Mr. Speaker, my first comment concerns the fact that Mr. Sharpe is, apparently, quite enthralled with the legislation. He says that the loose definition in the bill would liberalize things quite a bit from his standpoint and would give him lots of grounds for reasonable doubt in a criminal trial.
I have another point I want to raise. We had a serious case in my riding this past summer where a 12 year old aboriginal girl was sexually assaulted by three men in their mid-twenties. They had their trial split. One was convicted. I do not know how the jury decided the case for the other two accused because we cannot get into that, but one of the main defences of the lawyers was that the accused believed the victim was at least 14. This just proves to me that we have a problem and the bill does not provide any protection on that matter.
I know that a lot of the Bloc members opposed increasing the age from 14 to 16. I wonder what the Bloc member would have to say about raising the age of consent from 14 to 16.