Mr. Speaker, I should say at the outset that I intend to split my time with the member for Ottawa Centre.
I am glad to be able to participate in this debate on Bill C-26. I said earlier in the question and comment period that I appreciated both the tone and the content of most of the speeches and remarks made today, given the gravity of the subject matter and the obvious unanimous condemnation, by all parties and all members of Parliament, of this sort of activity. There can be no doubt that we genuinely want to do the best job that we humanly can to stop this kind of activity and to do all we can to pass good legislation.
Much of the bill deals with sentencing and I want to start with that in my remarks. We know that sentencing is an art as much as a science. It is a real challenge for judges to achieve the balance of the three things that sentencing seeks to do. In the first case, it is to punish bad behaviour, obviously. The public demands and is justified in demanding that perpetrators be punished. Sentences usually are and should be crafted and measured in such a way as to accurately reflect the degree of public condemnation for the nature of the offence. In this case, there could be no higher condemnation of the public.
The third and perhaps most critical element of sentencing is to deter and stop the practice. Hopefully, the sentence is significant enough that people will think twice before they risk undertaking this abhorrent practice, for fear of the punishment. However, that is where it becomes really sticky with this particular type of offence, because the psychiatric profession considers pedophilia to be a psychological disorder. I am not sure a pedophile, someone who is engaged in child sexual abuse, makes a rational choice of, “I had better not do this or else I am going to go to jail for 6 months, 9 months, 18 months, 10 years”. I am not sure reason and logic enter into it with a person who has this appalling disorder.
That is not to say that everyone who engages in child sexual abuse is a pedophile or has a psychological disorder. Some do, such as the most offensive types of business people who are selling and marketing the product of child pornography. That, I agree, we not only have to denounce and put a significant deterrent in place, but also punish thoroughly and without reservation.
Part of this bill, as I read it, gives the judge greater direction, I suppose, and in fact takes away the discretion of a judge in dealing with concurrent sentencing versus consecutive sentencing. In thinking this through, and staying with the example of child pornography, there is more than one offence associated with the production and distribution of this product, so to speak.
The actual assault on the child, of course, is a crime and warrants a strict sentence; the documenting of it, making a film of it or taping it, is a crime in and of itself; and then broadcasting and publishing the documented assault is a third crime. Therefore, there are really three criminal offences wrapped into the one act, as the law currently stands. I believe it is section 163.1 in the Criminal Code. These could be treated as one single offence and one sentence or three sentences to be served concurrently rather than consecutively.
In my view, and we will see if it gets amended or commented on during the committee stage, I do not disagree that it is reasonable to consider all three of these assaults as warranting their own punishment applied. One might say the same if there are multiple children involved. It could be perhaps 10 separate crimes with 10 individual children. I think the argument is warranted to make it a concurrent and not a consecutive issue.
While I have the floor, I want to recognize and pay tribute to a woman from Winnipeg named Rosalind Prober, who is the president and founder of an organization called Beyond Borders. This organization was founded in 1996, and she has been a tireless champion for the protection of children, both domestically and abroad. Her organization, Beyond Borders, is the Canadian arm of an international NGO based in Bangkok called ECPAT, End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes. It was Rosalind Prober who pushed for the first sex tourism laws in 1996, when Lloyd Axworthy was the foreign affairs minister. At the time, she appeared before committees saying that sex crimes of this nature against children, committed by Canadians, should be extraterritorial. In other words, the laws of Canada should and must apply to Canadian citizens as they travel abroad.
That was a breakthrough. That was almost a sea change in the mindset of Canadians, bringing awareness to the fact that sex tourism to exploit children was becoming a growing international problem. I am very proud that it offended the sensibilities of Canadians to such a degree that we expanded our domestic laws to apply to Canadians travelling abroad. It has not always worked. I have a number of examples where even the laws we have in place regarding this have failed to deter some fairly egregious examples, but I will not go into those here today, because there is no benefit.
As Bill C-26 stands, I am glad the NDP's justice critic said at the outset that we are going to support the bill to get it to committee. I think it warrants it. It deserves it. We owe it to our children to pull out all the stops and do all we can to pass the best laws possible to protect them.
I point out that the Minister of Justice, in introducing the bill, when he appeared before the justice committee, pointed out that sexual offences against children had increased 6% over the last two years. This is in spite of a number of measures taken since 2006. This Conservative government, in three parliaments, in 2006, 2008, 2011, implemented the Safe Streets and Communities Act, mandated aggravated assault where the child is under 16 years of age, made it illegal to provide sexually explicit material to a child, and raised the age of protection from 14 to 16 years of age. There are about 10 or 15 legislative changes to the Criminal Code regarding the protection of children and doing our best to stop the sexual exploitation of children, yet the minister claims that there is a 6% increase over the last two years.
We really have to look at the efficacy of the efforts made to date, and it is not unreasonable to question, then, the efficacy of the proposals put forward in Bill C-26, because frankly, everything we have done has failed to stop the escalation of these appalling incidents.
I know I am going to vote in favour of the bill to get it to committee so it can be studied more thoroughly. We owe it to our children. It is one of the most important things we can do in this 41st Parliament.