Bill C-22 (Historical)

An Act respecting the mandatory reporting of Internet child pornography by persons who provide an Internet service

This enactment imposes reporting duties on persons who provide an Internet service to the public if they are advised of an Internet address where child pornography may be available to the public or if they have reasonable grounds to believe that their Internet service is being or has been used to commit a child pornography offence. This enactment makes it an offence to fail to comply with the reporting duties.

Disposition of Abolition of Early Parole Act

[Chris Charlton, NDP, Hamilton Mountain, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I listened closely to the comments of the member in this chamber, and I am a bit surprised, because he is actually engaging in substantive debate around the bill to which the time allocation motion applies. However, what is really before us in the House today is the time allocation motion itself and the government cutting off the amount of time for debate on the bill.

We should not be debating the merits of the bill itself at all, yet I just heard the member say that all kinds of crime bills have been stalled at committee.

Let me give the House a number of the bills that have now passed through the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights: C-4, C-5, C-16, C-17, C-21, C-22, C-23A, C-23B, C-39, C-48, C-50, C-51, C-52, S-2, S-6, S-7, S-9 and S-10. Can the member really suggest that the crime agenda of the government is being stalled?

Some of us would argue they are the only bills we have been dealing with in the House. I wish the member would return to what we are really debating here tonight, and that is the time allocation motion, not the substance of the government's crime agenda.

Standing Committee on Finance

[Marlene Jennings, Liberal, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am saddened today to feel the obligation to rise to address comments with regard to the question of privilege raised by the member for Kings—Hants on February 7.

It is like the movie Groundhog Day. Anyone is familiar with that movie knows it was very successful. American actor Bill Murray relives the day over and over again until he learns his lesson.

It appears the government is reliving the same thing and forcing all other members of the House of Commons and Canadians to relive the same days we experienced back in 2009-10 with regard to a request from the special committee on Afghanistan for the production of documents from the government. The government resisted that. It took a question of privilege to be raised in the House. It took comments from many members of the House. It took considerable reflection and study on your part, Mr. Speaker, before you made a ruling that there was a prima facie case of privilege in that regard.

Yet, again, we are faced with the exact same situation today.

If I look at the timeline, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance tabled its 10th report on Monday, February 7. The member for Kings—Hants, pursuant to that report, raised the question of privilege of which we are now all aware.

I want to concur with the arguments raised by my colleague for Kings—Hants, as well as those raised by my colleagues from Mississauga South and Windsor—Tecumseh on the issue.

However, I wish to note a number of points. I also wish to address, in particular, the issues of cabinet confidence and the requests with regard to all the justice bills. It is important to do so, particularly with the time of events and the government's response to date to the committee's requests for the production of documents. We have not yet heard the government's response in the House with regard to the question of privilege.

On November 17, 2010, the Standing Committee on Finance passed a motion, ordering the Government of Canada to provide the committee with five-year projections of total corporate profits before taxes and effective corporate tax rates from the 2010-11 fiscal year until the 2014-15 fiscal year, inclusive. The November 17 motion also ordered the government to provide the committee with certain financial information pertaining to justice bills, which I will enumerate.

As all members in the House know, I am the justice critic for the official opposition. Therefore, all the information, all the documents requested through the motion of the finance committee have direct pertinence to the committee on justice and human rights. Those justice bills were Bill C-4, the youth criminal justice bill, Bill C-5, Bill C-16, Bill C-17, Bill C-21, Bill C-22, Bill C-23A, Bill C-23B, Bill C-39, Bill C-48, Bill C-50, Bill C-51, Bill C-52, Bill S-2, Bill S-6, Bill S-7, Bill S-9 and Bill S-10.

The motion specifically requested:

—detailed cost accounting, analysis and projections, including assumptions, for each of the bills and Acts, conducted in accordance with the Treasury Board Guide to Costing.

Members are now aware, by the issue of privilege raised by the member for Kings—Hants, that the motion established a deadline of seven calendar days, which ended on November 24, 2010.

On November 24, Finance Canada replied to the committee, and I will read the department's response in its entirety because it is quite important, particularly to any Canadian and any member sitting in the House who takes his or her work as an elected official representing Canadians, a sacred duty in fact, to know the response. It said:

Projections of corporate profits before taxes and effective corporate income tax rates are a Cabinet confidence. As such, we are not in a position to provide these series to the Committee.

The department claimed it was not in a position to provide these documents to the committee because, according to the government, these documents were a cabinet confidence. That is the heart of the matter. Do the documents requested constitute a cabinet confidence and, if so, are they excluded from the rule of the House of Commons, the power and authority of Parliament, to require documents to be provided?

As the House knows, because it has been mentioned by others in the House who have commented on the issue of privilege raised by the member for Kings—Hants, the government has yet to speak to this issue. I understand that one of the parliamentary secretaries has said the government is taking note of all of members' comments in the House, relating to the issue of privilege, and will respond in due course.

On December 1, 2010, one full week after the deadline of November 24, 2010, the committee received a reply from Justice Canada regarding projected costs of the justice bills. I will read the response by Justice Canada in its entirety. It said:

The issue of whether there are any costs associated with the implementation of any of the Government's Justice bills is a matter of Cabinet confidence and, as such, the Government is not in a position to provide such information or documents.

That is interesting because in justice committee, of which I am a member, when we have repeatedly asked the minister for the cost analysis of a government bill before the committee, the minister has never stated that he could not give us that information because it is a matter of confidence. I would challenge members to check the transcripts of justice committee. What I did hear was he did not have the information with him or some befuddled answer that did not answer the question.

On December 7, 2010, after the government had refused to provide the information ordered by finance committee by the established deadline, the member for Kings—Hants provided the committee with written notice of a motion by which, if passed, the committee would draw the attention of the House to what appeared to be a breach of its privileges. That has been done. The committee adopted the motion and the member for Kings—Hants rose in the House to speak to the issue.

On December 10, the committee received an additional response from the Department of Finance Canada in answer to its motion ordering the production of documents relating to the projections regarding corporate taxes before profits.

In response, the department stated:

To the best of its knowledge, the Department of Finance has determined that [the] "series" or projections of corporate profits before taxes or the effective corporate income tax rates have never been previously disclosed. These projections are from a comprehensive economic and fiscal projection that constitutes a Cabinet confidence.

To reiterate, according to the second or additional response of the Department of Finance to the finance committee, the Department of Finance, acting on behalf of the government, claimed that these projections have never been previously disclosed and constitute a cabinet confidence.

As pointed out in this chamber before, but which bears repetition, I would suggest to any Canadian to Google the phrase, “Corporate tax profits before taxes”, and restrict their search to the domain of the Department of Finance Canada. That Canadian would get exactly two results: the HTML and PDF versions of “The Economic and Fiscal Update“ from November 2005. In that update, we find precisely the information that the Department of Justice, in its December 10 additional response to the finance committee, claimed had never previously been disclosed because it constituted a cabinet confidence. In fact, it was disclosed in the November 2005 economic and fiscal update that was issued by the previous government comprised of the Liberal Party of Canada's elected members of Parliament.

Therefore, the assertion on the part of the government, through its Department of Finance, justifying its refusal to obey, respect and act on the order of the finance committee to produce the documents is an outright fabrication.

The government department could have said that in the past the information had been released, but that the policy had been changed with a new interpretation of what constituted a cabinet confidence and, as a result, would not be releasing those documents to the finance committee. However, that was not the reason given by the department, by the government, for refusing to release that information. The reason given to the committee for not providing that information, that it is a cabinet confidence, is pure nonsense.

What is the state of legislation regarding cabinet confidence?

As mentioned, one can look to the Access to Information Act and the law of evidence act, and one will find that the government does not have a leg to stand on, and in fact does not have two legs to stand on.

Any reasonable Canadian reading the pertinent sections of the Access to Information Act and the law of evidence act would see that the two responses given by the Department of Finance and the response given by the Department of Justice are nonsense.

As I said, we know that in 2005 the previous government recognized that projections of corporate tax profits before taxes were not covered by cabinet confidence. Such projections are not considered a cabinet confidence when, as is the case with Finance Canada's revenue model, these projections are used by the department in a manner not exclusively related to cabinet operations.

What has changed between 2005 and 2010-11? On what grounds is the government now claiming that these projections constitute a cabinet confidence when there was no such assertion in the past and governments in the past have in fact provided and disclosed that information?

The costs of the justice bills are also important because the Department of Justice, as well, replied to the finance committee by claiming cabinet confidence as a justification for not releasing that information to the finance committee.

We know that due diligence would have required that cabinet consider the cost implications of each justice bill before making a decision to proceed with each bill. We know that under normal practices, an analysis of the cost implications of each justice bill would have been included with the memorandum to cabinet prepared for each justice bill.

Why do we know this? We know it because the Liberal Party of Canada has formed government in the past. We know that when we came power the government that preceded us, the one formed by the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, had done that as well. So these are normal practices. These are practices of a prudent, diligent and competent government.

No diligent, prudent and competent government would consider an issue, whether amendments, or a justice bill bringing in new legislation to the Criminal Code or amending existing sections of the Criminal Code, because that constitutes government policy, would do so without informing itself of the cost of those changes.

That is what previous governments have done, because those previous governments, whatever their faults, have followed prudent, diligent and competent practices with regard to taking decisions on issues brought before cabinet.

As I said, we know that under normal practices, an analysis of the cost implications of each justice bill would have been included with the memorandum to cabinet prepared for each justice bill.

Now let us look at the legislation that deals with what is, or is not, cabinet confidence and whether or not something that falls into cabinet confidence can be accessible.

If one looks at section 69 of the Access to Information Act, it tells us that such analysis and background information is not, and I repeat, not, a cabinet confidence, if the cabinet decision to which the analysis relates has been made public.

A cost analysis of the implications of a justice bill should have been included, and I believe was included, in the memorandum to cabinet, as it is on each and every justice bill.

[Lianna McDonald]

We are working towards asking to be the designated agency under Bill C-22.

[Lianna McDonald, Executive Director, Canadian Centre for Child Protection]

Mr. Chairman and distinguished members of this committee, I thank you for the opportunity to provide a presentation on Bill C-54 and the larger issue of child sexual abuse and exploitation on the Internet.

I had the privilege to present to this committee a few months ago on Bill C-22, which provided the occasion to share some important background information on our agency and other relevant data surrounding the online sexual exploitation of children. Therefore, my goal today is to provide insight and information specifically to Bill C-54 and to make a few arguments for support of this new legislation.

The Canadian Centre for Child Protection will offer testimony today based on its role in operating Cybertip.ca, Canada's tip line to report the online sexual exploitation of children, as well as its coordinating role with law enforcement and the public and private sectors in combatting online child victimization.

I am joined today by my colleague, Signy Arnason, who is the director of Cybertip.ca. She will speak later to some of the actual reports received by the tip line over the course of the last year.

As stated previously, Cybertip was established in 2002 in partnership with the Government of Canada, various provincial governments, a national law enforcement advisory committee, and a federal task force and steering committee. Like other international hotlines, Cybertip has analysts who review, confirm, and triage reports to the appropriate law enforcement jurisdiction. In particular, the tip line accepts reports related to child abuse material known as child pornography, luring, child sex tourism, children exploited through prostitution, and child trafficking. The tip line is owned and operated by the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, a national charity dedicated to the personal safety of all children.

Since launching nationally, the tip line has received nearly 48,000 reports from the public regarding the online sexual exploitation of children, which has resulted in over 70 arrests by law enforcement and numerous children being removed from harmful or abusive environments.

As the front door to the Canadian public, Cybertip receives information regarding various types of concerning behaviours and harmful activities towards children. Often the tip line is the first to become aware of new trends and ways in which adults target or hurt children for sexual purposes. This would include reports dealing with the new offences captured under Bill C-54.

Based on our data, the proposed legislation rightfully acknowledges the role of the Internet in facilitating crimes against children. It is well established that the Internet facilitates the sexual abuse and exploitation of children in a number of ways. Individuals with a sexual interest in children often misuse technology to gain access to them, to normalize their deviant sexual interest, and to fuel sexual fantasies. As a result, reporting to Cybertip and other hotlines continues to grow annually in response to this growing problem.

Beyond reports to Cybertip pertaining to child abuse images, the tip line continues to receive reports that pertain to what is generally defined in the public domain as grooming. This activity often includes adults sending sexually explicit material to one or many targeted children. In the majority of these reports, the children are under the age of 13 and are sent sexually explicit images or videos, usually involving the offender either masturbating, pictures of their genitals, or hard core adult pornography. The grooming process is often used to bring down the child's inhibitions, to attempt to normalize sexual activity, and to engage the child in sexual interactions. In most cases, children do not have the maturity, emotional capacity, and development to manage the short- and long-term implications of such activity.

To date, little has been done to address such activities through the criminal justice process, contrary to the opinion and outrage of most Canadians.

Some of the more concerning reports deal with adults agreeing or making arrangements to commit a sexual offence against one or more children. It is hard to believe that people would offer up their very young children for other individuals to sexually abuse. In one report to Cybertip, a forum moderator was reported as making arrangements to trade his 12-year-old daughter for a second person's four-year-old daughter. The reported information indicated that there was discussion that the second person was going to have sex with the 12-year-old, film it, and impregnate her.

The tip line to date has received a handful of these types of reports. Clearly, they are very much of concern and warrant immediate action. Law enforcement's ability to use the new provisions outlined in Bill C-54 will greatly assist them in their efforts to charge individuals engaging in this type of harmful activity.

Similar to Canada's luring legislation, these two new additions will prove effective, in that law enforcement will be able to take swift action and potentially prevent a child from being victimized. As a result of Canada's existing luring legislation, countless children have been protected in advance of a serious sexual offence occurring; moreover, our agency believes that once the public becomes aware of these new amendments and understands their role in reporting, more children will be saved from abuse.

The public nature of the Internet, combined with the viral nature of child abuse material, offers the opportunity for the public to report and assist in the detection of this type of material and harmful behaviour towards children. While our organization supports the new amendments included in Bill C-54, it should be noted that public education and awareness efforts must also be key components to addressing this problem. Awareness efforts to educate parents and adults surrounding healthy boundaries towards children are essential, as is public education about laws protecting children. The responsibility of adults to take the necessary steps to report and protect them is also imperative.

In concluding, it is critical that governments recognize the particular vulnerability of children, combined with the fact that in today's society children are connected to a technological world that allows unprecedented access to them. This unlevel playing field has given children a new, largely unsupervised playground and has opened to doors for adults to take full advantage of this opportunity. For this reason, the Canadian Centre for Child Protection supports Bill C-54 and urges the government to move swiftly and enact this important legislation to better protect Canada's children.

Thank you.

[Scott Brison, Liberal, Kings—Hants, NS]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a question of privilege in relation to the 10th report of the Standing Committee on Finance.

In our system of responsible government, the government must seek Parliament's authority to spend public funds. Parliament, in turn, has an obligation, a responsibility to hold the government to account and to scrutinize the government's books.

Recently, this government impeded the work of the Standing Committee on Finance by hindering its attempts to better understand the federal government's budget projections.

As you know, Mr. Speaker, Standing Order 108 empowers committees to send for persons, papers and records. House of Commons Procedure and Practice, second edition, describes Parliament's right to order the production of documents as a right that is “as old as Parliament itself”.

On November 17, 2010, the Standing Committee on Finance passed a motion ordering the Government of Canada to provide the commitment with five-year projections of total corporate profits before taxes and effective corporate tax rates from the 2010-11 fiscal year until the 2014-15 fiscal year, inclusive.

The November 17 motion also ordered the government to provide the committee with certain financial information pertaining to justice Bills C-4, C-5, C-16, C-17, C-21, C-22, C-23A, C-23B, C-39, C-48, C-50, C-51, C-52, S-2, S-6, S-7, S-9 and S-10.

Among other things, the motion specifically requested:

detailed cost accounting, analysis and projections, including assumptions, for each of the bills and Acts, conducted in accordance with the Treasury Board Guide to Costing.

The motion established a deadline of seven calendar days, which ended on November 24, 2010.

On November 24, the Department of Finance replied to the committee with the following. I will read the department's response in its entirety. It stated:

Projections of corporate profits before taxes and effective corporate income tax rates are a Cabinet confidence. As such, we are not in a position to provide these series to the Committee.

The government provided no further information to the committee before the deadline.

On December 1, 2010, one full week after the deadline, the committee received a letter from the Department of Justice regarding projected costs of the justice bills. Again, I will read the department's response in its entirety. It stated:

The issue of whether there are any costs associated with the implementation of any of the Government's Justice bills is a matter of Cabinet confidence and, as such, the Government is not in a position to provide such information or documents.

On December 7, 2010, after the government had refused to provide the information ordered by the committee by the established deadline, I provided the committee with written notice for a motion by which, if passed, the committee would draw the attention of the House to what appeared to be a breach of its privileges.

On December 10, 2010, perhaps in response to the written notice I had written on December 7, the committee received an additional response from the Department of Finance.

In its response, the department stated:

To the best of its knowledge, the Department of Finance has determined that “series” or projections of corporate profits before taxes or the effective corporate income tax rates have never been previously disclosed. These projections are from a comprehensive economic and fiscal projection that constitutes a Cabinet confidence. As a result, the Department of Finance has not been in a position to provide these "series" to the Committee.

This response appeared somewhat dubious. For, if any member of the House or if any Canadian wishes to Google the phrase “corporate profits before taxes” and restrict their search to the domain of the Department of Finance's website, he or she would get exactly two results: the HTML and PDF versions of “The Economic and Fiscal Update” from November 2005, in which they would find, on page 83, that the previous Liberal government had actually published projections of corporate profits before taxes from 2005 until 2010.

At this time, I would like to seek unanimous consent to table page 83 of “The Economic and Fiscal Update” from November 2005.

Protecting Children from Sexual Predators Act

[Yasmin Ratansi, Liberal, Don Valley East, ON]

Mr. Speaker, as I mentioned previously, there were pieces of legislation that the opposition had already agreed to.

The government tries to say it has a tough on crime agenda, or a crime agenda, and we sit here wondering what crime agenda does it really have. If it were really tough on crime, if it really cared about issues, if it really cared about the safety of Canadians, the safety of kids, it would not be proroguing Parliament on a regular basis, because the legislation on the order paper disappears. Private members' bills do not, but those other ones go to zero.

Yes, there has been an impact on Bill C-54 and Bill C-22, and these are the bills that really need to be reinforced and introduced quickly, because we need to protect kids.

[Yasmin Ratansi, Liberal, Don Valley East, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member's question is disingenuous. Every time the government introduces legislation and opposition parties agree to go along with it, the government prorogues. I think out of 16 pieces of legislation, 10 were passed. Take Bill C-22, for example, which would protect children. It took the government 90 days after the resumption of Parliament to even introduce it.

The Liberals are smart on crime. The Conservatives are called stupid on crime for the basic reason that they cannot keep on introducing the same legislation over and over again, 16 times, without really being committed. The Conservatives are not committed. They keep on introducing the same legislation. I wonder if there is going to be another prorogation.

[Yasmin Ratansi, Liberal, Don Valley East, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the purpose of Bill C-54, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (sexual offences against children), is to increase the mandatory minimum penalties for certain sexual offences with respect to children.

I will digress a little and explain what a child is. A child is any person from the age of 0 to 16 years. It was the Liberal opposition that pushed this age of consent and finally drove the government to pass this legislation.

Bill C-54 was introduced on November 4 by the Minister of Justice. It would increase or impose mandatory minimum penalties for certain sexual offences with respect to children.

When one looks at the various changes to the subsections of the Criminal Code and one looks at the minimum penalties for different offences, it is important that the bill, which we support, goes to committee. A lot of issues need to be addressed and a lot of witnesses need to be called. It is important that everybody speaks from the same page because children are a very important asset. We have heard about heinous things being done to children. Not a day goes by without hearing a report on sexual activities against children. It is important that the bill is sent quickly to committee so we are able to really put into effect protection for children.

The bill would impose mandatory minimum penalties for certain sexual offences with respect to children. It would also prohibit anyone from providing sexually explicit material to a child for the purpose of facilitating the commission of a sexual offence against that child.

With the proliferation of things going back and forth on the Internet at such high speeds, it is very important that we look at this issue very critically. With the providing of sexually explicit materials to a child for the purpose of facilitating the commission of a sexual offence against the child, one needs to figure out how that child would be implicated, how the adult was involved and one needs to figure out through what means this was done.

The bill would also prohibit anyone from using any means of telecommunication, including a computer system, to agree or make arrangements with another person for the purpose of committing a sexual offence against a child. Too often we have seen the ramifications of child pornography where children are used as sexual toys for the pleasure of adults who have absolutely dehumanized them.

This is an important aspect of the bill because we need to understand how we would catch the perpetrators, how we would ensure that children are protected and how we would ensure that a child understands because children aged 0 to 16 are naive and vulnerable. They are our asset that needs to be protected. They believe in people.

I attended a memorial service for the victims of the December 6 massacre. I listened to Stevie Cameron talk about girls, about the fact that children are taught that they can do anything possible, that they are the masters of their destiny, and about how we protect these children and then suddenly somebody takes their life away.

With this bill, I am hoping we are able to not only ensure that the laws are in place but that we have a mechanism in place that will enforce the protection of our children, not only in Canada but worldwide because if we look at what is happening in today's age, we see child trafficking across the globe.

If we look at the sex trade or visitors who go to places like Thailand to have sex with little children, it is pornography that gives them that problem. It is the access to pornographic sites on the Internet that dehumanizes the poor child. Therefore, it is important that when we are looking at all of these aspects we are consistent in our enforcement, in what we do.

The third thing that the bill will do is ensure consistency among those two new offences and the existing offence of luring a child. Here I would like to bring to bear what happened to Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French. They were unsuspecting kids who were lured by a pedophile, and we reflect upon how this bill may have protected them or given a harsher sentence to Karla Homolka.

The fourth thing that the bill would do is expand the list of specified conditions that may be added to prohibition and recognizance orders to include prohibition concerning contact with a person under the age of 16 and the use of the Internet or other digital networks, and expand the list of enumerated offences that may give rise to such orders and prohibitions.

That brings me to what has been happening currently. Our kids go onto computers and they are more computer savvy than their parents. They access Internet sites and the parents are probably not aware of it. These may be latchkey kids or they may be kids whose parents are at home, but when they are locked in their rooms and they are on Facebook, they have no idea who they are communicating with. It is important that we have checks and balances in place that go after the providers of Internet services to ensure the protection of these kids, to ensure the traceability of the information.

The protection of children is a priority for the Liberal Party. As a party, we have stood firmly against the proliferation of online child pornography for over a decade. In 2002, the former Liberal government made it illegal to deliberately access a website containing child pornography, rather than just having possession of such materials, and it was the Liberal government that put into place Cybertip.ca, an online reporting tool for child pornography. Cybertip is an important tool because, as I mentioned, with the Internet and its proliferation, it is important that we know how to trace the source, to ensure that our children are safe, to ensure that we find the children who have been abducted for the purpose of the sex trade, and to find the perpetrators.

Making laws without having the tools or the means to enforce them does not make for good law, so I hope that when this legislation goes before committee, it will be calling on numerous witnesses so that they can have a wholesome discussion and a wholesome production. I am pleased to see that Bill C-54 introduces a series of new minimum penalties for crimes against children, but as I mentioned, the bill has so many other permutations and combinations that it is important that it be looked at properly at committee. The Liberals will be supporting this legislation to go before committee, in order to hear from a variety of witnesses, and we will assess at that time whether the Conservatives have introduced sufficient penalties or whether additional amendments are required.

As I mentioned earlier, what comes to mind here is the Paul Bernardo case. When he and his wife abducted two kids, Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French, it horrified Canadians. It horrified the whole country to know that such heinous crimes could be committed, that we had such disturbed individuals in our midst.

My question would be does the bill do enough to ensure that what happened with Karla Homolka, who was able to reduce her sentence through plea bargaining, cannot happen again? We all want safe communities. We all know that there are sick minds that access the Internet and pornographic sites that dehumanize children and women. This dehumanizing makes victims be treated as objects of pleasure.

If one looks at the five things that the bill has introduced, I would love to see a very strong enforcement tool that would allow police officers, or people who are given the duty to ensure enforcement, to be able to access the material, to be able to trace the source, be able to ensure that protection takes place, be able to facilitate that information whether it be across Canada or with Interpol or other agencies, because this type of crime, as I mentioned earlier, is not only done in Canada but is worldwide.

Children being abducted for the purpose of sex slavery is a horrendous crime and it is a crime against all children. In countries in the developing world where they do not have the same protection we need to ensure that when we enforce legislation we have a global approach to it because the globe is where we need to look at. A troubled mind will do anything.

We need to also invest in areas like mental health and education. The Liberals unconditionally supported Bill C-22, which would make the reporting of Internet child pornography mandatory for Internet service providers and other persons providing Internet services. In fact, we believe that the government took too long to bring this to bear and we need to ensure that if we are serious about crimes against children, if we are serious about protecting them, if we are serious about ensuring that children have safe lives, that we live in safe communities, that we are not always looking over our shoulder, or over the Internet to ensure the safety of our children, then we need to see that Bill C-54 be sent quickly to committee and be looked after.

Today, December 6, is a day of remembering the 14 women who were gunned down by a crazy person. These were students at university. Violence against women is not just violence against women themselves, but it is violence against children as well. When a woman is abused it affects the child and the psychology of that child. It affects the whole family. It makes the family dysfunctional. Violence against women that results in death at the hands of a spouse, or common-law partner, or a deranged person still makes society unsafe.

It is important that the government not speak from both sides of its mouth. If we want smart solutions for violent crimes then we need to ensure that our gun laws are strict, that registration is there, that women and children are protected.

I would urge the government not to just see things in silos but to take a holistic approach to this bill. I would ask the government to ensure that we have a wholesome discussion on the bill and that we find a solution relevant to the whole community.

[Bob Dechert, Conservative, Mississauga—Erindale, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for his question and the statement he made earlier today on Bill C-22 that all hon. members agree and have an interest in making our laws more restrictive to ensure that no child is ever sexually abused in Canada.

With respect to his specific question, I can assure him that the department did look at the way the definitions of child pornography mesh with the provisions of material to a child for the purposes of grooming the child for sexual abuse. It is the view of the government and the department that both will withstand any charter challenge.

Protecting Children from Online Sexual Exploitation Act

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to address Bill C-22 at third reading.

As always, it is important that we recognize the support for the bill, throughout many years actually. All parties are supportive of the bill, so it clearly will go through. With the opportunity we have for the short amount of debate we will have on it, probably finishing today, we need to set, in context, how it has come to be this far into the process, why it has taken so long and the usefulness of the procedures that we mandate will have.

There is a big component here, I would hope, both in this debate, as Canadians listen to it and have up to this point, and on an ongoing basis, and that is the public educational aspect to the bill. If it is to be useful, we need greater co-operation from individuals who use the Internet on a regular basis.

To set the context, the bill requires companies that provide servers for the Internet to report what they consider to be child pornography to a specific agency, yet to be established. It will be identified and all service providers will be made aware of the agency. That is the first element.

Second, companies will have to report to the agency and if they are then, either by the agency or by a police forces, advised that they believe it is child pornography and that an investigation will take place, they will have to retain the material for a 21 day period. That will give police and prosecutors sufficient time to get a warrant to access the data and to trace back this material to its source. Our prosecutors need the 21 days to get a judicial warrant to get access to that information.

The bill is essentially about that.

To set it in its context of why this is so important, the first thing I would point out is an NDP member had a private member's bill dealing with these aspects, and a couple more, way back in the late 1990s. The subsequent Liberal governments did nothing to move on this, and I think I am accurate in that. If they did, they introduced a bill really late, in 2004, 2005. The Conservative government picked it up in 2006, but we are now in almost 2011. In fact, this clearly will not likely become law until 2011 by the time it gets through the Senate and royal assent. That is a full five years.

What has happened in that period of time is more children have been abused. Our police officers, prosecutors and judges have all been hamstrung, to a significant degree, in dealing with child pornography on the Internet because they have not had these tools. In that period of time, as much as the justice minister in particular and the Prime Minister stand regularly in the House and in public and accuse the opposition parties of slowing down bills, this one included, the reality is the government went to an election. Even though it said it would go to a fixed date election, it broke that promise and stalled the bill. We had two prorogations and both times this bill or its predecessors were stalled as well. In effect we have lost a full five years when we could have had this law. In fact, we should have had it as much as 10 years ago, and that is a real shame.

In terms of the ability of our police forces in particular, the bill would allow our police enforcement agencies to get at this material.

It is important to understand something else that happened in Canada. Paul Gillespie, a police officer in Toronto, was trying to deal with child pornography and child sexual abuse generally. He became really frustrated by the lack of technology. On his own initiative, and he is really a Canadian hero in this regard, he sent a letter to Bill Gates of Microsoft and said that police officers needed help, that they could not trace the material, which has exploded on the Internet.

We have always had child pornography. We could go back to ancient Greece, ancient Egypt and find child pornography. However, with the advent of the Internet and easy access by billions of people around the Globe, child pornographers put this material on to the Internet in huge volume.

Paul Gillespie found that the police could not trace this material back. Most of this material does not come out of Canada. A chunk of it comes out of the United States, and we can disagree on how much, and a large chunk of it comes out of eastern Europe and parts of Asia. Mr. Gillespie was trying to trace this back to the source, but this material, at times, will go through as many as 50 different servers.

He said to Bill Gates that the police did not have the technology to trace this back, that there were all kinds of walls built into the Internet that the police could not break through and he asked for help. To their great credit, Mr. Gates and his corporation provided resources to the tune of about $10 million in both actual dollars and in his staff. They built a software program with which we are now able to trace back, quite successfully, this material to its very source.

We have the problem, and I will be quite frank on this. When we have traced it back to various countries, there is no ability or, in some cases, no willingness on their part to shut these servers down and to prosecute the people who put it up originally. That is an ongoing problem. We need international co-operation. However, Canada has now become known as the country that developed, with the help of Mr. Gates and his company, the technology to trace it back.

Back to the bill and why it is so important. The service providers now have a legislated mandate that if they identify child pornography, they pass that information on to the new agency that will be created. One of the agencies we believe will be in competition for this role is the Cybertip.ca in Manitoba. Cybertip.ca was modelled after a program that started in the U.K. A centre was established in Winnipeg that regularly searches the Internet to try to find these sources and then passes that on to police agencies to try to track it down. I believe the federal funding for Cybertip.ca came in 2004, 2005 under the then Liberal government. I remember at the time criticizing the government for not giving it enough money.

We heard from the members of Cybertip.ca. They testified before the committee on this bill. They acknowledged that there was a good deal of additional work they would like to do to identify and trace this material and help the police in that regard.

Essentially people call Cybertip.ca to say that they have found a site with child pornography. Cybertip.ca then looks at it and identifies it to determine if it is prosecutable. It is passed on to the Canadian police forces that then pass it on to international ones.

Cybertip.ca has been very successful, but again, it is not properly funded. There is a lot of work it would like to do. When the director came to committee, she made it quite clear that it could easily double its work force to cope with that huge volume of child pornography on the Internet.

This is one of the potential agencies that may be identified under the regulations of the legislation as the agency to report to. I expect there may be other agencies that would bid in once the criteria and mandate for the agency is set up under the regulations.

This is a very positive development in terms of fighting child pornography. There is not an individual in the House, and very few Canadians, who are not totally revolted by this material. In a previous bill that dealt with the issue of child luring, some material was shown to the committee in camera. I have also had exposure to this through my practice while doing some criminal work. It is absolutely revolting to see, especially when it is very young children, babies who cannot even walk yet, involved with adults sexually abusing them.

It is absolutely crucial that we move on this. I am very critical of the current government and the previous government that it has taken us this long to get to this stage.

Our police officers can significantly move forward because of the ability to now gather this material through the service providers. They see, as much as everybody else does, that they will have an effect. There will be a greater number of people reporting on the existence of this material and where it exists. A secondary part of this bill will be the ability to get a quick search warrant to access the address. Through the website, which would already have been identified, they will be able to trace it back because of the software program developed through Microsoft. This will make it much more effective in fighting this scourge.

We cannot downplay the huge volume. It is speculated that not only child pornography but pornography overall takes up as much as 50% of all the material that is on the Internet internationally, and child pornography forms a significant part of that.

When the bill is passed, the government and the country will be able to move very dramatically. We will continue to take a leadership role on this. That leadership role is recognized internationally. At the international level, we need to continue to press other governments that have not been willing, or that may not have the capacity to go after these service providers to get to the sites from where the child pornography comes. We have to be as forceful as we can.

The estimate I have seen, and this is reasonably accurate, is less than 1% or 2% of this material is produced in Canada because of some previous legislation we passed and because of the technology Microsoft developed for us. Since that technology came online, it has been available to people like Mr. Gillespie. I refer to him as Mr. Gillespie because he has left the police force and has set up a non-profit agency to continue to fight child pornography.

From the time that technology became available, we have identified a few sites in Canada where child pornography is produced and we have shut them down.

In terms of advocating at the international level, we need to pressure governments, particularly in eastern Europe and Asia, to be more proactive at investigating these sites in their countries, shutting them down and prosecuting the producers.

A significant element has developed, again mostly out of eastern Europe and Asia, of organized crime producing this material and making millions if not billions of dollars off it. In all cases we are seeing children, sometimes at a very young age being abused because of the pornographers.

I want to mention a couple of concerns that I have about the legislation, and I would urge the government to monitor this.

One of the provisions in the legislation is that, if the service providers do not comply with those two responsibilities, one, to report when they identify it and, two, to save the material for that 21-day period, they can be prosecuted.

I must say that the penalties contained in the bill seem to be quite mild when compared with other penalties that the government has imposed in the child pornography area. There seems to be some deference on the part of the government because these are corporate criminals. I have some difficulty with that and we will have to monitor it.

The other problem with it is that I do not understand the rationale behind this. The government put a maximum, a two-year limit, on the time when providers can be charged. It is certainly not beyond the pale that we would identify a number of service providers after two years who knew this type of material was on their sites and did not report it, or they did report it but did not keep the material.

In the secondary case, we will know and we will be able to charge them within that two-year time limit. But for those service providers who identify material and do not report it, it is quite conceivable, almost a certainty I would think, that we will find that some of them have done it for more than two years and we will not be able to prosecute them. I heard no argument from the government as to why it picked the arbitrary period of two years. Other sections in the Criminal Code do not have a two-year time limit in terms of the right to prosecute.

I raised another concern when I spoke to this bill at second reading, and that was that small service providers would not be able to comply. I just want to assure the House and Canadians generally that they are a small percentage of the overall market. The large service providers take up as much as 90% to 95% of the market.

We asked the association representing small service providers to attend committee and tell us if it had any concerns about the bill. The association said there was no need for it to appear because it was satisfied that small service providers could comply with the law. That has been taken care of, as far as we can tell.

This is a very good bill, with the exception of our one concern over the length of time to charge and prosecute. We will have to monitor that.

It is clear, from the evidence we heard on the bill and on other legislation we worked on with regard to child pornography and child sexual abuse more generally, that we have a responsibility because of the leadership role we have taken up to this point. Slow as it has been on some occasions, we are still further ahead than a lot of other countries. We have to continue at the international level to press governments to build a capacity to fight this scourge and, if they do identify it, have the political will to prosecute vigorously to shut the sites down and prosecute the producers of the material.

The House resumed from November 24 consideration of the motion that Bill C-22, An Act respecting the mandatory reporting of Internet child pornography by persons who provide an Internet service, be read the third time and passed.

Business of the House

[John Baird, Conservative, Leader of the Government in the House of Commons and Minister of the Environment]

Mr. Speaker, we will continue today with the opposition day motion by our friends from the New Democratic Party. Pursuant to an order made earlier today, the vote on the NDP motion will be deferred until the end of government orders on Tuesday.

Tomorrow we will consider a great bill proposed by the Minister of Justice, Bill C-22, protecting children from online sexual exploitation. The Minister of Justice has another great bill, Bill C-54, protecting children from sexual predators, which we will then debate. We will then move to Bill C-33, the safer railways act, on which the Minister of State for Transport has done a lot of very good work. Next is Bill C-21, the standing up for victims of white collar crime act, which is another strong justice bill brought forward by the Attorney General of Canada.

Next week we will continue with business from Friday.

I am pleased to report that there are ongoing constructive, and even harmonious, discussions among the parties, so the list of business that I mentioned may change.

Next week, each and every day we will be debating great bills that will do great things for Canada.

Also I will return to the House at a later time to designate the last allotted day.

[Marc Lemay, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Thank you.

Good afternoon, minister. I heard everything you said. It is quite clear we will never be able to support this. That's why we're in favour of certain amendments. I'm especially referring to the short titles that are not consistent with what the bill states.

For example, the short title of Bill C-16 is "Ending House Arrest for Property and Other Serious Crimes by Serious and Violent Offenders Act". That's not what the bill refers to. We voted against Bills S-6 and C-22 for the same reason. Your good parliamentary secretary came to my constituency to say that we had voted against it. However, that's not true; we voted against the short title, which is completely unrelated to the bill.

If you want to discuss the real issues, we'll do that. On page 180, the total amount of Funding to support victim services and violence prevention in aboriginal communities and to increase national support for missing persons investigations for votes 1 and 5 is $2,449,000. This is a request from aboriginal women. I know that because I sit on the Standing Committee on Indian and Northern Affairs.

Will these amounts be paid directly to the aboriginal communities or will they be allocated to police departments to help increase searches? The problem is victim searches. What do those amounts represent?

[John Baird, Conservative, Leader of the Government in the House of Commons and Minister of the Environment]

Mr. Speaker, before I respond to the hon. member's question, I want to say that at our House leaders meeting just two weeks ago, the government raised the issue of one of the Liberal members calling a minister of the Crown a “slime” five times.

The House leader for the Liberal Party is seeking to raise the decorum and the quality level of debate in this place. The member is a senior member of the Liberal shadow cabinet. Before I answer the normal Thursday question, I wonder if the member could update us on where we are on that.

The House leader of the official opposition has also been very passionate in wanting to reduce the amount of heckling in this place and yet we was rather egregiously heckling the Minister of Finance yesterday on Walkerton. I spoke with the member who represents that constituency and that community takes great offence at the continuing vilification of the name of their town. Maybe we will get that next week with the slime comment.

Today we will continue the opposition motion from the Bloc Québécois.

Friday we will debate Bill C-41, strengthening military justice, and Bill C-43, the RCMP labour modernization.

On Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday of next week we will call Bill C-49, action on human smuggling; Bill C-47, sustaining Canada's economic recovery; Bill C-22, protecting children from online sexual exploitation; Bill C-29, safeguarding Canadians' personal information; Bill C-41, strengthening military justice; Bill C-43, the RCMP labour modernization; Bill C-54, child sexual offences; Bill C-33, safer railways act; Bill C-8, Canada-Jordan free trade agreement; and, Bill C-20, an action plan for the National Capital Commission.

Thursday will be an allotted day for our friends in the New Democratic Party.

Protecting Children from Online Sexual Exploitation Act

[Brian Murphy, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise on Bill C-22, which is really a child pornography reporting bill. The emphasis is on reporting.

I am a little disturbed that, from speeches inside and outside of this House, in press clippings and in hyperbole at committee, people might have been left with the impression that this is a tool that will eradicate child pornography and make great strides towards stopping child pornography. In fact, it does very little.

I know the Conservatives like to have short titles for bills, such as “saving the community from everything bad” and stuff like that. This bill should really have been called the “too little too late act” in attempting to try to curb child pornography. I will explain why.

In 2006, I remember well, the Liberals were defeated and the Conservatives were elected. That is almost five years ago now. There will be a fifth anniversary, January 23. The Conservatives should look at that fifth anniversary and suggest to themselves in the mirror, “Mirror, mirror on the wall, have we delivered the laws fairest to all?”

No, they have not delivered laws. Here we have a law that there is no substantial opposition to. There is no opposition to this bill, and we are sitting here five years later.

In the spring of 2010, because of prorogation and elections and not making these housekeeping-type bills priorities, the parliamentary secretary at that time said:

The government is committed to doing everything it can to put a stop to this growing problem. That is why we are reintroducing in the House this legislative measure to create a uniform mandatory reporting regime across Canada that would apply to all Internet service providers.

If the government is doing everything it can, it should have done it sooner. It should have followed provincial examples. It should have followed international examples. The government would not have had any opposition.

The reason the Conservative government did not do everything it could is that it was preoccupied with a political agenda. It was preoccupied with prorogation, and it let the ball drop on this matter.

This is a growing problem. The government had to reintroduce it. It is not because the government is concerned about this, but it had to reintroduce the bill because it had Parliament crash, to use computer talk. The Conservatives crashed the CPU of Parliament, which is the sitting of Parliament, by prorogation.

Why is this problem specifically for Canada's management of the issue of posting Internet sites?

It is because, as table 1 from the Library of Parliament brief suggests, we are in the top five child pornography website host countries in the whole world. Would the Conservative Party, as a custodian of government, want to be in the top five?

We would not, but we are. We are number three. The percentage of sites hosted by Canada, which in the realm of world populations is not the largest country, is 9% of child pornography websites.

It is a problem. It needed to be addressed on January 24, 2006. It was not. Following that, it needed to go through the collapses of prorogation and be put on the front burner. It was not.

What did the provinces do? What did the people of Canada do through their other elected representatives?

They filled the vacuum. In September 2008, now over two years ago, federal and provincial ministers of justice and attorneys general, responsible for justice in Canada, agreed that the federal legislation to establish mandatory reporting of online child pornography by ISPs was necessary.

This did not even come from the federal government. The federal government should have been aware that being number three in the world is not a good list to be on with respect to hosting child pornography websites. It is not a good thing. The federal government should have been more proactive. Instead, it let the provinces suggest that they needed the federal government to enact legislation.

Here we are in the fall of 2010 finally looking at this legislation, finally speaking to it, agreeing to it and getting it through. In the meantime, this legislation has been leapfrogged by others provincially and internationally. They were more successful, penetrating, effective, coercive and co-operative with respect to the public engagement of reporting child pornography sites than this bill.

We have not even passed the bill yet and it is antiquated. How do we feel about that as lawmakers?

We will talk about the bill but the message for the government is that there will be many occasions when it will find no opposition in this House to a bill that seeks to have more reporting of Internet child pornography sites.

Therefore, with some dispatch and a little more efficiency and concern for the actual laws of the country, will the government please, on other fronts, get to legislation that people care about it.

In June, I said:

I would like to express, though, how troubled I am that it has taken the government so long to do something about this important topic.

We are now in November. It has been almost four and a half years and the government has done nothing. The victims of these crimes cannot wait and the government's tactics have deprived many children the free and happy lives they deserve.

Many of us have children and many of us provide the best we can for them and think that we are providing for them a free and happy life.

Those statements and the rest of what I said in June apply now. Let us get on with it and pass this bill.

Earlier in the debate, the parliamentary secretary said that the government was committed to doing everything it could to put a stop to Internet child pornography. In a response to a question, he also said that Canada was a leader in this field by virtue of Bill C-22, which has not been passed in five years, faced with the fact that we are number three on a list of all countries hosting Internet sites and based on the fact that he appears to be either not aware of or at least not disclosing. with respect to very good questions from my friend from the Bloc and my colleague from Scarborough—Agincourt, what is going on in the rest of the world.

What is going on in the rest of the world has already gone on because, in 2002, the sexual exploitation and other abuse of children statute 18 USC chapter 110 was passed. Unlike this bill, which would only puts an obligation on the ISP, the bill in the United States makes it also a duty to have anyone providing telecommunications services to have the same duty.

Let us think of that in a country like Canada where every body that provides telecommunications services, not just ISPs, has a duty to report the existence of child pornography , if it comes to his or her knowledge, and of doing something about it. That is a broader law than the Canadian government has introduced under Bill C-22.

The question that was put to the elected officials at our committee was why we had not broadened the federal legislation to put a more serious duty on other persons other than ISPs. Why should there not be a duty on the general public to report a child pornography Internet site?

There is an obligation under the Criminal Code to report crimes when witnessed. Why is there not an obligation on persons who see these sites? Why do we not do this in Canada? At least the United States, some eight years before, was heading in that direction. Australia, in 1995, amended its code and has had a law similar to the United States law for that a period of time.

We are playing catch-up. Even this bill would not get us halfway to the leaders in the field.

We want to support the bill but we want to blast the government, as we did at committee, for not using broader powers that exist under the Constitution to put duties on average citizens, duties at least on all telecommunications service providers to report. The only way we will be able to crack down on child pornography Internet sites is to know about them and be informed about them.

Great groups like cybertip.ca, and in fact the RCMP which has divisions devoted to this type of crime, are under-lawed and understaffed, but that is another issue. They do not have the legal basis to crack down on the sites that they know about and they are not being aided in the way they would be if we had legislation similar to the American and Australian legislation in this instance.

I want to move from the international scene to talk about what happened in Canada. As I mentioned, in the fall of 2008, attorneys general came to Ottawa, at which time the government would have been two years on the rack, and suggested that we should have federal legislation covering this very egregious problem. It is now two years and two months later and it is finally here.

What did the provinces do in the meantime? What would we do if we were a premier or a minister of justice in a province? We would probably look at what the we could do as province to do something in the vacuum created by the inaction and the incessant political pandering of the federal government.

I will give a couple of examples of what the provinces did. Nova Scotia enacted the child pornography reporting act which came into effect in 2010 and was enacted in 2008. The province took some time in 2008 to act on the recommendations of the provincial and territorial governments when they came to Ottawa and acted fairly swiftly. That act now states that a reporting entity shall be responsible to further up the investigation of complaints it receives from people in general.

That is a very important section because, after reading this, the people in Nova Scotia will feel that their province has done more about the problem than their federal government. It says that there is a duty to report by every person, not just an ISP, not just a telco operator, not just someone involved in scanning the Internet to see what is involved for a police force, but “Every person who reasonably believes that a representation or material is child pornography shall promptly report to a reporting entity any information”. It is irrespective of confidentiality or privilege because it is a crime.

The crime is committed because a child has been photographed or depicted and those depictions are victimizations in a crime in itself, let alone the transmission of that image across the bandwidth in this country. This is a brave and, so far, completely legal and constitutional act on behalf of the Province of Nova Scotia.

We hear so much on this side about how fighting crime is the feather in the Conservatives' cap. It is what they are good at. They fight crime. If they were really fighting crime in this instance, they would have done a better job. They would have convinced Department of Justice officials that a federal act could at least go as far as the United States and Australia in touching telcos.

They might even say that when a crime is visited upon a child or person depicted on a pornography site, that is a crime that touches the national interest. It is not merely the interest of the child being protected and it is not merely the domain of the provincial government under the Child and Family Services Act and that power in a section of the Constitution. It is clearly a criminal justice issue.

Where were these titans of crime-fighting when they went to the Department of Justice and said that they had some issues with getting a stable government and were preoccupied with keeping power and getting the ads out on the nightly news?

What we is a powerful legislation like the one in Australia, in the U.S. or, even better, the one I mentioned in Nova Scotia. Manitoba's legislation is very similar. Those are two jurisdictions that said, “Elected persons in Manitoba and Nova Scotia, we can't wait for the federal government”.

I am not sure, because there have been so many changes, but I think I am being completely non-partisan. There is not a Liberal government in those two provinces and there has not been for a while, so we are talking about NDP and Conservative governments. They took the bull by the horns and said that they would protect the children in their provinces because they could not wait for the federal government to invoke a federal criminal justice power in the legislation before them.

What we have now in Bill C-22 is something we can all agree on. However, we need to get the message out there that this is too little and it is too late because other jurisdictions have leap-frogged us. The bill is a step in the right direction. I do not want to leave my remarks by being 100% critical of the government. Making the reporting of child sexual abuse images mandatory for ISPs is a good step. It is a good tool to put in the hands of law enforcement. As I said before, groups that came forward during the parliamentary hearings process would be very able to administer the law.

We might have one criticism. The Conservatives had five years but they could not even put the governing aspects of the bill, which is who reports to whom and what gets done, which are the guts of the bill, into the bill. The bill says that subject to regulations we will sort this all out later. My goodness, they have had five years to get this together, would we not think that they could have picked an agency like Cybertip or a division of the RCMP? Instead of regulation, which to us is uncertain and will not be effected or enacted immediately, could they not have put in this fairly short bill the details of which agency gets reported to and what is expected of that reporting agency? It does not seem to be that difficult because Nova Scotia and Manitoba already have it in their acts.

I always say that when there is an issue like this, sometimes we need to look east to the Maritimes, and Nova Scotia has a regime that is working. Nova Scotia went through the constitutional argument of whether it had the power and it does. The federal Conservative government never went through the rigours of that but it presented a bill to us. I suppose we should all fall on our swords on this side of the House and say that it was our fault because we did not propose amendments. We did not propose amendments because it would take the bill beyond the scope.

We are not the government yet but if we were the government we would have had legislation like this done much quicker. We need to keep in mind that the growth of Internet porn sites is exponential. By 2008, every first law officer in this country, the attorney generals and ministers of justice, agreed that something needed to be done and, in some cases, they did. When they expected the federal government to do it, the federal government did not deliver. It is just delivering now in November.

The bill requires Internet service providers to report child pornography to a designated reporting entity. We heard evidence that the RCMP or Cybertip.ca might be those entities. It is true that federal legislation can only provide a mandatory duty where it finds a nexus. As suggested in my speech, I do not think the nexus is just with child and family services provincial power. It is with a criminal activity or a criminal law power. Although not everyone in the House is a lawyer, I think we all recognize that taping, making a video, photographing or the image taking of a young person in a pornographic situation in itself is victimization and a crime of the first order. The transmission of that is also a crime of the first order.

It think there is a positive duty on every Canadian, at least all those involved in the telecommunications services, the Internet service provider businesses and, by and large the Internet providers, to report those crimes. That is where the government has fallen down and that is why we are urging the Conservatives, on a completely non-partisan basis but a basis that says yes, to get this bill passed. We need to get on with it. We need to do something more effective and more in stream with the rest of the world and now the rest of the country.

As the Conservatives often say, but it rings so true in this case, “let us get the job done” with respect to the reporting and the cracking down on child Internet pornography sites.