Mr. Speaker, I listened to some of the speeches regarding Bill C-22. I must admit that the speeches I heard are similar but do have some major differences. I listened closely to the speech by my colleagues from Vancouver East and Calgary Northeast. The member for Calgary Northeast was a police detective and worked with my uncle for several years.I know how important law and order are to him.
However, while listening to the speech by my colleague from Vancouver East, I realized that, although we support this bill, there are certain points that should lead us to ask some hard questions as to some of its provisions.
I concur with what my colleague said earlier that setting the age of consent for anal sex at 18 is very discriminatory. Why are we attempting to protect boys until they are 18 years old and girls until they are 16? That makes no sense and is ridiculous. Is there a difference in how children are affected by unwanted sexual relations based on the victim's sex or whether the relationship was heterosexual or homosexual?I believe that unwanted sexual relations are abusive sexual relations and cause a great deal of harm. I do not understand why there is a difference.
At my age, 57, we have come a long way from when we believed that we could become pregnant by kissing our boyfriend. When I was very young, I kissed my first boyfriend. I felt so guilty that I did not want to talk about it to anyone. We did not talk about sex back then. We did not talk about it in 1960 and we still do not in 2007.
It is the responsibility of the adults who look after and are close to our young people—their parents and teachers—to teach them about sex, give them information, and make them aware of their sexuality.
Even today, sexuality is a very taboo subject. We speak very little about the sexuality of older persons. You might say that we do not want to admit that older persons—our parents and grandparents—have sexual relations. Yet, the best seniors' residences are those that allow older persons to have sexual relations. Just because we become older does not mean that we stop having feelings and sensations.
Unfortunately, sex has always been looked on as something dirty, something that people should do only for procreation or for momentary pleasure. In addition, very little is said about homosexual sex. Very little is said about children's sexuality. Very little is said about the sexuality of persons with disabilities. Yet they too have a sex life and are entitled to one.
We do not talk enough about sex with our children. We are reluctant to talk to them about it. In my opinion, it is not good to perpetuate such taboos and avoid talking frankly with our children about sex. It is very important to talk about it.
When we hear that children are being lured over the Internet, when we see children in hotels or restaurants with much older people, we wonder how these children could have fallen into the trap, how they could have been lured by someone who used the Internet to tell them all sorts of things that were not true. It happens everywhere.
I always monitor the websites my grandson visits. I have custody of my 14 year old grandson, and this is extremely important to me. I talk to him about sex, the dangers of the Internet and what life is really like, because I love him and I want him to become a young adult who behaves responsibly in his relationships with his friends. I want him to become someone who takes responsibility not only for his sexual activity but in all aspects of his life. I often talk to him about these dangers, and I check the sites he visits. I ask Alexis who he is chatting with, what he is doing, who someone is. He always tells me that I am worrying for nothing.
Last week, he came home on the weekend and told me that one of his friends had been approached online by someone who wanted to meet him. At that point, my grandson realized that there were dangers out there. His friend could not confide in adults and asked Alexis what he should do. He told Alexis that this person had asked to meet him somewhere. Alexis told him, “Call the police, call the authorities and tell your parents”. He said that because that is what I have taught him.
We are the primary instruments in educating our children so they know what to do when they are being harassed, when they are being approached by people who want to have sexual relations with them without their consent.
It is quite clear that, when it comes to a bill that will set the age of consent at 16 years, we sometimes ask why this is the case. I understand that, for my colleague from Vancouver East, this may seem quite sanctimonious and it is probably that reason that led the party that introduced this bill to want to have it passed. It is rather its philosophy, its thinking, its ideology that are quite different.
In this regard, I remind the House that we must be very careful not to fall into any traps. Indeed, as we see in the United States, the people who are the most conservative are quite often those who are the most guilty of excesses. We see this presently with Mrs. D.C, with a committee chairman and with some political figures who are being forced to resign from their positions. We saw a little earlier that another member of the Republican Party also had to resign because he was making overtures to young pages who were working for him. I do not see anyone doing this here, although our pages are quite good-looking. I am very happy that our young pages, who work so hard and so well to make our task easier, do not have to suffer such affronts.
Legislation should not be made only to maintain morality. When bills are written, we must be careful to protect the people for whom they are written. We have decided to support this bill, because we have managed, in spite of it all, to have included in the bill some measures that will limit the negative effects that it might have on some people.
I was saying that my grandson is 14. Right now, his girlfriends are the same age. However, he is 5 foot 9. He is a tall, well built, handsome young man. No doubt when he goes dancing on Friday nights, girls 15, 16 or 17 try to attract his attention. He looks older than he is. However, when someone looks like a 16 or 17 year old, that does not mean that he or she has the mindset that goes with that look or that he or she has the intellectual abilities of a 15, 16 or 17 year old.
So, I agree that we must adopt legislation to offer some protection, but we must be careful to make them fair for everybody. When my colleague from Vancouver East said that the bill would forbid anal sex between men or women 18 years old I did not understand. I was flabbergasted.
I think that we must go to the source of the problem. If we take a hard look at today's society, we realize that our children are not more sexually informed than us at their age. However, schools give sex education courses and have been doing so for many years in Quebec. Unfortunately, due to the cuts in federal transfers to provinces, services and courses for students have been reduced. Among other things, sex education courses were transformed into moral issues courses and that was detrimental to our children because they no longer know what to think and they must learn about sex through books, the Internet and the phone.
As I mentioned earlier, I look after my grandson. For me, his sexual life is part of his whole being. A few weeks ago, I took him with me to buy condoms. He was embarrassed and said: “Grandma, the parents of the other kids at school do not do that. What I am going to look like?” I replied: “You will look like a young man who wants to learn how to protect himself and the young woman or the young man with whom he is going to have sexual relations. This is what you will look like. You will look like a responsible person. Indeed, the fact that you love someone with whom you are in a relationship is not going to protect you from sexually transmitted diseases, or prevent you from transmitting such diseases.”
Now that he understands that, he has asked me if I would also inform his friends. I told him: “No, grandma does not want to become an agency that talks about and provides information on sexual relations. I informed you. Now, go and tell your friends that they should get that information at home, because it is important.”
As parents we have a duty to properly assume that responsibility. Let us stop burying our heads in the sand, and let us see the obvious.
Currently, there is a hypersexualization phenomenon throughout the world, among our young women and men, in the TV messages and on the Internet. Everything we see is hypersexualized, including messages that make us think in sexual terms as soon as we see them. It is not our children or pedophiles who are responsible for this. It is the agencies that come up with these messages.
All this needs to be re-evaluated by our society. How do we want to deal with our children? How do we want them to behave in life? How do we want them to view and understand sexuality? Sexuality is something that is good and wonderful, something that each person has the fundamental right to experience. It is something personal. By interfering with a person's sexuality, we could create a monster.
Therefore, we should not pass too many bills to prevent people from fully experiencing their sexuality, because it is a fundamental right. We are all born with sexual urges. Little children take great pleasure in touching themselves, and this is normal.
When I was young, I was taught by nuns. I remember them telling us that we had to sleep with our hands above the covers and not wash ourselves in the bathtub. At the time, there were no showers. We were not allowed to put our hands in the water to wash our lower bodies. That was prohibited. We had to use a washcloth and do it very quickly. We were not supposed to spend a lot of time on those parts even though those were probably the parts we would have wanted to spend the most time on because it felt good to clean them. I should point out that young people do not really like washing themselves.
This is why I say yes to bills that protect our young people, but we have to be careful not to go too far in trying to protect them. We must not protect them from themselves. We must protect them from people who want to hurt them and attack them.
We are trying to punish pedophiles and stop people from attacking our youth. We want to stop them from hurting our youth. We are not trying to stop our 12, 14, 16 or 18 year olds from exploring their sexuality because that is how they will become whole human beings and be able to smile as they walk down the street.
Too many of the people in this House do not smile enough. Perhaps that is because their sexuality is unfulfilled. If people were more comfortable with their sexuality, maybe they would smile more. Many of my colleagues smile often, but too many of them never smile. I would like to wish everyone here a fulfilling sex life. To ensure that our young people have the opportunity to develop their sexuality, we must protect their right to grow up without being attacked by people who want to hurt them.
