Status of Women committee  Our stance is the idea that all children have the right to be protected and safe. When we run into this whole conversation about encryption and who should have access to what information, it becomes a larger, very difficult conversation. When we set this up, we knew that if it wasn't a voluntary system, we would have pushback from many civil libertarians, who would come back and say “Where's the judicial oversight in what you're doing?”

Status of Women committee  I know you can't. This is probably the million-dollar problem. The biggest issue we face as an organization is the challenges with the various provincial educational systems. As you would all know, where there isn't any jurisdiction federally, the biggest problem is getting consistency in the educational programming and making sure that it's being used.

Status of Women committee  Thank you.

Status of Women committee  Signy can speak to that. Here's one of the issues we see. It goes back into—and I think this is a larger conversation that we, as a global community, have not reconciled—what the public expects in terms of privacy versus this conversation about public safety.

Status of Women committee  We cannot be telling Canadian parents that they have to own this, that this is their burden. It's impossible. Anyone who's raised a child absolutely knows that part of the time you're snowed. You're not going to know everything, nor should you.

Status of Women committee  We have resources to address this exact issue you're talking about. It is not simple. We recognize that it's an ongoing educational process. What a 13-year-old and a 16-year-old experience are going to be completely different things, so the conversation about what constitutes a healthy relationship is really relevant to the ages by which those kids are experiencing this thing.

Status of Women committee  I'll say just one last thing, because I can't stop. The other thing is this whole idea—and you're going to hear a lot about it—of digital literacy. It's not so simple. People are people. This idea of parents owning all of this and that it's a parental responsibility to be monitoring their children full time—it's impossible.

Status of Women committee  I'm going to add a couple of things. The answer is, very simply, it all depends, and there is no answer. It depends on the imbalance of power, the power relationship, what they're doing, and the influences surrounding what's happening. We have laws that address some aspects.

Status of Women committee  We are, but again it all depends. It's about the content provider. I think there's some confusion; the Internet service providers, which are primarily the pipes, are not necessarily the companies—

Status of Women committee  They're not serving up the content. The Facebooks, the Twitters, the content providers have a more important role. We're hearing from our police partners, certainly the RCMP's NCECC that I believe you heard from the other day. They've received quite a big pickup in those reports coming in.

Status of Women committee  I can speak French, but I'm more comfortable in English. Yes, we do have.... Certainly we are a bilingual organization. A number of reports come to us from Quebec. We work with the SQ and all the Quebec police agencies. We consider ourselves a bit of a broker. People who are dealing with very serious issues who need grassroots organizations there to support them, so we work with a number of organizations in Quebec that support families who are dealing with a continuum of issues.

Status of Women committee  Yes, we are. Beyond working directly with families who come in, we are the front door and the clearing house. In French, it's called Cyberaide.ca. A lot of people go to Cyberaide and make reports. Over and above that, we work closely and specifically with the police agencies.

Status of Women committee  Thank you for that. I've talked a lot about intervention. Fifty per cent of our mandate is prevention and education. In the social value reports that we have distributed, you will see a lot of programming. To your question about education, we recently created a site and a resource that has probably been our most taken up resource.

Status of Women committee  Just to follow up on Signy's comments, I have a couple of things that I did not mention, just so everybody is clear. Our organization is independent of government and police. We are a charitable organization, a non-partisan organization. We work very closely not only with a variety of stakeholders but also with provincial governments in navigating some unique options when we're looking at regulations or other remedies that we can move forward on in terms of the protection of our children.

Status of Women committee  Good afternoon, everybody. What a very important opportunity for us, and I thank you so much. I know you're coming to the end of your day, so hopefully we will engage in a good conversation about the work of our organization. This worked out very well. We do many presentations on this issue of online child sexual abuse and exploitation, and have over the course of many years, but today, because of the way this is rolling, I wanted to give you a little background about who we are.