A Conservative MP is trying to close Canada’s bestiality ‘loophole.’ What is it?
Tristin Hopper
n Canada, having intercourse with a Labrador retriever can net someone a 10-year jail sentence. However, thanks to an oversight in the Criminal Code, all other forms of sexual gratification with that Labrador, including oral sex, have always been legal.
Now, more than a year after a B.C. sex criminal used this very loophole to escape conviction, Calgary MP Michelle Rempel has introduced a private member’s bill to fix it once and for all.
Bill C-388, tabled on Wednesday, inserts a one-line amendment into the Criminal Code defining bestiality as “any contact by a person, for a sexual purpose, with an animal.”
“I am disturbed that the government has not yet corrected this glaring void in our criminal code,” she wrote in an official statement, which also called the current law a “disturbing loophole.”
“This is a non-partisan issue,” said Rempel.
Rempel’s bill, if passed, will criminalize all zoophilic sexual contact in Canada, with certain exceptions, such as agricultural sperm collection.
Until last year, virtually all Canadian lawyers would have assumed that animal sexual contact was already illegal in Canada.
“There are many examples of courts accepting guilty pleas in bestiality cases involving non-penetrative conduct,” wrote Camille Labchuk, executive director of Animal Justice, in an email.
That all changed in June, 2016, when a Supreme Court of Canada decision dredged up nearly 500 years of legal precedent and came to the surprise conclusion that bestiality, as Canada defined it, “required penetration.”
Categorised in: Canadian News