Status of Women Committee on Nov. 21st, 2016

[Patricia Cartes]

I know I keep saying great question, but they really are all great questions.

You're correct. That idea of getting offline or stopping using the platform doesn't work, and by the way, I rarely share this publicly, but I was a victim of a high-profile harassment case in Ireland, and the first thing that the An Garda Síochána, which is the Irish police, said to me was, “Well, you need to get off these platforms.” I said, “Well, I work in them, so I can't just get off the platform.”

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Yes.

[Patricia Cartes]

I know how terrible it feels when that is the only word of advice you get, especially because you're made to feel like you were in the wrong, and also, by no means should you change the way you have been interacting. That's something that people like my family would say. They'd say, “Well, just don't tweet publicly.” That shouldn't be the case.

We have just published a guide with the National Network to End Domestic Violence, NNEDV, which I will also share with the clerk for the purposes of the committee, that really highlights all of the options that you have. You can protect your tweets so that you're not tweeting publicly, but you can also do other things like not sharing your geo-location data if you are worried that somebody may be tracking your movements. Actually, on Twitter, by default we strike the geo-location data of your images, so unless you change the settings, if you were to share an image here right now, it wouldn't share that geo-location data, and that's something that we do precisely to protect the privacy of the users, but also to protect victims who have said time and time again that their location had been disclosed unnecessarily by using images.

We also recommend using your community to support you. That's why we launched the bystander reports. I know how triggering it can be to have to go through each one of those abusive tweets to report them yourself manually, and that's why we now enable the community to report on behalf of the person who is being abused. In that line, within the block function that I mentioned before, you don't have to manually block the people who are abusing you or making you feel uncomfortable. You can also ask others to block them, and you can now export the list of blocks. We designed that feature precisely with communities in mind that are being targeted on a regular basis. In my case, I asked my sisters to go through all of the accounts, block them, and then my sisters exported the list that I was able to import to my account. That's something you can do from your account settings on block.

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Awesome.

[Patricia Cartes]

We will continue to look at features like this, how to report the violent threats to law enforcement in a way that you have all of the information printed by the time you go to law enforcement. These are just small tweaks within the features that we think make it easier for the victim.

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Excellent.

[Patricia Cartes]

I think what's most important is to continue to work with groups like NNEDV, and sit down with victims to go through the experiences that they've had, and see what educational materials we can build, but also how we can modify the features so that victims can still feel safe and at home using this technology.

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Excellent. Thank you very much.

I know I used them, probably a week after I was elected, so we understand those things.

What do you think is the role of the government when it comes to social media, algorithms, and a variety of things like that? Since you are global, have you seen some best practices? I love the SPOC, that's exceptional, but is there anything that other countries are doing that we should be adopting so that we can make it better for Canadian women and young girls?

[Patricia Cartes]

A lot of countries have felt this pressure, and maybe have been tempted to legislate against online bullying and abuse. I think it's very hard to legislate because it's not always black and white, and you don't always know who is in the wrong and who is in the right, especially if two parties are engaging in an online battle.

One country that I think has followed the right approach is Australia. In 2014 they were discussing the criminalization of cyber-bullying, and after some discussions in the house of Parliament, that led to the creation of an eSafety commissioner. The eSafety commissioner's office was initially going to look at abuse reports and have a very specific time frame for companies to respond to those abuse cases. I think they very quickly realized that they could be really overwhelmed by the number of reports, just like we feel on a daily basis.

What they do now is they provide a public hotline. You can report abuse to them, and then they will work with the platform. We have a specific mechanism for the eSafety commissioner in Australia to bring abuse to our attention. We take action on the cases, but also on an ongoing basis we look at the creation of documentation to educate, based on the issues we see Australian society has experienced. If we see abuse against aboriginal communities, if we see a rise of hate speech, we look for ways to fight that through education.

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Awesome.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Excellent.

Now we're going to go to Mr. Fraser for five minutes.

[Sean Fraser, Liberal, Central Nova, NS]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

I am going to yield a few moments of my time to Mr. Serré before I begin.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

Thank you so much for coming.

You mentioned freedom of speech. You mentioned lack of staffing. We've heard here by victims—by mothers, by teenagers, young people—that the Twitter platform has re-abused them, re-victimized them. I know you have done some work here in the last week. You have announced the blocking and the muting. That's good progress moving forward. It's the first time you have actually made some major changes. But there's more to be done.

I was just wondering. Are you looking at more? Because it's not right to say, “Oh, it's freedom of speech” or “Oh, I had a lack of staff.” You have a platform. It's out there in the public. It's being utilized to victimize young children, time and time again. You have a responsibility.

We have a responsibility, too, as legislators. I think legislation might be important if a private company doesn't do some of the work.

Can you expand a bit about that?

[Patricia Cartes]

I don't think the day will ever come when we say that we're done with safety, that we are a safe platform now, so everybody just enjoy it.

I mentioned before that when we first launched you couldn't upload images. Therefore we were not seeing the violations of privacy that we would see in this day in age.

I think Twitter as a company was maybe surprised by the reach of its platform. The platform grew in a way that the company didn't grow in. Perhaps we were not “safety by design” from the get-go. I actually find myself being the party-pooper in the meetings with engineering at times, where, if they say we're going to enable the sharing of images in direct messages, I am the one who has to put up a hand to say, how about child sexual exploitation?

I think there's been a really big shift within the company where we now think about safety first. This is for any feature that I have seen discussed in the last year, and I'm not just talking about safety, I'm talking about anything that is rolled out on the site. When we rolled out Twitter Moments, we asked, how can Twitter Moments be abused? How do we make sure that they don't get abused? How do we build a reporting mechanism within Twitter Moments? That shift has taken place, and I think it's a normal shift.

I mentioned having worked at Google and Facebook before. When I joined Facebook I was the second person in Europe. There were no rules. There were no reporting mechanisms. I do think they're one of the safer platforms out there right now. I think this is the regular progression of a platform. I completely agree that we have a responsibility not just to our users but to people who encounter our content. My grandmother is not on Twitter, but is following hashtags left, right, and centre, and pinging me about hate speech that she sees on those hashtags.

We need to empower the users with better controls, but we need to take more severe actions when violations have taken place.

I started talking about the rules explaining that while we empower people to speak truth to power, that means little if they are scared. You can expect to see more changes in the next six months. It's a severe overhaul of how we have processed abuse reports before. I mentioned working on transparency of reporting. We want to make sure that the users know what happens when they click “report”, what action we're taking so they can appeal decisions. It's only going to get better.

I know that we have asked the world to be too patient. It's been too long. It's not acceptable. We did not want our platform to become a platform of abuse. I can assure you that every time I'm back in San Francisco, and I sit down with the abuse team, and I escalate content to them, it breaks their hearts. These people are working 24/7 to make sure that the abuse is not online, it's not live on the platform, and their own families don't have to see it.

I apologize for any re-victimization and anybody who has been abused through the platform. I think working constructively with civil society, and government is what's going to lead to a safer platform, and most importantly, to a safer society because unfortunately some of these prejudices do exist offline. They are very hard to eradicate.

[Sean Fraser, Liberal, Central Nova, NS]

Just quickly, we have less than a minute to go.

You mentioned there was some success with MediaSmarts and Hollaback! Could you perhaps very briefly describe some of the best partnerships you've had with community organizations and provide anything supplementary by way of follow-up in writing?

[Patricia Cartes]

Absolutely.

By way of writing, we just published today a blog post about position of strength. It's our women and safety empowerment initiative that we brought to Toronto last month. We're looking forward to bringing it to Ottawa, and to continuing the movement in Canada. You'll be able to see more about that on the link that we will provide.

With MediaSmarts we have worked a lot on media literacy. We are now working on the creation of guides. We have a number of one pagers that we have been able to distribute in Canada in French and English with the help of MediaSmarts.

I mentioned that they're really leading the way on digital citizenship, most importantly, empowering young people to share how to use the technology in a safe way, which will be very important.

And also there's a new non-profit that you should all be aware of, High Resolves. They were born in Australia. They look at doing counter-narratives with young people. With them we're looking at how to fight specific incidents of hate speech with young people using or harvesting the power of Twitter.

[Sean Fraser, Liberal, Central Nova, NS]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Excellent. Thank you very much. We appreciate so much of your testimony and the work that you are doing to make the platform safer and to address the issues that we have. I wanted to let the committee know that we did hear from Hollaback! We will be hearing from MediaSmarts, so you'll have a chance to ask some more questions.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Did we already hear from them?

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

I thought they were coming for the algorithms.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

No, MediaSmarts is coming for the algorithms.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Thank you very much. We're now going to suspend while we change up for the next panel.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

I'll call the meeting back to order.

For our panel discussion this afternoon we're really pleased to have a number of witnesses with us. We have from the Canadian Council for Refugees, Loly Rico, the president, who is with us today by video conference. We have from the Native Women's Association of Canada, Lynne Groulx, Marilee Nowgesic, and Francyne Joe, who is the president. From Babely Shades we have Awar Obob.

We are going to give each of our groups seven minutes to speak and we'll start with the Canadian Council for Refugees.

[Loly Rico, President, Canadian Council for Refugees]

Good afternoon.

My name is Loly Rico and I'm the president of the Canadian Council for Refugees. We are a national organization and we accommodate more than 180 members. We do most of our work as an advocacy group for the rights of immigrants and refugees.

Thank you for the invitation. Our focus today will be in relation to policies and practices on immigration. I want to bring up different points. One is on the conditional permanent resident status. We welcome that the government is going to remove it for next year, but one of the things we have been seeing is that in the meantime they are still implementing the regulation and on that, as you know, there are even reports saying it makes women and children more vulnerable.

We in the CCR are asking the government publicly to commit to stop pursuing this and to remove the condition, even though it is going to be finished next year. Maybe they can stop doing that.

The other issue we want to bring up is about the spousal sponsorship issue, which I want to focus on a little bit more, because the processing time in Canada is too long. Sometimes we have reports from our members that the women stay in abusive relationships because there are no other options for them to get out of abusive relationships without being deported.

We also want to bring up the human trafficking situation, especially focused on youth, on young women who are the victims of human trafficking, and especially in international cases. The government has a temporary protection form, the temporary resident permit, but there is no option for permanent residency. This limits them and puts them more in a situation of vulnerability to stay in the trafficking situation. We are looking for the government to have legislation where they can give more permanent residence.

I would like to deal with family reunification, for the long term. I want to bring up that when the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act was implemented in 2002, there was a consideration of gender-based analysis in the policies and there was involvement of the community. In the past, the Canadian Council for Refugees has been in communication because even Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada had a gender-based analysis unit and started talking about different regulations. At this moment there is no unit and they lost that possibility and they stopped doing this analysis. I've given you the examples about spousal sponsorship and conditional permanent residence. We are recommending to the committee and to the government to go back and have a gender-based analysis unit in Immigration and to have a consultation with the community.

The other item that we want to bring up is about enforcement, which we are looking at with the Canada Border Services Agency. I can give you an example, a case where a woman is without status because she's in a spousal sponsorship and that's how the abuse starts. When the police is called, because the person doesn't have status, she is immediately reported to the Canada Border Services Agency. At the end sometimes there's no protection for the woman. She is deported.

We have been asking the Canada Border Services Agency to have a violence against women policy. We are looking for a possibility that you can bring into your study that there has to be a violence against women policy in relation to the Canada Border Services Agency and in relation to Immigration.

That's our position. Again, we thank you for the invitation.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Thank you very much.

We're going to hear now from the Native Women's Association of Canada.

Lynne and Marilee, you have seven minutes.