By Lloyd Mackey

AS it happens, the subject of Bill C-268, now making its way through the Senate, was the subject of a little legislative road-mapping last week in the upper chamber.

C-268, as some readers will recall, is Manitoba MP Joy Smith's private member's bill -- which received strong support in the House of Commons last year from all parties, except the Bloc Quebecois. It is the legislation that would provide for mandatory minimum sentences for people and groups exploiting minors for sex trafficking purposes.

Sponsor for C-268 in the Senate, BC's Yonah Martin, hopes optimistically that the bill will receive Royal Assent by June, when things wrap up for the summer.

And that is as it should be, in Martin's view. She says there is a "groundswell" of Canadian support for the legislation, much of it encouraged by such faith-based organizations as the Catholic Women's League and 4MyCanada.

Further, her colleague from Manitoba, Don Plett, has been turning in petitions with thousands of names, urging early action.

The hope had been that the bill would get through Parliament before the Olympics, in order to put a damper on sex trafficking there. That was not to be -- but, after prorogation, it began to move once more through the Senate, for that mandatory "sober second thought" the red chamber is supposed to provide.

Smith's conviction that sex traffickers need the full force of the law grew both out of her strong faith roots and her police officer son's accounts, years before, of the horrendous true stories about what happens to young people caught up in the sex trade.

In the Senate, last week, the discussion was most genteel, but nevertheless serious. At issue was the moving and seconding by BC senators Martin and Richard Neufeld, that C-268 be referred to the Senate's human rights committee.

Their motion caught some Liberals by surprise, because they had expected the bill to be debated by the legal and constitutional committee. On the surface, it might seem to be a moot point. What difference did it make which committee dealt with the matter?

A fair question. But beneath that is the fact that the Senate is moving gradually from being Liberal-dominated to being aligned with the current governing party.

That has happened because many Liberal-appointed senators have reached the age of 75 -- the mandatory retirement age.

Gradually, they have been replaced by Conservatives, who now hold a slight plurality. Not quite a majority, because there is a handful of seats held by independents or Progressive Conservatives who did not join the Alliance-Conservative merger a few years ago.

To fast forward to last week: The end result of the little discussion about which committee should debate the bill, was that it went to social affairs, chaired by Liberal Art Eggleton (sometime mayor of Toronto). Vice-chair is Conservative Kelvin Ogilvie, former president of Acadia University in Nova Scotia.

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And Martin is happy to see it in social affairs. She points out that both she and the Liberal critic on the bill, Lillian Eva Dyck, are both on that committee. And, as far as C-268 is concerned, they are singing from the same book, if not always the same page. For Martin, Dyck -- a member of the Gordon First Nation, with some Chinese in her heritage as well -- is "passionate" on issues involving the sexual exploitation of aboriginal women.

Dyck, a former NDPer, was appointed to the senate by Paul Martin. She could not sit as an NDPer because her party believes in the abolition of the Senate. Ultimately, she joined the Liberal caucus.

All of which is to say that C-268 should get a good round of reconsideration in the social affairs committee -- and, if anything, perhaps come out arguably slightly improved over what it was when it went in.

My hope would be to cover at least a session or two of the social affairs committee before June, in order to provide a little more context to the process through which C-268 is passing in the upper chamber.

Noted Martin: "We will be calling the kinds of witnesses that will help provide the perspectives of various stakeholders -- justice and legal officials as well as police and law enforcement. Much of what we are dealing with is new, even for the legal community.

"We need to hear from victims, themselves, who have been affected. As far as I am concerned, the sooner we can schedule the hearings, the better. We need to protect minors. [The committee] has been undertaking a study of post-secondary education; but everyone will accept that trafficking is important enough to set the study aside for a few weeks."

She also expressed some personal feelings about the issue at hand:

"True, I am the sponsor of the bill in the Senate. But it is not my work alone. There is a real movement on the ground, with tens of thousands of Canadians signing petitions and sending letters.

"As a mother of a 14 year old daughter, I think of the victims who are her age and younger. I pray that the work can be completed before the end of the session [in June]. I believe senators on both sides will be responsible.

"The committee sessions will be closely watched ... and many people will be waiting for the results. But sometimes, the last bit will be most challenging. We want to be dealing [with the bill] efficiently and diligently."

* * * Lloyd Mackey is a member of the Canadian Parliamentary Press Gallery in Ottawa and author of Stephen Harper: The Case for Collaborative Governance (ECW Press, 2006), More Faithful Than We Think: Stories and Insights on Canadian Leaders Doing Politics Christianly (BayRidge Books, 2005) and Like Father, Like Son: Ernest Manning and Preston Manning (ECW Press, 1997). Lloyd can be reached at lmackey@canadianchristianity.com

April 30/2010