The federal government is getting even tougher on child predators at home and abroad, Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced Monday as he unveiled plans for a publicly accessible national sex offender registry and new tools to better track child sex tourists.
“Gaps in information sharing between government agencies are hampering our ability to monitor and catch child predators, especially those who victimize children beyond our border,” he said at a news conference in Vancouver. “That is going to change.”
Harper cited the case of Howard Cotterman, a California man with a history of sex offences who was nabbed at the Mexico-U.S. border in 2007 with hundreds of images of himself molesting a young girl. He attributed Cotterman’s arrest to information sharing between authorities and suggested the same might not have happened if he were a Canadian returning to this country.
The new provisions, to be unveiled in a comprehensive bill dubbed the Tougher Penalties for Child Predators Act which will be introduced when Parliament resumes next month, will require high-risk sex offenders to provide Canadian police with advance notice of any international travel.
It will further authorize Canadian police to share this information with members of the Canada Border Service Agency who will carefully monitor the offender.
“When a child predator plans upcoming travel abroad, Canadian officials must, where appropriate, warn destination countries that a dangerous offender is heading their way,” Harper said.
The legislation will also create a publicly accessible, online, national database of high-risk child predators administered by the RCMP to “replace the patchwork of registries that currently exits.”
The Vancouver announcement is the second related to the Tougher Penalties for Child Predators Act, a government priority that will no doubt factor into the upcoming speech from the throne. The government is calling it the “most comprehensive law to combat sex crimes against children ever enacted in this country.”
Harper first introduced the proposal last month. At the time, he said the bill would include new mandatory minimum and maximum sentences for child pornographers and pedophiles. It will also propose consecutive sentences for those convicted of victimizing multiple children and provisions that could compel the spouse of an accused person to testify against their partner in court.
But while Harper was thousands of kilometres away pitching tough-on-crime legislation to his base of supporters, NDP Leader Tom Mulcair was in Ottawa for what was supposed to be the first day back for MPs following the summer break.
He suggested the announcement was an attempt to “distract” Canadians from the fact Harper prorogued Parliament for a month to delay having to answer tough questions on accountability, youth unemployment and rising household debt in the House of Commons.
Mulcair argued the place to debate legislation like this yet-to-be-tabled child predator bill is in Parliament and questioned why it has taken the government eight years to come up with a National Sex Offender Registry.
“If it was a real problem, we would have thought they would act on it in eight years but it’s a good debate to have here in the House of Commons — only the doors are closed,” he said outside the lower chamber.
That said, it’s no coincidence that Harper made the announcement in Vancouver. It’s the home of notorious child sex tourist Christopher Neil. The former Maple Ridge, B.C,. English teacher, known around the world as the man with the “swirl” face in child pornography videos distributed online, spent five years in a Thai prison for sexually assaulting young boys. He was freed in Canada last October under strict conditions but was arrested in August for breaching one of them.
The new provisions are in keeping with the Harper government’s tough-on-crime agenda and appear to expand upon Bill C-10, the omnibus SafeStreets and Communities Act which became law in March 2012. Among other things, it created two new offences for sex crimes involving children, imposed a number of new mandatory minimum penalties and increased existing mandatory minimum and maximum penalties for a series of child sex crimes.
tcohen@postmedia.com
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