So those law enforcement people who use the registry would have to give an assessment as to whether or not it was useful to them.

There could be 5,000 hits, and they could say, yes, it was very helpful and helped me in this way; or they could say, no, it wasn't helpful because the information wasn't correct. It takes an additional degree of interpretation or information to assess effectiveness.

Members will understand why I say we should have the Auditor General audit firearms law to see if it is cost effective. That is what we should be doing.

Here is what the RCMP commissioner said on June 7, 2006, when he appeared before the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security:

They're automatic CPIC checks that they automatically go over. I don't have the number of how many are direct checks.

Guess what? The Liberals have known this deceptive statistic for a very long time and yet chose not to be upfront and honest with Parliament or the Canadian people.

On December 3, 2004, the then registrar of firearms emailed the then director of public policy with the Canada Firearms Centre and said, “In sum, CFRO”, the gun registry, “is indeed automatically queried in many cases when police officers query CPIC”, meaning the police computer system.

This email from the firearms interest police coordinator to the registrar of firearms states:

Note that the CFRO auto query of addresses is based on any valid address query response returned through their Intergraph System query. This means that if a parking ticket had a valid address and was returned...the Intergraph System, it would generate a CFRO address query.

This quote is from a young RCMP officer in my riding who was told by his superiors to stop sending requests to the gun registry before attending domestic disputes because he was “putting his life in danger”. The reason, he was told, was that “the usual 'no guns' response to his query 'creates a false sense of security'”.

It may surprise many MPs on the other side that the majority of front line police officers do not support the gun registry nor do they use it. Why should they, when it is so full of errors?

In December 2005, I released Liberal government documents showing that the number of unverified firearms in the gun registry had increased from 5.1 million to 5.6 million over the last two and a half years, and there are only seven million firearms in the registry. The more millions wasted, the further they fell behind. So much for the Canadian Police Association's resolutions in 1999 and 2004 demanding that data entered in the gun registry be “verified as accurate”.

Other Canadian Police Association demands from 1999 that have not been met are as follows: that the Auditor General of Canada conduct a thorough review of the firearms registration system and release a public report on the findings to the people of Canada; that the CPA receive confirmation that the registration system has the capacity to meet the legislative timeframes established for firearms registration; that the CPA receive confirmation that the cost recovery plan for registration can be achieved; that meaningful consultations with the user group take place to ensure that the concerns of stakeholders are addressed in the review process; and that the CPA receive confirmation that the implementation and operation of the system is not taking officers off the street.

It is unfortunate that we are playing politics with public safety.

Now let us get to the meat of Bill C-21, our government's first step toward implementing our party's firearms and property rights policies passed by our delegates in Montreal in March of 2005.

Our firearms policy states:

A Conservative government will repeal Canada's costly gun registry legislation and work with the provinces and territories on cost-effective gun control programs designed to keep guns out of the hands of criminals while respecting the rights of law-abiding Canadians to own and use firearms responsibly. Measures will include: mandatory minimum sentences for the criminal use of firearms; strict monitoring of high-risk individuals; crackdown on the smuggling; safe storage provisions; firearms safety training; a certification screening system for all those wishing to acquire firearms legally; and putting more law enforcement officers on our streets.

I support Bill C-21 because it is the first step toward fixing all that is wrong with Canada's gun control laws. Getting this bill through second reading will get it into committee where the truth can finally be uncovered and we can start building evidence based and truly cost effective measures to control the criminal use of all weapons, not just guns.

Legislation is seldom perfect. Many people support the gun registry because they think it is gun control. I challenge everyone to look below the surface on this issue and not form an opinion based on a superficial impression that some may have created. The long gun registry does not enhance public safety and that is why it should be repealed.

I appreciate the opportunity—

[Committees of the House, June 4th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I have the honour to present, in both official languages, the 10th report of the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security, entitled “Counterfeit Goods in Canada--A Threat to Public Safety”.

Counterfeiting and piracy are having a very negative effect on the Canadian economy. Many Canadian jobs are being lost and organized crime is reaping huge benefits. Almost everything imaginable is being counterfeited, from extension cords to clothes, medication and children's toys. This threat to the health and safety of all Canadians needs to be dealt with immediately because it is not just an economic issue.

This report that I am tabling makes a number of recommendations to the government. Hopefully, it is an issue that will receive prompt attention, legislation and support for our law enforcement and border security. A summary of our work at the standing committee is contained in the report.

I would like to thank all the committee members from every political party for their contributions and help in investigating this important issue, and in making the recommendations in the report. The cooperation I received makes it a pleasure to chair this committee. It has been a pleasure to work with all of the people on the committee from every political party. They have all made an important contribution.

As members know, most of our work here in Parliament is done at the committees, so it is an honour for me to submit this report.

[Property Rights, May 17th, 2007]

It's completely devalued.

[Property Rights, May 17th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to address Motion No. 315.

This will be the last speech I will deliver that Dennis Young in my office has helped me prepare. I want to publicly say that I will greatly miss him, as will the Conservative Party and Canadians right across Canada. I will miss the tremendous work he has been doing and the fantastic research he has put together on countless issues for almost 14 years. He has helped me prepare many speeches over these years. I will miss him greatly and I thank him very much.

I will begin by thanking the hon. member for Niagara West—Glanbrook for introducing this motion. As everyone knows, property rights were intentionally left out of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It was a big mistake and now this House has an another chance to correct this major oversight.

I say that we have another opportunity or chance to change this because since 1983 property rights bills and motions have been debated 10 times in this House. I know that because five of those debates were on private members' bills or motions that I introduced. Sadly, Conservative MP John Reimer's property rights motion of 1987 was the only one that was passed by this House.

Now that China has put property rights in its constitution, I believe it is time for us to do the same. This is why I support Motion No. 315. And the vast majority of Canadians agree.

In 2005, the Canadian Real Estate Association commissioned an extensive survey involving almost 10,000 respondents. Ninety-two per cent of the telephone respondents thought it was important that the government fairly compensate property owners if their property was expropriated. Eighty-eight per cent thought it was important for the government to fairly compensate property owners if restrictions were imposed on how their property was used.

I am sure many Canadians are asking: “But doesn't that already happen?” Sadly, it does not.

We just need ask the grain farmers in the prairie provinces who grow their own wheat and barley but still cannot sell their grain to the highest bidder. When they try to take their grain across the border because they cannot sell it in this country, the federal government throws them in jail just for trying to sell their own crops. This is a fundamental economic freedom that grain producers in Ontario and Quebec take for granted, but not out west. By the way, the court challenges program has not helped these people one bit and all the examples that I will cite have not helped.

We just need to ask farmers who have had their land taken out of production by the Species at Risk Act. This federal law does not even guarantee them to be compensated for their own loss at fair market value.

We just need to ask the tens of thousands of law-abiding gun owners who have had their legally registered firearms banned, completely devalued by Bill C-68 in 1995. These owners never did anything wrong or unsafe with their property and yet it was banned anyway. They have also been denied permits so that they cannot even enjoy their property at the range. They have been denied compensation for the loss and value of their property, many of which are family heirlooms. In the case of a few hundred owners of section 12(6) handguns, the government is taking them to court because they want to register their firearms but the law that was passed, Bill C-10A, by the previous government was never implemented fast enough to take effect.

Finally, we just need to ask the 30,000 mentally disabled war veterans who were denied payment of the millions of dollars of interest on their pension benefits by the federal government when they lost their case before the Supreme Court of Canada in July 2003.

The Supreme Court ruled in favour of the government's amendment to the Veterans Affairs Act by stating:

Parliament has the right to expropriate property, even without compensation, if it has made its intention clear and, in s. 5.1(4), Parliament's expropriative intent is clear and unambiguous.

The Supreme Court went on to say:

Lastly, while substantive rights may stem from due process, the Bill of Rights does not protect against the expropriation of property by the passage of unambiguous legislation.

At that time I asked: “If property rights guarantees in the Canadian Bill of Rights do not protect an individual's fundamental property rights, what good are they?”

Proper constitutional protection of property rights by amending section 7 of the charter, as proposed by my hon. colleague, would prevent all of the above injustices.

It would also prevent a colossal waste of time and money by our citizens and by the federal government. It would also go a long way to protect the environment because people take far better care of our land and resources than the government ever has or ever will.

Section 7 of the charter states:

Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.

Section 7 needs to be amended to include property rights because the right to life and the right to property go hand in hand. We cannot have one without the other.

I urge all members of this House to support this motion, so that we can give Parliament the opportunity to fix one of the major flaws in our Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The Prime Minister spoke in December of last year in favour of adding property rights to the Constitution. However, if it were passed by this House, we would still need the approval of seven provinces and 50% of the population. It is not an easy thing to do, but it is high time we approve this and start that process.

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms came into force on April 17, 1982, and as has been mentioned, we marked the 25th anniversary of this. A striking omission is the absence of the right to own and use property, and that is why I would like to give the House three reasons why this must be included.

First, property rights are crucial for the building of a just and prosperous nation. The right to own property, to enjoy one's property, and the right not to be unfairly deprived of one's property, is fundamental to a free and democratic society. Property rights are essential to a Canadian way of life, to political freedom and autonomy, and to a well-functioning economy. These protections in themselves are not enough.

If property rights are essential for the well-being of our economy and our way of life, why do they have so little protection? The Bill of Rights is second best and it has been referred to already. We need to include these in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Second, property rights have been at the centre of the human rights movement from the beginning. Since the 17th century, people have understood that the right to own and use property is necessary for political freedom.

After the English civil wars, John Locke famously argued that the rights to life, liberty and property were natural, inalienable rights, and if the state was to have legitimacy in the eyes of the people, it had to secure these rights.

People are disillusioned with government today. One of the ways we can correct that is by adding these to the charter, so their rights will not be run over roughshod by government.

Against this background, the charter appears to be an anomaly. As a document that guarantees rights and freedoms in a free and democratic society, its silence about property rights is clearly an omission that has to be corrected.

There is a third reason why the absence of property rights in the charter is an omission. Property rights were originally supposed to be in the charter. Early drafts of the charter naturally included the protection of property rights. This is what we would expect in any bill of rights. The Conservative Party at that time supported including these property rights in the charter. I could go on and explain many other things that we need to do in regard to this.

I am hoping that all members in this House will not be distracted by some of the things that I have heard here in the last hour. We need to focus on property rights, why they are important, why they need to be included in the charter, and then work together to try to accomplish this.

I appeal to all members to have an open mind on this and not listen to some of the distractions that I have heard already in these arguments.

[Dennis Young, May 15th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I regret to announce the retirement of my long-time legislative assistant, Dennis Young, from Parliament Hill.

Dennis and I have worked side by side since I was elected to Parliament in 1993. He is the most faithful and hard-working assistant that a member of Parliament could ever hope to find.

Dennis used his creativity every day on every file. He processed and analyzed more than 550 access to information requests. His research exposed the $2 billion gun registry fiasco. With his tenacity and highest of principles, Dennis has values that will not be compromised.

Firearms owners owe Dennis Young a huge debt for his relentless battle on behalf of real public safety and property rights. His legacy in Ottawa includes the popular parliamentary outdoors caucus and serving as a political beacon for the people of Yorkton—Melville.

I thank my friend for being the best strategic partner one could ever ask for. Lydia and I will keep Dennis and Hazel in our prayers as they head west for a well deserved retirement. God bless Dennis. I will miss him.

[Criminal Code, May 3rd, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I commend the member on what he had to say.

I want to make a point and see if he agrees with me. I am going to cite a special case in my constituency. The point that I think needs to be made is that sometimes we MPs forget that delaying legislative changes such as this may cost lives and/or allow deplorable situations to exist.

I do not know if the member is familiar with the case in my riding that was covered nationally on the news. In fact, it was covered on The Verdict, a CTV program. It involved a man who tried to rescue his daughter from the influence of her boyfriend, a drug pusher. That man, Kim Walker, is now serving a life sentence in prison.

We have to wonder if the situation would have turned out differently if the police and authorities could have intervened earlier. If the bill that we are debating today would have been in place, the age of consent possibly would have allowed the police and others to rescue this particular youth, Jadah Walker, from an abusive relationship.

We have many other youth in Canada involved in these abusive relationships where men take advantage of young girls and boys. In the Kim and Jadah Walker affair, we had a father who was desperate and we now have a man who is dead. Jadah said that she too would have been dead if something had not been done.

I have listened to the discussion here today, but I think it is about time to consider the victims of these abusive relationships where older adults take advantage of vulnerable girls and boys. The Kim and Jadah Walker case may have turned out very differently if this law had been in place.

For those who do not think we have a problem, I think they need to take a closer look at what is happening. There are other things that need to be changed in the system as well, I grant that, but there are problems within the system which indicate that this bill would be a good start in fixing them.

I have written to the attorney general of Saskatchewan about this case. I do not expect the member to know the details of it, but I have asked the attorney general to review this case to see what changes need to be made to the system. A tragedy like this one can be pre-empted. Changing the age of consent to 16 is a good start.

If the member has any comments, I would appreciate hearing them.