Child Pornography – Alliance Opposition Motion

Tuesday April 23, 2002

 

Mr. Bill Blaikie (Winnipeg--Transcona, NDP): Mr. Speaker, on behalf of the NDP I would like to begin by saying how unsatisfactory this is. We are trying to deal with an issue as difficult as the issue the Alliance motion has put before us in the context of a one day debate on a motion which we either have to vote up or down. This is a difficult situation for the House to be put in, for parties to be put in and for individual members to be put in.

    Perhaps it is unavoidable in some ways but it seems to me it was avoidable at one point. We had an opportunity to look at these issues in greater depth than we are now able to at least today, but we passed it up. Again it is partly because of the politics that attends this kind of issue.

    People want to do a good job writing laws that deal with the issue of child pornography. Very often they are prevented from doing so by being in the position of either passing bad laws or bad motions because there is a willingness on the part of others in our political universe to charge them with not caring enough about child pornography if they do not hurry and pass the motion or the legislation.

    In terms of amendments that came back to us from the Senate on Bill C-15A and in terms of this motion, we are now dealing with a situation that would have been preventable in part if we had been able to take the time to do Bill C-15A properly, or that part of Bill C-15 which was carved out of the original Bill C-15. However, because it dealt with child pornography and a number of other issues, and I am as guilty as anyone else in this, we said, no, let us just pass it and get it through.

    Eventually the government buckled to the pressure. Instead of having that bill go through committee and having that part dealing with child pornography being considered properly, there was this sense that anyone responsible for any delay on that was somehow an accomplice of child pornography and therefore the bill had to be rushed through. In some sense now we are dealing with the consequences of not being able to look at that bill as thoroughly as we should have. Today we are debating an opposition day motion and we are basically in a similar position.

    We are being asked to vote for something which, depending on one's point of view, one could not quarrel with the principle that the government immediately introduce legislation to protect children from sexual predators. Who could be against that? Yet the motion goes on to include thus, thus and thus. It is not well worded in some respects and does not really reflect some of the concerns people genuinely have, in that if we are to implement some of the measures that are included in the “including” part of the motion, there are things that need to be taken into account that are not.

    If we were to go back far enough we could fault the government for not bringing in a piece of legislation having to do with child pornography alone. Then we could just deal with that. Instead original Bill C-15 before it was split into Bill C-15A and Bill C-15B, had child pornography and various other amendments to the criminal code having to do with police officers, et cetera. There were a whole bunch of things. Some were quite simple and one could just be for them and pass them. Others, as we have come to know more probably than we would like to through various court decisions, were complicated, such as this child pornography issue.

    If the government had introduced that part of Bill C-15 which dealt with child pornography alone and allowed the committee to do a proper job, and if opposition parties had not taken the view that it had to be rushed through, there might have been a better job done. Then we would not be in the position we are in today.

    We are of two minds, frankly. One is whether to vote for the general intent of the motion, which is to say that the government should introduce legislation to protect children from sexual predators. But we realize that the House really is not of one mind as to what that legislation might look like. It is a political dilemma in some respects because it goes beyond the principle in the motion to talk about, for instance, raising the legal age of consent to at least 16 years.

    I know that members of the Alliance have said it is not their intention in any way to criminalize sexual relations between teenagers. I am glad to hear that, but the motion does not say that. In fact some would argue that the age of consent is 14 years in one respect but 18 years in another respect. What is it that is intended by the legal age of consent being raised to 16 years? What is the intent with respect to the 18 year old threshold that we also find in the law?

    Having said that, I myself as the NDP justice critic asked the then minister of justice, now the Minister of Health, when she was before the committee I believe on Bill C-15 whether or not the government was intending to act with respect to the legal age of consent. I do not want to speak for other governments but I believe provincial ministers of justice have raised this with the federal ministry of justice. There is a feeling that something needs to be done about the age of consent. I am not unsupportive of that as the NDP justice critic. However it is a matter of some detail as to how one goes about doing that in the criminal code and the motion does not reflect that.

    With respect to the child pornography aspect of the bill, many people are concerned. The member for Palliser stated it well on our behalf yesterday when he read letters from his constituents. People are concerned about the so-called Sharpe decision and the fact that artistic merit was used as a defence against charges of possessing what I believe were stories, which by anyone's judgment except perhaps Mr. Sharpe's and a few others, are offensive. If one takes a certain point of view with respect to child pornography stories, they may well actually contribute to sexual crimes by virtue of their existence and the relationship between their existence and the effect of their existence on the person who has them in their possession.

    What we need to debate in the House is the appropriateness of the artistic merit defence when it comes to child pornography. I would bet there would be divisions between individuals within parties on this issue as it is not a question of one party versus another necessarily. There is nothing written in the evidence so to speak which says that child pornography should have this particular defence available to it, even in the very limited form that the supreme court has made it available.

    For instance, we do not permit artistic merit to be a defence when it comes to hate. We have carved that out and said that artistic merit does not cut it as a defence when it comes to hate literature. We should look seriously at whether or not we should have a similar, but obviously not identical, carve out, when it comes to child pornography. Just what that would look like would be a matter of some deliberation.

    As I have said in the past, the artistic merit defence is something that should be referred to the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights. The member for Palliser said that yesterday on our behalf in the debate on the amendments to Bill C-15A. We need to look at these decisions. We need to hear from people who are making very strong arguments that this is not a defence that should be available.

    Of course, we need to hear from people who say that eliminating this defence would in some way or another endanger freedom of expression in other areas of expression. I would hope that even those who are strongly supportive of the artistic merit defence are not doing it on the basis of their attachment to or out of any defence of child pornography. They are doing it presumably because they are concerned about the effect that rejecting such a defence might have in other areas. It seems to me that is the moot point of the issue before us.

    I say once again how much I regret that as a House we are not able to deal with this in a satisfactory manner in terms of process. We get rushed when we should not be rushed. Parliament has been rushed a number of times in my experience. A couple of times, certainly in retrospect, people have judged that we have passed bad law or law that would not stand up in the courts, et cetera. Although this is not a piece of legislation, we should consider whether or not we are doing the same thing again today.

    Hon. Hedy Fry (Vancouver Centre, Lib.): Mr. Speaker, I want to ask the hon. member to comment on something that concerns me a great deal about the motion.

    I agree with him that on an issue as complex as this we must sit down and think clearly so that we do not do the wrong things for the right reasons. We must clearly understand the issues of sexual exploitation of children, which all of us in the House are opposed to, completely and totally. I have spent a great deal of my time as secretary of state for the status of women working with the Minister of Justice dealing with the issues of commercial sexual exploitation of children and youth. It is an abomination and we must work very hard on that issue.

    However, the term legal age of consent and raising it to 16 concerns me. It is not about sexual exploitation but about the sexuality of young people below the age of 16 and their ability and right to consent to engage in sexual activity at the age of 15 or sometimes at the age of 14.

    I recall clearly that sexual activity in young people was beginning at the age of 13 when I was practicing medicine. I remember that it was a very difficult time for physicians who were trying to help those patients to make the right decisions with regard to issues of sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy. How do we help these young people? How do we discuss birth control and the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases? How do we talk about the issue of safe sex with these young people?

    First and foremost there must be a recognition that young people under the age of 16 do have a sexuality that they need to express and engage in consensually with each other. That is what concerns me about this age limit that we are placing here. Second, what happens to physicians and other health care providers who are helping these young people through these difficult times? They discuss sex in a logical and clear way in terms of the pros and the cons and talk about protection, what the risks are, and what the up sides are of this issue. What might this prohibit when we talk about appear to describe children engaged in sexual activity?

    Does that mean that a physician counselling a young person below the age of 16 would be considered to be describing or appearing to describe children engaged in sexual activity? Would it mean that two young people at the age of 15 who mutually consent to have sex would suddenly be indulging in an illegal activity? Is that an appropriate thing? Would it mean that when health care workers give these young people either condoms or other forms of birth control they would be doing something illegal?

    There are huge ramifications to this consent issue that concern me. I wonder if the hon. member could comment on this because for me, the problem of appearing to depict means that a young girl of 15 cannot write anything in her diary about her relationship with a young boy of 15 with whom she had sexual activity. How she writes that would be apparent to depict the engagement in sexual activity. Those are the concerns I have.

    I understand the intent of the motion and I do not have a problem with the intent. For many of us who are parents and physicians, we are all concerned about exploitation of children and youth and the engagement of sexual activity without consent. For me this age of consent is a major concern.

    Mr. Bill Blaikie: Mr. Speaker, the hon. member has asked a lot of questions and I will not pretend to be able to answer them all. However, the fact that so many questions can be asked about what this means points to some of the difficulties that I expressed about the motion. I do not know exactly what it would mean or what the motion would mean. I know what Alliance members have said about what it means but that is not what the motion says.

     It is legitimate to be concerned as to whether or not this would have the effect of criminalizing sexual activity between people who are under the age of 16. It does not for instance register the caveat, as I think exists in the law now, if there is not a big age difference between people involved and that sort of thing.

    I heard the member say that is taken for granted within the motion. Is it? Perhaps the motion should have said that to begin with.

    Having said all that, what the member raises in terms of physicians instructing young people with respect to birth control or sexuality et cetera is the sort of thing that could be done without depicting or describing children engaged in sexual activity. There is probably a way around that, but clearly the member raises some important concerns.

    What it reflects, and I do not say this about the member's question but just generally, is that as a society none of us are certain about what level of responsibility we want to assign to young people at various ages. There are mixed messages coming from the House in a number of ways.

    On the one hand we have people arguing that children as young as 11 should be held responsible by criminal law for break and entering, property thefts or other crimes. There is a certain amount of cognitive dissonance here. On the one hand we want to drive down the age of responsibility when it comes to a bunch of things that are regarded as criminal and on the other hand we want to drive up the age of responsibility when it comes to sexual matters.

    That may be a good thing depending on how we do it and what it includes. There is a kind of confusion in our collective mind about responsibility and when it kicks in and whether it kicks in at different ages with respect to different kinds of activity.

    Outrage is appropriate to some degree when it comes to some of the terrible things that go on, but humility is also in order in the sense that this is not an easy question and there is clearly a lot of confusion with respect to the whole notion of responsibility and how it should be described and how it should be enforced.

    Mr. Reed Elley (Nanaimo--Cowichan, Canadian Alliance): Mr. Speaker, I am the father of eight children. I have a 33 year old daughter who 20 years ago was 13. I have an 11 year old daughter who will be 13 in a couple of years. I have a 15 year old daughter who was 13 a couple of years ago. I do not know whether hon. members who just spoke have children of that age in their homes, but I do.

    I have seen over the course of 20 years our society force young people to grow up too quickly. The media, fashion magazines and television have an incredible effect upon our young people. I have seen them forced to grow up physically. The natural changes that go on in their bodies seem to happen at an earlier age. Then everything else around them forces them to grow up in that way.

    I have to say as a father that I have not seen an accompanying environment in our society that helps them to grow up emotionally so they can cope with some of the horrible stuff that may come their way because of a drift that I call moral laxity. It has allowed this kind of filth to go on in our society and is bombarding our children at every turn.

    I cannot for the life of me see why anybody, any member of the House, would be against us having the kind of debate that we are having today. It may result at some point in the government bringing legislation that would enable our judiciary, social workers, court officials, and police departments to have some kind of legal recourse to stop the sexual predators who are preying upon our young people at an earlier and earlier age.

    Why would members vote against something like this when we know this is going on in our society? If we do not do something about it, it makes my job as a father, as a parent of teenage children, more difficult and I believe I speak for many parents in this country.

    Mr. Bill Blaikie: Mr. Speaker, if the member had listened to me I said we were of two minds about the motion. We do support the main thrust of the motion that the government immediately introduce legislation to protect children. However, the member would have to admit it is not absolutely clear what that legislation should look like.

    With respect to his other comment, he talked about our children being bombarded. They are. This is one of the things that struck me over the years and I am glad he raised this. Most children are not bombarded with child pornography. They would be a minority, I presume. However, all children are bombarded, our whole society is bombarded, with the exploitation of sexuality that we find in advertising, for instance.

    Advertising is becoming more unacceptable. The exploitation of sex, implications of adultery and all kinds of things are woven into various advertisements. This is done not by sick little minds that are writing dirty stories somewhere in remote parts of the country. This bombarding of our young people with advertisements and other things that exploit sexuality is being done by the so-called paragons of our society, by the corporate elite who pay people hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to come up with new ways to exploit sexuality.

    I never hear anything about all the acceptable legal ways in which sexuality is exploited. I am not pointing my finger at the hon. member here. I am saying that it is kind of odd. I can remember preaching about this 25 years ago, one of my first summer charges, saying we are so concerned about pornography yet we are not concerned about all the latent pornographic images and the way in which sexuality is exploited. There is subliminal pornography and encouragement to elicit sexual activity built into the way we sell cars, clothes and everything, yet this is all called free enterprise. This is the ultimate human activity.

    How many times have I heard the word marketing in the House as if it was some kind of mantra, as if anyone who is not into marketing is some kind of dumdum. I will tell the House that marketing is all about the exploitation of sexuality when it comes to many products. When the day comes that we have that kind of debate in here and we go after the corporations for the way in which they are constantly, every day, in every house, on every TV set exploiting sexuality, then we will have a real debate on our hands.