No, the concern that is expressed in particular by officials at Global Affairs Canada is that if you have another offence called torture and you prosecute that as torture, then how are we abiding by our obligations to prosecute torture when we already have section 269.1 which says that torture is defined in section 269.1, and we have another offence in proposed new section 268.1 which says inflicting torture is torture? What torture are you talking about? How do you go to the committee and say, “Well, no, we didn't prosecute the person for torture. We prosecuted the person for torture.” That's why I said earlier in my comments that if you want to make a domestic offence that addresses the intentional causation of pain or suffering as a consequence as well as the intentional assault, Parliament is free to do that. It's a policy issue.
What we're saying is it would be much clearer not to call that offence torture and not to use the word “torture” anywhere in that offence, so it doesn't cause confusion with section 269.1. It would have been much better to call it grievous aggravated assault, which also requires an intentional element to cause the consequences and not just simply to cause the harm.