Bill C-58 (Historical)

Child Protection Act (Online Sexual Exploitation)

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.

Child Protection Act (Online Sexual Exploitation)

[Helena Guergis, Conservative, Simcoe—Grey, ON]

moved that Bill C-58, An Act respecting the mandatory reporting of Internet child pornography by persons who provide an Internet service, be read the second time and referred to a committee.

Mr. Speaker, I am honoured to speak in support of government Bill C-58, the child protection act.

I think everyone in this House would agree there is no greater duty for us as elected officials than to ensure the protection of children, the most precious and vulnerable members of our society.

The creation of the Internet, particularly the creation of the World Wide Web, has provided new means for offenders to distribute and consume child pornography, resulting in significant increases in the availability and volume of child pornography.

While Canada has one of the most comprehensive frameworks in the world to combat child pornography, we can and must do better in protecting children from sexual exploitation. This proposed new federal statute before us today would enhance Canada's capacity to better protect children from sexual exploitation by requiring suppliers of Internet services to report Internet child pornography.

Bill C-58 would strengthen Canada's ability to detect potential child pornography offences; help reduce the availability of online child sexual abuse; facilitate the identification, apprehension and prosecution of offenders; and, most importantly, help identify the victims so they may be rescued from sadistic pedophiles.

Less than a week ago, the Canadian Centre for Child Protection released a report that included an overview of the information received through reports to Cybertip.ca. Cybertip.ca is Canada's tipline for reporting online child sexual exploitation, in particular, child pornography, online luring, child exploitation through prostitution, travelling sex offenders and child trafficking.

I will quote from this report, which contains absolutely shocking information about the prevalence of online sexual assault and the distribution of these images:

The results of this assessment provide some disturbing data on the issue of child abuse images. Most concerning is the severity of abuse depicted, with over 35% of all images showing serious sexual assaults. Combined with the age ranges of the children in the images, we see that children under 8 years old are most likely to be abused through sexual assaults. Even more alarming is the extreme sexual assaults which occur against children under the age of 8 years. These statistics challenge the misconception that child pornography consists largely of innocent or harmless nude photographs of children.

The Cybertip.ca report reinforces similar findings revealed this past summer in the special report of the Federal Ombudsman for Victims of Crime, “Every Image, Every Child”.

This report, which provided an overview of the problem of Internet-facilitated child sexual abuse, revealed that the number of charges for production and distribution of child pornography increased 900% between 1998 and 2003. Moreover, between 2003 and 2007, the number of images of serious child abuse quadrupled. Additionally, the images are becoming more violent and the photos are featuring younger children.

Canadians would be appalled to know that 39% of those accessing child pornography were viewing images of children between the ages of three and five, and 19% were viewing images of infants under three years old.

Here are a few other facts from the report. Commercial child pornography is estimated to be a multi-billion dollar industry worldwide. There are over 750,000 pedophiles online at any given time. Thousands of new images or videos are put on the Internet every week, and hundreds of thousands of searches for child sexual abuse are performed daily. Offenders may have collections of over a million child sexual abuse images. An image of a four year old girl in diapers has been shared an estimated 800,000 times. Most child sexual abuse image producers are known to the victims.

The most disturbing revelation in the ombudsman's report comes in the form of a quote from Ontario Provincial Police detective inspector Angie Howe. When she appeared before a Senate committee in 2005, she said:

The images are getting more violent and the children in the photos are getting younger. As recently as one year ago, we did not see pictures with babies, where now it is normal to see babies in many collections that we find. There is even a highly sought-after series on the Internet of a newborn baby being violated. She still has her umbilical cord attached; she is that young.

We must do everything within our power to put a stop to this growing problem. That is why our government has introduced legislation to create a uniform mandatory reporting regime across Canada.

It is important to note that the measures proposed in Bill C-58 build upon our existing comprehensive measures to better protect all children against sexual exploitation through child pornography.

Canadian criminal laws against child pornography are among the most comprehensive in the world and apply to representations involving real and imaginary children. Section 163.1 of the Criminal Code prohibits all forms of making, distributing, transmitting, accessing, selling, advertising, exporting, importing and possessing child pornography. It broadly defines child pornography that includes visual, written and audio depictions of sexual abuse of a young person under the age of 18 years, that advocates or counsels such unlawful activity, or that has descriptions of such unlawful activity as its predominant focus.

All child pornography offences are punishable by significant penalties, including a maximum of 10 years' imprisonment upon indictment for the offences of making and distributing child pornography.

Since 2005, all child pornography offences impose a mandatory minimum sentence of imprisonment and, as a result, convicted child pornographers are not eligible to receive a conditional sentence, for example, house arrest.

As well, the commission of any child pornography offence with the intent to profit is an aggravating factor for sentencing purposes.

Also, since 2005, sentencing courts are required to give primary consideration to the sentencing objectives of denunciation and deterrence in sentencing for an offence involving the abuse of a child.

This government also recognizes that more is needed to combat this scourge than just strong criminal laws. That is why, in December 2008, we renewed the federal government's national strategy to protect children from sexual exploitation on the Internet. Initially launched in 2004, and under the lead of the Minister of Public Safety, this strategy is providing $42.1 million over five years to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police's National Child Exploitation Coordination Centre to provide law enforcement with better tools and resources to address Internet-based child sexual exploitation, enhance public education and awareness, and support the national launch and ongoing operation of Cybertip.ca as a national 24/7 tipline for reporting the sexual exploitation of children on the Internet.

As announced in budget 2007 and rolled out in 2008, we have allocated an additional $6 million per year to strengthen initiatives to combat the sexual exploitation and trafficking of children. These funds are being used to augment the overall capacity of the NCECC, as well as to specifically enhance its ability to identify, and ultimately rescue, child victims through the analysis of images seized from sex offenders, captured on the Internet or received from international law enforcement agencies.

The international community has also recognized that the protection of our children is of paramount importance in the many treaties that address the issue. In particular, the Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime seeks to standardize a definition of child pornography and offences related to child pornography in an attempt to foster international cooperation for crimes against the world's children. The legislation introduced in the House yesterday would further enhance our ability to cooperate with our international partners in the fight to eradicate this violence.

I would now like to describe how this piece of legislation will work.

First, the bill focuses on the Internet and those who supply Internet services to the public, because the widespread adoption of the Internet is largely responsible for the growth in child pornography crimes over the last 10 years or so. Because suppliers of Internet services are uniquely placed to discover child pornography crimes, because they provide Canadians with the Internet services through which child pornography crimes can be committed, the bill imposes upon them a duty to report or notify.

It should be noted that this act will cover more than just ISPs. The term ISP usually refers to those who provide access to the Internet, in other words, the wires that go into our homes or apartments. This bill applies to all persons who supply an Internet service to the public. While this includes ISPs, it also includes those who supply electronic mail services such as webmail, Internet content hosting, which would include web server farms and co-location facilities, and social networking sites on which the public can upload material to an Internet service.

Furthermore, the act would apply to those who provide complimentary Internet services to the public, such as cybercafés, hotels, restaurants and public libraries. This wide application will ensure that the act has as broad a scope as possible and will eliminate as many pedophile safe havens as possible.

Under this new federal statute, suppliers of an Internet service will have a duty to comply with a number of requirements.

First, they will be required to report to a designated agency whenever they are advised of any Internet addressing information relating to a website where child pornography may be found. To be clear, it is only the Internet addressing information that they will be required to report to the designated agency. No personal information will be sent to the designated agency.

This has to be done for two reasons. First, in order to perform the triage function of determining where this material resides, the designated agency does not need any additional information. Second and most importantly, since the designated agency does not need personal information to fulfill its duties, which will be articulated in the regulations, to protect the privacy of Canadians, no personal information will be passed on by the supplier of the Internet service to the designated agency.

Although the regulations have not yet been finalized, it is anticipated that the main role of the designated agency will be to, first, determine if the Internet addressing information actually leads to child pornography as defined by the Criminal Code, and second, to determine the actual geographic location of the web servers hosting the material. The designated agency would then refer the report on to the appropriate law enforcement agency.

The second duty proposed by Bill C-58 would require persons who supply Internet services to the public to notify police when they have reasonable grounds to believe that a child pornography offence has been committed using their Internet service.

For example, if an email provider, while conducting routine maintenance for its mail servers, found a user's mailbox filled with child pornography, it would then be required to notify police that it had grounds to believe that a child pornography offence had been committed. This duty, which falls under clause 4 of this proposed new federal statute, also comes with an additional duty to preserve this information for 21 days once the email provider had notified police.

In order to ensure that the privacy rights of Canadians would not be unduly impacted, the person who notified police would also be required to destroy any information that would not be retained in the ordinary course of business after the expiry of the 21 days, or continue to safeguard the information if a further court order were obtained in relation to that information. Any person who made a notification to police under this act would also be required not to disclose the fact that he or she had made such a notification.

Bill C-58 was also crafted with the following overarching principles in mind.

This legislation should not contribute to the consumption or further dissemination of child pornography. In accordance with this principle, among other things, the bill explicitly states that it does not require or authorize any person to seek out child pornography. In addition to this, the duties were crafted in a manner that would not require a person who supplies an Internet service to do any personal investigation.

They are not required to verify Internet addressing information when they must report to an agency, and they are required to notify police only when they become aware that a child pornography offence has been committed using their Internet service.

The last feature of the bill that I would like to talk about this afternoon is the offences and the penalties.

Any person who knowingly contravenes his or her duties under this act is liable on summary conviction to a graduated penalty scheme, starting with fines of up to $1,000 for a first offence to $5,000 for a second offence with the possibility of a $10,000 fine and/or imprisonment for up to six months for a third and subsequent offence.

Increased penalties are available for corporations and these, in the same manner, are $10,000, $50,000 and $100,000 respectively. The two-tier penalty scheme recognizes the diverse landscape of Canada's service provider community which ranges from large multi-national corporations to sole-proprietorships. While some might argue that these penalties are relatively minor, the government believes that they strike the balance between sending a message to suppliers of Internet services that they have a social, moral and now legal duty to report this heinous material when they encounter it and the real focus of the bill which is compliance.

This government wants to ensure that not only the major ISPs, that already voluntarily report and assist policy, comply but that all suppliers of Internet services in Canada comply so that we can further the goal of better protecting our children.

I hope that all parties and all members of Parliament will provide support for Bill C-58.

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

Mr. Speaker, this is a timely bill.

I have a number of questions. The minister was absolutely correct in talking about the exponential growth in this heinous area of activity. However, as the bill targets those who permit child pornography to be distributed, and that in my view is as bad as creating child pornography, which is covered by the Criminal Code, I wonder why the government chose not to put these offences in the Criminal Code right next to section 163. They are very germane. We could look at doing so in committee as well.

The minister admitted that in 2005, the previous government widened the definition of child pornography, which was a good thing and also brought in the mandatory minimum sentence of one year, which was a good thing, but really I have only been here since January 2006 and there has been little done by the government on this file.

Why did it take so long? Why are we so far behind the EU and Germany in this regard?

[Helena Guergis, Conservative, Simcoe—Grey, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I know the member recognizes that the debate we are having today about this very important bill is significant and very important to all Canadians.

When it comes to combatting crime across the country or child pornography, ending violence against women, or ending house arrest for serious crimes like human trafficking, property damage and such, our government's position is strong. We have a strong record on combatting crime and criminal behaviour.

This is something I know this member and all members of the House, regardless of their political stripe, know that the Conservative Party has a strong record on.

Judging from the member's questions today, I know that he recognizes the significance of Bill C-58. It is my hope that he will be supporting it.

I think it is important to highlight for a moment how many cases of Internet child pornography actually are investigated and prosecuted in Canada each year and how many of those have been reported by an Internet service provider.

The latest statistical data we have relating to child pornography is from 2007. During that year there were over 1,400 police-reported child pornography incidents of which 440 resulted in charges.

Unfortunately we have no way of knowing if any of these cases were initiated by an ISP report. What we do know, however, is that the proliferation of images over the Internet is a growing problem. According to the special report of the Federal Ombudsman for Victims of Crime, entitled “Every Image, Every Child”, the number of images of serious child abuse quadrupled between 2003 and 2007 and the images are getting more violent and the children in the photos are getting even younger.

[Jim Maloway, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I certainly support the intent of the bill. While I did not hear the entire speech of the minister, I wholeheartedly agree with what I did hear. In addition, my Liberal colleague's comments were on the mark.

It seems to me that police resources are the key to this. Canada's police forces have been very effective in dealing with this issue. We feel they should be given more resources.

The minister mentioned that $42.1 million is being given to the police over five years to provide law enforcement with more resources. Is the $42.1 million announced today new money, or is this simply money that the police had before?

[Helena Guergis, Conservative, Simcoe—Grey, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I will have to get back to the member to give him a specific answer.

Another question asked was how much would it cost suppliers of Internet services to implement these new statutory requirements. It is anticipated that the bill would have a limited impact on the business practices of those ISPs that already voluntarily report cases of online child pornography.

The requirements in the bill were drafted in a manner that reflected, as closely as possible, the current practices of Canada's major ISPs.

[Justin Trudeau, Liberal, Papineau, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am glad to see the bill come forward and I certainly support the intent of it. If the government is as tough on crime as it says it is, I am curious to know the rationale for not putting this into the Criminal Code and instead leaving it on the civil side of things.

[Helena Guergis, Conservative, Simcoe—Grey, ON]

Mr. Speaker, our government is focused on combatting child pornography. This has been on the radar.

As the Minister of State for Status of Women, I have travelled across the country and have spoken with thousands of women and with organizations that combat violence against women and child pornography. They are very focused on women and children and ending that violence. On numerous occasions, they have highlighted to me that our government should proceed with this.

They assured me in all conversations that they knew all members in the House would be supportive of such an initiative. I take from the member's question that he is supportive of it.

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

Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to speak to Bill C-58, yet another bill destined for our already busy committee on justice and human rights.

I am pleased to rise to address this issue. Such issues are just as important to the people of my riding of Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe as to those across the country.

Everyone is concerned about the exponential growth in the production and distribution of pornography and child pornography in particular. We also know, whether it is child pornography, or information in general or social networking, the Internet in particular is the vehicle of the future for the dissemination of information, good and bad.

Countries around the world and provinces and territories across the country are moving to stop gaps. I think police forces and child protection agencies across the country are feeling that they are like the child putting the finger in the dike. We are just not keeping up.

As a preface before I get into the bill, I will state my overall view on the crime-fighting agenda of the government. I have only been here for three years, 10 months and a number of days. Since I have been here, the government has given great lip service to fighting crime. It has booked whatever TV studio wherever it could and created whatever press conference however it could to be seen as fighting crime.

That may have worked for a while. However, when we are sitting here almost four years after the government came to power and nothing has been done on issues regarding child pornography, one wonders why it was so eager to publicize its fighting crime agenda, but then not deliver the goods for four years. I will get into the nitty-gritty of whether Bill C-58 delivers the goods or not.

The reality is, in 2005, the mandatory minimum sentence of one year for an offence of possessing and creating child pornography was instituted by a Liberal government. The definition of child pornography was broadened by a Liberal government to include depictions, digital or otherwise, in order to trap more perpetrators of the crime. That took us up to late 2005.

Then we take the canvas over to January 23, 2006. I have sat through the justice committee meetings and read the literature since that time without interruption. I have not attended every meeting, but I have been there for the whole agenda. There has been nothing on child pornography in that time. If we are all united in Parliament to try to do some good and combat the ill effects of the web and child pornography exploitation in particular, we ought to say to each other that this is not good enough.

Speaking to the Canadian public between elections, some of which were called unnecessarily, and committee wrangling, some of which were instituted unnecessarily, there is enough blame to go all around. This is not partisan. However, the people sitting at home must wonder why child pornography has not been a priority for almost four years.

We will support sending the bill to committee. At committee, under the cold eye of revision and input, we may even make improvements upon the intent of the bill. That is always our intention when it goes to a committee. We might look at it at committee and ask a number of very searing questions. When he appears before the committee, the minister will be asked why it took so long to bring this forward.

We have a Criminal Code that keeps growing in size. Section 163.1 has a definition of child pornography and the sentences set out for the various offences involving making, possessing or accessing. That seems to be the triage or the flow. People can create child pornography. They can access or possess it. In doing that, they have committed a whole other group of possible offences, which might include enslavement, captivity, assaults and all those other related offences in the other part of the Code.

However, when we look at section 163, which starts out with creating the heinous images and it goes down to accessing child pornography, the bill we are speaking of could very well be inserted in the Criminal Code. To the outside world and to the criminal bar in particular, because the Criminal Code has a whole number of procedural safeguards enforcing the offences in there, it seems to me that the content of the bill could have been easily slipped into section 163.2 or something like that to make it a very copacetic law.

There might be some push-back with respect to this law, having made it only a separate law. I do not know, but we will hear from representatives of industry who might have resisted this. After all, the fines in the bill relate mostly to companies and individuals running services, which is in the realm of small business persons. If an individual supports an Internet service or works on websites and somehow has knowledge of pornographic material and does not report it, which is the essence of the bill, the person is subject to, on the first offence, a fine of $1,000. If a company is guilty of a similar non-action, the first offence is $10,000.

This is not the kind of tough on crime that the father of three daughters, like me, living in a middle-class neighbourhood in Moncton, New Brunswick, thinks is appropriate. I am sure people listening to the debate might wonder about this. People could knowingly ignore the pornographic images on a site that they manage, not report it, yet, if caught, they would only get $1,000 fine under this law. It may not be strenuous enough. It is not in the Criminal Code, and it is almost four years late.

That does not go to the substance of the bill. We will take it to committee and hopefully we will buttress it. However, we want to make it clear to the government that the time is now over for the five o`clock newscasts during which Conservatives say that they will introduce another bill and deliver on promises, some here and some there, and that they will meet with the territorial and provincial attorneys general, but only act on their recommendations a year and a half later.

Some of these recommendations, which were to have come from a 2008 provincial and territorial attorneys general meeting, were submitted in June for a September meeting. We are talking almost a year and a half before implementation of what every, to my knowledge, attorney general across the country feels. It is no wonder, then, that provinces, in the realm of many areas of legislation that should be brought in by the Conservative government, are doing their own thing.

Since 2008, Ontario already has on the books a child pornography reporting act. I remind the House that the Conservative government came into power in 2006. I am not familiar necessarily with the Ontario legislative agenda, but it had to do its own thing. I believe Manitoba has done something similar.

Last week, and around the speech from the throne in my province, Attorney General Michael Murphy, and he is a relation, brought in the civil forfeiture act. It is a unique law in the country that maybe other provinces will emulate. In the case of convicted child pornographers, their property will be forfeited. The civil value of those properties will go into victims of crime pools of money to help the province with people who have been subject to this terrible type of crime. Not only that, pending trial by way of escrow or in trust, the assets will be frozen and any proceeds from the assets will be held pending the outcome of a trial on charges like this.

It is the kind of thing that provinces had to do because, I would say, the Conservative government has had its concentration on publicizing the crimes they are bringing in rather than thinking about holistic changes to our criminal law in general.

Now to the bill. The bill itself deals with sole proprietors of corporations who fail to report child pornography on sites that they have a hand in managing. It certainly is timely. It is, however, as I mentioned, a civil bill, and it does not have as its consequences criminal in nature as we would expect.

Section 11 of the act has fines ranging from $1,000 to $10,000 for offences by an individual, and from $10,000 to $100,000 for all other cases. The definition completely scripts what the Criminal Code says about child pornography, so that will not be challenged. It has already been tested by the courts.

Now what are the people, the stakeholders, saying about this crime? There are two reports here. One is from the Cape Breton Post which says:

This in itself won’t make a big dent in the torrent of child porn still available worldwide but it will give police and anti-child porn agencies such as cybertip.ca some more chances to pick up the threads of networks and rings, and possibly even to rescue a few more children from horrific situations.

This is what I was trying to say earlier. The Internet has transformed modern life in many positive ways. The explosion of electronic child porn is the outstanding example of the cost of this. If some principles of privacy and freedom have to be qualified to reduce that cost to the children of the world, so be it.

Certainly, one of the questions I will be asking the minister and the Department of Justice officials is this. Is the concern for the privacy and the freedom of speech, is that the reason why this bill is not tougher? It is something we will have a debate in Parliament with respect to the balance between freedom of speech, any expectation of privacy, and the need to get serious about combating the Internet.

Let us be clear, the whip is not here and I should talk to the whip, but I do not want to criticize Cape Breton or the Cape Breton Post but I do not need the Cape Breton Post to make this statement, which is that the real problem here is not cracking down on reporting of known sites, the real problem here is to prevent those sites from being distributed in the first place.

We are almost attacking the people who see the sites or who are supposed to see the sites or who might see the sites, and we are attacking them if they do not report it. It seems to me that to get right to the core, we have to do as they have done in other countries and we have to take action with the industry to ensure that those sites are not distributed in the first place.

I am not suggesting we go to totalitarian regimes, and I will not name them, but I think we know that there are some countries where there is no Internet because the government wants to control the message and in those cases there is no message.

We cannot do that, but it does prove that if the small island of Cuba, and there, I have said it, can say, “There shall be no Internet at all”, and that is not a terribly technologically advanced country, how is it that we cannot, in this world, in this country, one of the richest countries in the world, do better in stopping the source of these sites.

Again, going from east to west, the Edmonton Sun says, with respect to the recent study by the federal ombudsman:

The number of Internet images of 'serious child abuse' quadrupled between 2003 and 2007.

What it opines on this law is:

So while the new bill will indeed provide an additional tool, it is not the solution and it must not be regarded as such.

I spoke about other jurisdictions. The international conference, combating child pornography on the Internet, which took place in Vienna, Austria, also adds some elements that I hope the government is considering. The whole world, at this conference, concluded that we have to take steps to ensure that we can obtain the evidence necessary to identify child pornographers.

The minister spoke very briefly about how this bill will be used to do that. We hope that there is further evidence on that because we want this bill to be effective. It is not enough just to penalize people who do not report. We have to know, and we will get this from the law enforcement officials, that the reporting will lead to the finding of child pornographers.

Second, there must be a balance regarding the privacy laws with respect to the expectation of privacy.

The third point, however, and probably the most important one that cannot be really addressed in legislation but has to be out there on a justice agenda, is that we must work together: hotlines, law enforcement and private industry. We need to shield from civil liability those hotlines, ISPs and others in the industry that in good faith attempt to assist law enforcement in investigations of child pornography.

The minister was very correct in quoting the statistics from cybertip.ca. The facts are outstanding. They are horrifying. For instance, of the 4,110 unique images assessed by an analyst, 35 showed sexual assaults against children, and if we broke it down by age, 37.2% of them were against 8-year-olds and 83% of the images were of female children. It is despicable. It is horrible. It must be addressed.

The international situation is deplorable for Canada. We speak a lot in this chamber about the government turning away from international obligations, international colloquia, international conferences, and international discussions on things from climate change to financial institutions, to international standards on child care, to not signing the universal declaration of aboriginal rights.

The government has all the excuses for those aversions to talking to the international community, but probably one that it would never think it has been absent on is the impression of its law enforcement standards across the world.

When we see these categories, I would think Conservatives who tout their anti-crime agenda would be embarrassed. Of the top five countries hosting websites with child sexual abuse images, we are third. Of the top five countries hosting images of child sexual abuse, we are second. And of the top five countries selling material on child sexual abuse websites, we are second.

The other countries involved are not countries we would like to be in line with. The United States has its commercial pre-eminence and its, until recently, overemphasis on freedom of speech and overemphasis on the right to be secure from privacy with Miranda and so forth, and not have incursions by the state into private life. Sadly, I think I hear echoes of this from the other side as being something that can be templated for Canada. I disagree. We are Canada, not the United States.

The United States comes first in all these categories. We do not want to go up in this category. We want to go down. One of the things that could be done, and has been done all around the world, and I would think that if there are opposition members suggesting being tougher on something, the government would want to, for instance, listen to or emulate Sweden.

In Sweden, the TeliaSonera launched child porn blocking services for ISPs, so the blocking is done at the source. In Brazil, the goal of the policy established there is to set up ethical rules for companies providing Internet services in Brazil, and for the users of these services. In Germany and the EU, probably the most advanced system, they are putting together systems to block access to websites containing child pornography.

In summary, we are just starting to get at this. It has been almost four years. With the goodwill in this House toward this unspeakable set of crimes, it probably could have been accomplished a lot sooner, so I guess the question we would all have is, why was it not done sooner?

Let us get at it. Let us improve this bill to emulate parts of the international community that the government normally, with respect to climate change and other items, does not want to be seen with, but for once maybe we will show the government, as we send this along to committee, that it is not bad to have friends internationally. It is not bad to emulate best practices around the world, and it is not bad to work with other parties.

[Claude Gravelle, NDP, Nickel Belt, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member named some positions that Canada was in compared with other countries. I would like to ask him whether, if this child pornography issue were put into the hands of the police, who are trained to identify child pornography, would that help in making Canada a safer place in eliminating child pornography?

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

Mr. Speaker, the police will be very involved in this.

The one thing that I would agree with the minister on, in her comments, is the great network of intelligence gathering and execution of responsibilities we have in Canada. CSIS and other organizations are top-notch in this regard. However, like anything, hiring a carpenter or a surgeon, we have to give them the tools. This reporting mechanism will only go so far.

I would think that the police officers in question would be very happy if there was not any child pornography distributed across the country. They would also be interested in the government investing money in police officers to better investigate, in social workers, as well as in people in the community to help people understand, by way of education, the dangers of sexual abuse, which leads to child pornography in almost every case.

So, the member is right on in giving the police officers better resources and giving them better tools to combat the issue.

[Dan McTeague, Liberal, Pickering—Scarborough East, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I want to commend my hon. colleague from Moncton. He will be familiar with the fact that his predecessor, Claudette Bradshaw, worked with members, as well as members from the other parties, on a very important initiative that took place back in April 2002.

One of the recommendations made was to not only provide a coordinating force within Canada but, in fact, several millions of dollars in order to provide an opportunity for police to become better trained and for Crown and other judges in this nation to better understand the implications of child exploitation.

I have had more updates since that time, and I take some pride in the fact that as a Parliament we have been able to work together on this. However, I wonder if the hon. member could perhaps hone down in his deliberations before the committee, speak to some of the experts, such as the Kids Internet Safety Alliance, which has done great work around the world, people like Paul Gillespie and David Butt, and many others.

They seem to be pointing out that there is a lot of initiative on behalf of the private sector willing to help and that the government simply is not there to create international centres in which we can sort of point out that Canada is putting its best foot forward. It looks like it is the private sector that is being sought for help when the government ought to be able to do it. We can have all the laws in the world we want. But I want to be more focused on the question of whether the hon. member would be able to precisely raise in committee the growing concern of many who are working on these issues about peer-to-peer file sharing, Internet file sharing.

We can talk about ISPs. We can talk about the Internet, probably about that big. However, when it really comes down to the tragedy in Canada and around the world, it is the conundrum, it is the blockage which is occurring as a result of peer-to-peer file sharing that seems to be at the source of this.

I also know the RCMP suggested 65,000 Canadians in this country some years ago may have been involved with child pornography and its distribution and dissemination. Those numbers could in fact be much higher.

I wonder if we can get from the hon. member that he will pursue the government and pursue the answers that I think will give greater clarity and bring Parliament up to date with the ongoing tragedy, in the hope of being able to protect at least more children, not just in Canada, but around the world.

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

Mr. Speaker, the names Paul Gillespie and David Butt were in fact on my preliminary list of witnesses. I am very familiar with their work.

The hon. member proved today that he knows about a lot more than just gas prices. He knows how to use the Internet and how it is used.

He is exactly right, that this is a huge issue. This is not just changing the criminal laws of Canada. This is not dealing with criminals who knock over a gas station or a corner store, with a gun. This is an international crime across borders and it is spread by technology.

So, it is certainly something that I think we all have to work together because we are not quite the Luddites that people may think we are but we are not equipped in this Parliament, necessarily, to be experts on how technology works in the evil way. We find out, with the gang-related and organized crime study at the justice committee, that organized crime is way ahead of the police forces, which makes it probably way ahead of Parliament.

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

Mr. Speaker, as my hon. colleague knows, I sit on the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, where we too had discussions. I listened carefully to the end of the member's speech, the questions put to him and the answers he provided. It seems obvious to me that he is very familiar with the issue.

This bill provides ammunitions and would make reporting mandatory. I wonder, however, if there will be enough police officers or equipment to follow up on the reports. In an interview yesterday, a university professor said that great expectations were being created. Initially, there will be a large volume of reporting, but very few police officers to act on it.

Does my hon. colleague agree? Has he given this any thought? Clearly, this bill will be referred to committee for consideration. How should we address the question raised by this university professor?

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

Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for his question.

The Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights always raises the same issue and always asks the same question: are we providing police forces with enough resources to enforce the new act? As always, we never get a real answer.

We asked the Department of Justice if more resources were to be given to police forces. Unfortunately, we were told that it is the Minister of Public Safety who should answer that question. That is one way of avoiding the issue. However, the government must address all issues raised by every new bill.

Will police forces be provided with enough money and resources? That has the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights a bit worried. Every time the government introduces a bill, we know for sure that there will not be enough resources to correctly enforce it.

As always, the member asked a good question.

[Jim Maloway, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I was planning to ask the minister a follow-up question but I did not get up. She mentioned that $42.1 million over five years would be provided to law enforcement to give law enforcement more resources, which I feel is an important part of this, but she could not tell us whether this was new money just being announced right now or whether this was just a re-announcement of existing money.

In addition, she said that in 2007 there were 1,400 police incidents and 440 charges but she could not tell us whether any one of those came from an ISP, and this legislation deals with ISPs.

Does the Liberal member think this legislation is really more about the six o'clock news? It has been on CTV around the clock for the last two days. The member mentioned that it should be in the Criminal Code. It has taken the government four years to bring this bill in--

[The Deputy Speaker, Conservative, Andrew Scheer]

I will stop the hon. member there to allow enough time for the member for Moncton to respond. He has 30 seconds left.

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

Mr. Speaker, I do not know. To hold the government to two speeches for the full layout of the bill, I do hope there is more to come. That is why we have committees. We will be asking those questions at committee.

However, it is passing strange that this bill is not in the Criminal Code and that the precise amount of allotment for this bill is not defined. For pornography, and child pornography in general, there might be an amount needed and it would be well spent of course, but we will find out.

[The Deputy Speaker, Conservative, Andrew Scheer]

It is my duty pursuant to Standing Order 38 to inform the House that the question to be raised tonight at the time of adjournment is as follows: the hon. member for Mississauga South, Natural Resources.

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

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak on behalf of my party to Bill C-58. I will say from the outset that the bill, on the surface, seems extremely interesting. We will support it in order that it may be sent to the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights to be studied closely.

It is time for Canada, and Quebec in particular, to get with it when it comes to dealing with crime and to take measures to deal with crimes that are on the rise, namely child pornography and pedophilia. These are what I would call heinous crimes that are committed by people—and that is the problem with this type of crime, so I will choose my words carefully—in secret. In other words, an individual, sitting alone at his computer, can visit pornographic sites that post heinous material, namely pornography and pedophilia. These are things we never used to encounter.

This is the 21st century and no one could have anticipated these problems when the Criminal Code was first written. However, when the Criminal Code was amended recently, we started to take note of this new type of crime that has appeared in the past 10 or 15 years. It is a new form of insidious crime that is very difficult to get a handle on. We will nevertheless try to put a stop to it, but we need the means to do so.

This is a crime that is committed in solitude. The individual, in their secret hideaway, in their house, in their bedroom or even at their office—we know that some people have done this at work—visits pornographic sites.

I think it is important to provide a definition at this stage because we will do so with this bill. I am referring to section 163 of the Criminal Code, which will be clarified as follows:

“computer data” means representations, including signs, signals or symbols, that are in a form suitable for processing in a computer system.

With respect, this is truly a totally new area of law. We are wading into something completely new.

We are going to amend subsections 161.1, 161.2, 161.3 on the definition of pornography, the distribution of pornography, the possession of child pornography and accessing child pornography.

However, things get very interesting when we get into a new debate, a new area of law. It is very interesting. I will read clause 3 of the bill slowly to be sure that the interpreter can translate it well.

If a person is advised, in the course of providing an Internet service to the public, of an Internet Protocol address or a Uniform Resource Locator—

This is also known as a URL and is referred to as such in the French version of the legislation. I will continue.

—where child pornography may be available to the public, the person must report that address or Uniform Resource Locator to the organization designated by the regulations, as soon as feasible and in accordance with the regulations.

Quite honestly, I am somewhat concerned about all of this. It seems a little complicated to me. It is going to be implemented. I hope and pray that this will not turn into another gun registry because that would be catastrophic.

Clause 4 reads as follows:

If a person who provides an Internet service to the public has reasonable grounds to believe that their Internet service is being or has been used to commit a child pornography offence, the person must notify an officer, constable or other person employed for the preservation and maintenance of the public peace of that fact, as soon as feasible and in accordance with the regulations.

The system is based on reporting. In my opinion, there comes a point when we have to implement harsh measures. Child pornography is unacceptable, and nobody in the House will stand for it. Abusing kids who are just five, six or seven years old, or younger still, is unacceptable debasement.

As I said before, this form of debasement has been allowed to proliferate over the years because we have not had the means to stop it. I hope that this bill and the amendments to the Criminal Code will help us identify these users.

Increasing the likelihood of getting caught is a much greater deterrent than increasing punishments, which often seem remote and abstract. That is exactly what this bill will accomplish. We have to send a clear message to all pornographers. Words cannot describe the loathsome individuals who participate in child pornography. Their behaviour is unacceptable. We have to send them the message that from now on, chances are they will get caught.

Here is an analogy. Giving people a $2,000 fine if they are caught driving while impaired will not stop people from driving their cars. The real deterrent is the risk of getting caught and dealing with the consequences of impaired driving. Imposing fines and minimum prison sentences is not that effective.

There has been a decrease in prison sentences and impaired driving cases, but it is the fear of getting caught that greatly encourages people to be careful and avoid drinking. Many people drink less and spend less time in bars. That is the objective of the bill. That is one of the reasons why the Bloc will support it. However, I have a few questions. Of course, I will ask them in committee. In fact, I hope that we will be able to study the bill very early in the new year.

The bill covers more than ISPs, or Internet service providers. That means that the bill covers more than Bell and Rogers. That is when things get interesting. The bill will cover anyone who offers Internet services to the public. That may include all small sized companies. That could include people who have servers in their basement. I will chose my words carefully. I do not mean to say that aboriginal communities have the kind of servers, but there are aboriginal communities that receive all poker games controlled from Kahnawake. If we include everybody who host Internet sites, we cover much more than Bell. That would include anyone who offers Internet services to the public, hence, anyone who hosts that kind of Internet sites.

This also includes Internet service providers, as well as those providing email services, host services and social networking sites on the Internet. Consider for example all the users of Twitter and Facebook around the world.

Let us use the example of the hon. member for Bourassa, who has I do not know how many friends on Facebook. Of course, I do not doubt his honesty. I am merely giving an example.

One of his Facebook friends could tell him to look at a particular site, because it has something interesting on it. We are not talking fiction here; we are not in a movie. This is real life. That is how these networks work. Someone sends a message to someone else, telling him or her to go to a particular site. For example, someone who is looking for a $4,000 bicycle might be told to try eBay.

Getting back to my example of the fine member for Bourassa, who has at least 7,000 Facebook friends, if one of those people recommends visiting a site of some interest, the fine member for Bourassa would be obligated to report it.

That is what is extremely important about this bill. That must stop. Such things can no longer be accepted. We must ensure that these people are not given special privileges, people who, under the pretext of helping someone, recommend sites. I hesitate to even use the word “help”. Child pornography, which victimizes children aged five, six, seven or eight years old, is completely unacceptable. It makes no sense and is unacceptable. Pornography in general is probably unacceptable for some, but child pornography is particularly offensive. And it is our duty to protect children and minors.

I would like to repeat what I said a few moments ago, to make sure I did not make any mistakes:

The Bloc Québécois believes that Increasing the likelihood of getting caught is a much greater deterrent than increasing punishments, which often seem remote and abstract.

A lot of Canadians are connected to the Internet and visit websites like Facebook and Twitter. If they receive a message like I mentioned earlier, or if someone suggests that they visit a website of interest, it is clear that there will be an obligation to report. That is exactly what clause 4 of the bill states:

If a person who provides an Internet service to the public has reasonable grounds to believe that their Internet service is being or has been used to commit a child pornography offence, the person must notify... as soon as feasible—

Therefore, those responsible for these networks, the service providers, and I think, especially, the users will have to report. It is not illegal to visit Twitter, to have friends on Facebook, or to use Google. There is nothing illegal about that. With Bill C-58, what will become illegal will be visiting child pornography sites and encouraging others to visit them.

Even as a criminal lawyer, I can say that this is a good bill. It is about time. It is a good bill to amend the Criminal Code.

First the compliments, now the criticisms. It is all well and good to pass new laws, but we must also develop the means to enforce them.

That is of great concern to me. Something was brought to our attention in recent days when we learned that the bill was coming. A number of people began to wonder about our ability to deal with the information that will be reported, and thus to investigate and file charges. We have been told that, in Canada, no more than 300 police officers currently monitor Internet sites and carry out related duties. They answer inquiries, conduct investigations and, generally, lay charges. We have seen and continue to see this every day in different media when charges are laid against pedophiles.

We have been told that once the bill is in effect, in its first or second year, there will be so much information that is stored, or provided or sent to people such as the police that they will not be able to do the work and will run the risk of missing a number of pedophiles who visit these sites.

That is the fear of the Bloc Québécois and we will certainly be asking these questions when the minister or his representatives appear before us. We will probably also call the Solicitor General and the Minister of Public Safety before the committee. We have to give the legislation legs to stand on. It is all well and good to introduce a bill, to fight child pornography and to want to eradicate it, but we have to give police the means to deal with the needs and the complaints as well as the resulting summons. We only need to examine the requirements of the bill. I will read just section 5:

A person who makes a notification under section 4 must preserve...

Those who provide information have obligations. I will continue:

...must preserve all computer data related to the notification that is in their possession or control for 21 days after the day on which the notification is made.

It is beginning to pose a few difficulties. I will continue with subsection 5(2) of the bill:

The person must destroy the computer data that would not be retained in the ordinary course of business and any document that is prepared for the purpose of preserving computer data under subsection (1) as soon as feasible after the expiry of the 21-day period, unless the person is required to preserve the computer data by a judicial order made under any other Act of Parliament or the legislature of a province.

In plain English, it boils down to one thing: before we pass this bill, we must ensure that our police forces have what they need to enforce it. We cannot adopt this type of bill, implement it and then see how things go. We cannot and that is our main concern.

I will close by saying that when a bill responds to society's needs, the Bloc Québécois supports it. We believe that the bill responds to the needs of society, of Canada in general, and of Quebec in particular, and we will therefore support the bill.

[Jim Maloway, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Mr. Speaker, we have heard reports of exponential growth in child pornography over the last four years. We have a government that sat around for four years and did not really do anything about this issue and now introduces a bill that some would question whether it should be part of the Criminal Code.

If this problem is increasing in exponential fashion, would the Bloc member not think that perhaps some of the solutions that some other countries are using might be relevant? The Liberal member for Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe mentioned that Sweden has a blocking of child pornography and that Brazil has set up ethical rules. However, in the European Union, he said that Germany had the best set of rules and that it blocked access to the sites. Perhaps that may be the answer here if this problem is really becoming out of control.

I would ask the member what he thinks about those ideas raised by the member for the Liberal Party?

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

Mr. Speaker, my colleague's suggestion is interesting. I did not hear what the hon. member for Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe said, but given that he sits on the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, this proposal will obviously surface again. I do find it quite interesting.

Not only do I find it interesting, but I truly believe that it should be implemented at least at the outset. What I had suggested and what we will suggest, is that the bill be studied and, before it is passed, that a means to block these pornographic sites be put in place. As soon as this kind of site is detected, it must be blocked. When a site is detected that originates in Germany, England, New Zealand, Malaysia or elsewhere, it must be blocked. Then we will prosecute those who visit these sites.

I personally believe that we should establish a police unit from the outset. Child pornography units have been set up by a number of police forces. I think it would be of interest to start putting in place such units. Since the bill has already been introduced, it will go to committee in a few months. I feel that this bill should be studied rather quickly. The government should already be preparing to put in place a structure to enforce the legislation.

[Megan Leslie, NDP, Halifax, NS]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his analysis of the bill. It is clear that his expertise in criminal law really came through in his analysis.

He raised clause 5 and clause 5(2) talks about a 21 day period where an Internet service provider would need to report and that within 20 days, if there has not been an order for it to save the information it has, it would need to destroy it. The member talked about the problem this would pose for law enforcement, the problem of resources, and whether it could adequately investigate within this 21 day period.

I must admit that when I read this clause I felt like the government was saying that we would never get to it in 21 days so we need to have some kind of mechanism to deal with this information. It struck me as very odd. I would like to hear from the member some further thoughts on this particular clause and what the 21 day period is about.

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

Mr. Speaker, we do not want a company, for example, Bell, a service provider, to have to keep a high volume of documents or information on its hard drives or elsewhere. According to clause 4:

If a person who provides an Internet service...has reasonable grounds to believe...the person must notify an officer...as soon as feasible—

Clause 5 states:

A person who makes a notification under section 4 must preserve all computer data...for 21 days—

It goes without saying that if the government is talking about a 21 day period, it must be expecting an increase in demands for investigation and analysis. That is why I am repeating that before we implement this bill, we must do everything we can to ensure we are able to meet that 21 day deadline.

I can assure my colleague that that is one of the questions I will ask when the minister appears before us. I would like to know where the 21 days came from, and what it actually means. If it is in the bill, that means that it becomes a prerogative. It cannot be ignored. It will allow companies to destroy these documents, as described in subclause 5(2).

After reading the bill, we feel that the reason for the famous 21 day period is to avoid overtaxing computer networks.

[Peter Julian, NDP, Burnaby—New Westminster, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest to the presentation given by the hon. member for Abitibi—Témiscamingue. As we have seen with all the justice bills introduced by this government, there seems to be a gap between the legislation and the resources needed to achieve the objectives of said legislation. We have seen the cuts made by this government in the area of crime prevention, the cuts to police forces and compensation for police officers. In all those areas, the reality is that there is a difference between what the government is saying and what it is doing.

I think this bill really does correspond to a legitimate concern people have. It is unfortunate that Canada ranks second in the world when it comes to child abuse. We are not seeing any additional resources to follow through on this legislation.

Does the member believe that the government intends to allocate the resources needed to really tackle these crimes?

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

Mr. Speaker, the answer is yes. The government needs to get serious. I suggest that my colleague take a look at clause 12 of the bill, which is very clear. I will read it:

A prosecution for an offence under this Act cannot be commenced more than two years after the time when the act or omission giving rise to the prosecution occurred.

This means that before implementing the bill, we need the necessary means in place to implement and enforce it. If not, then because of the two-year time limit, if we have not done the work properly or put the legislation together well, criminals will slip through the cracks.

It is clear that before implementing such a bill, we will urge the government to be extremely prudent and to ensure that all of the means are in place to enforce this legislation, or Canada will continue to be a laughingstock. Canada will not be able to enforce its own law. The government will amend section 163 of the Criminal Code, and nobody will be able to enforce it because police services will not be able to do what we are asking them to do.

I think that the government has to be prepared to take drastic action, because according to what we have been told, thousands of complaints could be filed over the next two years.

[Megan Leslie, NDP, Halifax, NS]

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak to Bill C-58, An Act respecting the mandatory reporting of Internet child pornography by persons who provide an Internet service.

As we heard earlier today, the bill would force an Internet service provider to report an Internet protocol address or a uniform resource locator if the ISP, the Internet service provider, is aware that this address may be used for the purposes of committing a child pornography offence. It says that the ISP needs to report it as soon possible and that, following reporting, the ISP must preserve all computer data related to the notification for 21 days.

Criminal Code reform or any kind of reform dealing with law within the criminal realm, whether it is dealt with through regulations or civil law, calls for a fact based appraisal of the present situation, as well as a very careful assessment of whether proposed reforms will actually enhance the objectives of what we say is the realm of criminal law or the criminal justice system.

One needs to answer some very important questions, and there are three in particular that I will note: first, what are we trying to accomplish; second, are the proposed reforms likely to make our communities safer; and, third, do we actually need this legislative change?

I will begin with the first question. What are we trying to accomplish? This bill is trying to accomplish the protection of children from online sexual exploitation. This is very much a laudable goal. I would point out that this is something we stand behind and action on this issue in the House is a long time coming.

In fact, the NDP introduced a bill about Internet luring in 2006 in the 39th Parliament. My colleague, the member for Sackville—Eastern Shore, introduced the bill. The purpose of that bill, which was then Bill C-214, was to prevent the use of the Internet to unlawfully promote, display, describe or facilitate participation in unlawful sexual activity involving young persons. That was in 2006 and I congratulate my colleague from Sackville—Eastern Shore for introducing the bill and turning the attention of the House to this very important issue.

Here we are in 2009, on the doorstep of 2010, and this is the first time we are seeing a bill that would deal with Internet child pornography. I extend congratulations to the government for finally waking up to this serious issue, an issue that impacts the health and safety of all communities in Canada.

The next question I would like to address in our analysis of this bill is: Are the proposed reforms likely to make our communities safer? This is the crux of the issue and I believe the answer requires a bit of nuance thinking and real analysis.

First, let me be clear that action on child pornography is critical, and this cannot be stated enough. Child pornography is wrong, it is criminal and we must work to stop it. Is this the best way to approach Internet pornography? Is this the best way to stop the exploitation of children online? I believe there is some merit to this bill, no doubt, but I am really struck by what is not in the bill.

The bill states that Internet service providers must report to police when their addresses are being used for child pornography. However, I think we also need to consider how we will deal with ISPs that do not co-operate with this mandate. I think we can go further when it comes to the duty and onus that is placed on ISPs.

ISPs have the information. This is how investigative officers can get information about the identities of people who are involved in putting child pornography online. I look forward to hearing from witnesses at committee about this aspect of the bill. What can we do to put an additional onus on ISPs that do not co-operate? What other provisions can be put in place?

What is obviously missing from this bill are the resources. What does it mean to report child pornography when there are no resources, human, financial or structural, to do anything about it? I had a discussion earlier with my colleague from Abitibi—Témiscamingue. There is a provision in the bill to deal with a scenario of an ISP reporting online child pornography and then after 21 days having to dispose of the information if it has not been asked to protect it by judicial order. I imagine that this will be the case very frequently, that the 21 day period will pass with very little, if any, action in most cases because our police officers do not have the resources to deal with online child pornography. They know it is out there. We all know it is out there.

In doing research for this speech, I learned not to put online child porn in a search engine because I was assaulted with the findings. Police know it is out there. Communities know it is out there. Parents know it is out there. How do we investigate it when there is only one person, at best, per station who is charged with the task of actually investigating online child porn?

The bill needs resources. It needs a task force of investigators, a task force that can develop expertise in investigating, in pursuing and in prosecuting.

Earlier this year, the University of Toronto, which has a Centre for Innovation Law and Policy, held a symposium on online child exploitation. David Butt, a trial lawyer in Toronto who was mentioned in the House earlier in the debate, spoke about the issue of child pornography investigations. I would like to read from the abstract of his presentation because it sums up some of the issues facing us when we are considering online child porn. In the abstract, he wrote:

Traditionally, prosecutors and police conducting internet child exploitation cases worked at the practical intersection of many different fields of expertise: law, child-oriented social work, pedophilia as a psychiatric phenomenon, and of course criminal investigations. The recent explosion of internet related child exploitation has obliged prosecutors and police to draw as well from various technological disciplines, international commerce, international relations, and a host of disciplines that examine the social impact of the emerging cyber-world. This is a daunting task for prosecutors and police, and illustrates well the radical change in the face of child exploitation that the internet has wrought. We are not far along in adjusting to this radical change. Success in addressing internet child exploitation will arrive only through creative multi-faceted responses that mirror the multifaceted nature of the internet itself.

I think the most important part of that abstract is the statement:

Success in addressing Internet child exploitation will arrive only through creative multi-faceted responses that mirror the multifaceted nature of the internet itself.

We have an expert on this issue saying that we need a creative approach to this issue and yet the response in this House by the government is brief and empty, and I fear that it is truly meaningless. We need meaningful action on child pornography.

Reporting is absolutely key but it is only the first step. We need serious attention to resources in order to stop this terrible crime.

Earlier today I was talking about this bill with my colleagues and the member for Hamilton Centre raised a very good point. He said, and I agree with him, that he was sick and tired of bills like this that the government trots out in an attempt to make it look like it cares about children when yesterday we recognized that it was 20 years ago that this House made a commitment to end child poverty in Canada. Here we are 20 years later and we do not consider giving kids a safe place to live, enough food, early childhood education or any of the things that we need to actually ensure children are healthy and safe in this country.

The only thing the bill would do is introduce mandatory reporting. What about real action to ensure our kids are safe? We purport to do things like in 1989, the unanimous House of Commons vote to end child poverty; i the Convention on the Rights of the Child was ratified by federal, provincial and territorial governments in 1999; in 1997, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples set a target to close the economic gap by 50%; and in 2005, the first ministers meeting on aboriginal affairs in Kelowna.

Here we are though with very little to show for it. All we have are terrible statistics like those that follow.

Between 1989 and 2008, the number of children in Canada relying on food banks grew from 151,000 to 260,000. Children are disproportionately dependent on food banks.

The average low income family lives far below the poverty line. Low income, two parent families would, on average, need an extra $9,400 a year to bring their incomes up to the poverty line, to the low income cutoff.

We have also completely abandoned aboriginal children when it comes to poverty, and also when it comes to sex crime issues. Somehow when we think about what is happening with aboriginal girls, we imagine them as being involved in the sex trade, but that is not right. They are not involved in the sex trade. It is sexual exploitation. It is child trafficking. It is the luring of aboriginal girls from their communities to cities where they are sexually exploited, and it happens because these girls are poor and forgotten.

This is a pretty sad legacy and it is part and parcel of the total lack of real action on online child pornography. It is my hope that we will have witnesses come to committee who will shed light on how we can take real action on Internet child pornography.

Perhaps we will have some witnesses from the Canadian Professional Police Association, which has said time after time that the police lack the resources for effective and meaningful crime investigations. The association has stood up publicly and called the government on its reneging on the promise for more officers and resources for police.

In a brief to the Standing Committee on Finance in 2008, the Canadian Professional Police Association spoke to this very issue of resources. I would like to read from that brief:

[The Prime Minister] launched the Conservative Party's Stand Up for Security plan during the 2006 Federal Election campaign, which included a promise to “negotiate with the provinces to create a new cost-shared program jointly with provincial and municipal governments, to put at least 2,500 more police on the beat in our cities and communities”.

In April, 2006, [the Prime Minister] came to speak to our association, and promised our delegates that his government would put in place a new cost sharing program with the provinces and municipalities to increase the number of police officers in our communities....

Our member associations feel betrayed by the government's failure to deliver upon this key election promise. We are calling on Parliament to reinforce the program commitment and design in the 2009 Federal Budget, in order to address these shortcomings.

The association feels feel betrayed. These experts in policing say they do not have enough boots on the ground. I very much look forward to their testimony on this bill to see if they think that a mandatory reporting mechanism is enough. I also look forward to hearing from other experts on online child pornography issues.

We have looked at the questions of what we are trying to accomplish and whether the proposed reforms are likely to make our communities safer. The third question that we need to answer is, do we need this legislation? Well, maybe.

One thing I know for sure is that we need more than what this bill is providing, if we are actually going to address the issue of online child pornography.

[Kevin Sorenson, Conservative, Crowfoot, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague from the NDP for her remarks, which showed some of her reservations about this bill. That is all right. Sometimes when governments bring forward bills, the opposition tend to say, “Our job is to critique them”, and we look forward to the NDP doing that.

It is a great day when we see legislation like this being brought forward. It reminds me of a number of years ago when, as the Speaker will remember, we had a large man in this House by the name of Myron Thompson from Wild Rose. His seat was just a little bit from mine. I remember he would stand to protect our children, which was a passion of his. He would stand and speak with the most eloquence and passion in defence of these young children, in many cases babies. Police forces, such as the Toronto Police Service, had brought forward the issue to him and he was an ambassador for the protection of children. Thus when we have a bill like this, I am certainly reminded of Myron Thompson.

The last statistical data we have in regard to child pornography are from 2007. During that year, there were over 1,400 reported child pornography incidents, of which 440 resulted in charges.

The government has always been bringing forward legislation that would protect the most vulnerable. In the remarks by the New Democratic member, she said she was not sure that mandatory reporting was enough. We can certainly look at more. However, time after time when we bring forward this legislation, we watch as the opposition votes against it, stalls it here, and stalls it in that other place. Therefore, I am encouraged when I hear something positive said about this bill.

She asked whether it was enough and if we needed it and responded, “Well, maybe”. I do not think there should be any “Well, maybe” about this. We need these kinds of steps and I commend the justice minister for bringing this bill forward. If we do not need it when we have 1,400 incidents reported in a year, I ask my colleague how many incidents she wants to wait for before she knows that we need it.

[Megan Leslie, NDP, Halifax, NS]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague did say that “We need these kinds of steps”, but the one problem with that statement was that it was plural. There are no steps here. There is one very tiny step toward mandatory reporting, and if we only have 440 charges, that is a very serious problem.

I would point out that the Centre for Innovation Law and Policy at the University of Toronto, which I referred to earlier, has a white paper entitled, “Staying safely connected: Updated strategies for protecting children and youth from exploitation online”, and they have some really wonderful recommendations.

In particular, they have recommendations about policing. They talk about police training regarding online meeting crimes and child pornography. They talk about having special prosecutors with experience in prosecuting these crimes. That would be quite fantastic, would it not?

They are the ones who should be handling these cases to make sure that the evidence is very clear to judges, to the judiciary, because it is pretty technical. For instance, what is an ISP? We heard a lot about the member for Bourassa's Facebook friends, and I do not even know if any judges in my province are friends on Facebook.

The centre also suggests collaboration with industry.

These are some really sound suggestions coming from this law and policy group or centre, and these are really the steps, plural, that we should be taking.

[Jean Crowder, NDP, Nanaimo—Cowichan, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the member for Halifax for outlining some of the good things in the bill, but some of the challenges as well. I want to touch on a couple of points the member mentioned.

She mentioned the fact that when we are talking about children in this context, often we are talking about prostitution or other aspects, and that we ignore the sexual exploitation of children. I know that in the other house, Senator Dallaire has an committee talking about sexual exploitation of aboriginal youth and that the committee is looking at how it is that despite law enforcement and prevention, young men and women end up being sexually exploited. That committee has been looking at some best practices across this country.

The member also mentioned the fact that this bill, in and of itself, does not address some of the very serious issues that lead to young men and women being taken advantage of.

I wonder if the member could specifically talk about some of these other issues that need to be taken into consideration.

[Megan Leslie, NDP, Halifax, NS]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for mentioning the committee she is working on with Senator Dallaire.

It is very important to look at the youth who are actually being affected. To go back to the white paper, some of the recommendations in it are actually about education.

We think that educating youth is such a wishy-washy thing to be doing and that we need to really crack down on online sexual exploitation. However education of young people is absolutely key. Many children over 12 are actually complicit in some of their own exploitation. Therefore, we need to work with young people to understand what makes them susceptible to sexual relationships that actually end up online, and to work with teachers and technicians to figure out how to do this. We need to provide education to make sure that kids understand what sexual exploitation is and that they can report it. It has been shown that a lot of children who are involved with online sexual abuse actually experience sexual abuse within their own lives as well before this type of abuse actually gets online.

How can we capture that information? How can we make sure that children are self-reporting? I know it sounds like a very simple thing. The Kids Help Phone is a profound way in which we could start.

We need to work directly with young people and children.

[Irene Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague's presentation was most informative.

One of the tragedies that we have to face in this place is that we are talking about this after the fact. We are talking about children who have been abused and exploited and have not heard very much about how to protect them and prevent the exploitation.

Not terribly long ago I was at an event sponsored by the Saint Leonard's Society, where there was talk about the crime rate. Generally speaking, no matter what the government says, the crime rate is going down. It is going down for violent crimes and it is in decline, except for one group. That group is young men aged 22 to 29.

That society connected the increase in crime and delinquency within that group and problems such as being susceptible to child pornography to the Mike Harris government, because of the lack of resources, the lack of affordable housing, the lack of child care and the lack of after school programs. Children need to be protected, warned and supported.

The government has said nothing about that, and I wonder if my hon. colleague would care to comment.

[Megan Leslie, NDP, Halifax, NS]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from London—Fanshawe not just for her question but also for the incredible work she has done on issues in her own riding. I applaud her for that.

I also applaud her for her statement before the question, because that is exactly what we need to be talking about. Yes, violent crime has been going down, except within this one group. Why is it happening?

The depth of poverty in Canada is dramatic and is increasing. What it means is that poor families are poorer. They have access to fewer resources and fewer opportunities for their future.

I support what the member said and I think she is bang on.

[Pierre Lemieux, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Agriculture]

Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Leeds—Grenville.

I am proud to rise in the House today to speak to this important piece of legislation which would enhance Canada's existing measures to better protect children against sexual exploitation through child pornography.

As the father of five children aged from six to 20 years of age, I can tell the House there is nothing more important to a parent than ensuring the safety of our children and protecting them from dangerous Internet predators. That is one of the top priorities for parents in this new digital era.

Bill C-58 would do so by creating a new national statutory requirement for providers of Internet services to report online child pornography to designated authorities. Ultimately, this new reporting requirement would improve the ability of law enforcement to detect potential child pornography offences, thereby helping to reduce the availability of online child pornography. It would facilitate the identification and rescue of child victims, and help identify offenders for the purpose of investigation and prosecution.

Although Canada's criminal law has specifically prohibited child pornography since 1993 and strengthened these prohibitions in 2002 and 2005, the full impact of the role of the Internet in facilitating the demand for and distribution of this material is really only now becoming better understood. The anonymity and instantaneous worldwide access to such despicable material offered by the Internet are real challenges.

Bill C-58 would apply to those who provide Internet services to the public, requiring them to report to a designated agency tips they receive regarding websites where child pornography may be available to the public. It would also require them to notify police and safeguard evidence if they believed that a child pornography offence had been committed using their Internet service.

Failure to comply with these duties would constitute an offence punishable by graduated fines up to $1,000 for a first offence, $5,000 for a second offence and for subsequent offences the possibility of a fine up to $10,000 or six months' imprisonment or both, for individual offenders. If the offender were a corporation the graduated fines would be up to $10,000, $50,000 and $100,000.

I would highlight that nothing in the legislation would either require or authorize any individual or company to actively seek out incidents of child pornography. In other words, providers of Internet services will not be required to monitor their networks for this type of material.

Our government recognizes the efforts of Canada's major Internet service providers, or ISPs, as they are known, in addressing this serious problem. Most Canadian ISPs have adopted acceptable use policies that outline the rules for using Internet accounts, the conditions for access privileges and the consequences for violating those rules and conditions. Most of these policies allow the ISPs to terminate accounts in cases of unacceptable online behaviour.

Organizations such as the Canadian Association of Internet Providers have also helped to develop standards for the industry, including a code of conduct. In 2003 some Canadian ISPs and police agencies formed the Canadian Coalition Against Internet Child Exploitation to assist law enforcement in addressing online child pornography. One important initiative to come out of such collaboration with ISPs is Project Cleanfeed Canada, which aims to block access to websites that host child pornography. Because the focus of Cleanfeed Canada is on limiting accidental exposure to such images, Cybertip.ca provides to participating ISPs a regularly updated list of Internet addresses associated with images of child sexual abuse.

Most of the major ISPs providing service to almost 90% of all Canadian Internet subscribers are participating in Cleanfeed Canada under a memorandum of understanding with Cybertip.ca. Efforts are being made to expand Cleanfeed Canada to the ISPs that service the other 10% of Canadians. Requiring all providers of Internet services to report child pornography websites will undoubtedly enhance the efficiency of the Cleanfeed Canada program.

Bill C-58 also ensures that all those who provide Internet services to the public are be held to the same reporting standard when it comes to reporting online Internet child pornography.

I would highlight that we anticipate that this new legislation should have a limited impact on the business practices of providers of Internet services who already voluntarily report cases of online child pornography. Bill C-58 was drafted in a manner that closely reflects the current practices of Canada's major ISPs.

Bill C-58, however, covers more than just a typical ISP. The term ISP, or Internet service provider, usually refers to someone who provides access to the Internet. This act applies to all those who provide an Internet service to the public. While this does include access providers, it also includes those who provide electronic mail services such as webmail, Internet content hosting services and social networking sites.

This legislation complements our existing comprehensive strategy to combat child sexual exploitation in Canada. This strategy includes an impressive array of existing Criminal Code provisions as well as recent legislative initiatives currently before the House such as Bill C-46, An Act to amend the Criminal Code, the Competition Act and the Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Act, and Bill C-47, An Act regulating telecommunications facilities to support investigations.

If adopted, these proposed pieces of legislation would help ensure that law enforcement and national security agencies have the tools they need to fight crimes such as child pornography in today's high tech environment. This government also recognizes that more is needed to combat this scourge than just strong criminal laws.

That is why, in December 2008, we renewed the federal government's national strategy to protect children from sexual exploitation on the Internet. Initially launched in 2004, this national strategy is providing $42.1 million over five years to the RCMP's National Child Exploitation Coordination Centre to provide law enforcement with better tools and resources to address Internet-based child sexual exploitation, enhance public education and awareness and support the 2005 national launch and ongoing operation of Cybertip.ca as a national 24/7 tipline for reporting the sexual exploitation of children on the Internet.

As announced in budget 2007 and rolled out in 2008, our Conservative government has allocated an additional $6 million per year to strengthen initiatives to combat the sexual exploitation and trafficking of children. These funds are being used to augment the overall capacity of the NCECC as well as to specifically enhance its ability to identify and ultimately rescue child victims through the analysis of images seized from sex offenders that are captured on the Internet or received from international law enforcement agencies.

I hope the House understands just how important this legislation is. Bill C-58 will further enhance collaboration between the Internet service industry and law enforcement, resulting in greater protection for our children from online sexual exploitation in today's technological environment. I urge the House to give this bill its full support.

[The Deputy Speaker, Conservative, Andrew Scheer]

We might have time for a very brief question before the bells ring. I will go to the member for Burnaby—New Westminster for a 30-second question.

[Peter Julian, NDP, Burnaby—New Westminster, BC]

Mr. Speaker, we have seen the government cut back on crime prevention funding and not keep its promise to fund the 2,500 police officer positions that were supposed to be funded. There are no resources going with this bill. We are all concerned about child abuse. Why is the government not investing so that the resources are available to follow this bill?

[Pierre Lemieux, Conservative, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

Mr. Speaker, toward the closing of my speech, I believe I identified funding that our government has identified toward ending child exploitation. I mentioned $42.1 million over five years to the RCMP, for example, and $6 million per year to strengthen initiatives to combat the sexual exploitation and trafficking of children.

When it comes to this specific bill, we are placing the responsibility on ISPs to report to a registered agency tips that they receive concerning child pornography through the use of their services.

The House resumed from November 25 consideration of the motion that Bill C-58, An Act respecting the mandatory reporting of Internet child pornography by persons who provide an Internet service, be read the second time and referred to a committee.

[Gord Brown, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today on second reading of Bill C-58, An Act respecting the mandatory reporting of Internet child pornography by persons who provide an Internet service, and to reiterate the government's commitment to protecting our children.

Evolving communication technologies like the World Wide Web have proven to be of clear benefit to Canadians.

Sadly, these same technologies have also provided new and easier means for offenders to make, view and distribute child pornography. As a result, there has been a significant increase in the availability and volume of child pornography. The web has also enabled criminals to coordinate and plan a wide range of other crimes.

Unfortunately, despite its undeniable benefits, today's advanced technology not only makes these crimes easier to commit but also harder to investigate. While technology has advanced rapidly, it is a challenge for law enforcement to keep pace with new technologies when it comes to investigating crimes.

There are also reports of an increased demand for material with violent content and/or material showing children who are very young. This increased demand is being met with increased supply.

Child pornography constitutes a very serious form of child victimization. Not only are children sexually abused and exploited, but the continuing demand for production and use of child pornography also objectifies all children as sexual objects for the sexual gratification of adult predators.

According to the recent report by the Federal Ombudsman for Victims of Crime, “Every Image, Every Child”, the number of images of serious child abuse quadrupled between 2003 and 2007. As I mentioned, these images are becoming more violent and feature younger children.

I was appalled to discover that 39% of those individuals accessing child pornography were viewing images of children between the ages of three and five, and 19% were viewing images of infants under three years old. I am sure that most law-abiding Canadians would be just as horrified by these statistics.

In addition, Cybertip.ca, Canada's national tipline for reporting the online sexual exploitation of children, receives more than 800,000 hits and more than 700 reports to its website each month.

To help achieve our goal of putting a stop to the growing problem of sexual exploitation of children, the Minister of Justice recently introduced legislation that would create a more uniform mandatory reporting regime across Canada. It would require persons who provide Internet services to the public to report certain information about Internet child pornography. Failure to comply with these duties would constitute an offence punishable by fines and, in some cases, imprisonment, or both.

Our efforts are focused on the Internet and on suppliers of Internet services, because the Internet has largely been responsible for the growth of child pornography crimes over the last 10 years or so.

This legislation covers more than just Internet service provides, or ISPs, as they are known. This term, of course, is commonly used in relation to those who provide access to the Internet. The legislation applies to all persons who provide an Internet service to the public, including Internet access, electronic mail services, Internet content hosting services and social networking sites.

This new reporting regime would complement the actions this government has already taken earlier this year. Our government introduced legislation that proposed to update certain existing offences and to create new investigative powers to help law enforcement officials deal with crime in today's technological environment. It also introduced legislation regarding investigative tools for enforcement agencies to quickly respond to crimes such as child pornography. These pieces of legislation acknowledge that the same communications technologies that benefit our day-to-day lives also provide easier ways of committing crimes, as well as shielding perpetrators from investigation.

Bill C-58, a new act, complements well the measures already in place in the Criminal Code. The code's existing child pornography provisions prohibit all forms of making, distributing, making available, accessing and possessing child pornography, including through the use of the Internet.

At the same time, I also applaud the efforts of provincial and territorial governments that have already enacted, or are contemplating, legislation on mandatory reporting of child pornography. Children are also protected from sexual exploitation by provincial and territorial child welfare legislation, which permits the voluntary reporting of child pornography and makes that reporting mandatory in three provinces. In fact, the approaches adopted in Manitoba, Ontario and Nova Scotia require all citizens to report all forms of child pornography.

Bill C-58 is new federal criminal legislation that is narrower in scope than the legislation in those three provinces. Nevertheless, it will provide for uniform mandatory reporting regimes across the country, which will complement provincial and territorial efforts under their child welfare legislation.

I am also encouraged by the actions of the many suppliers of Internet services who have been good corporate citizens in voluntarily reporting child pornography. The reports to Cybertip.ca have resulted in a number of arrests, as well as numerous children being removed from abusive environments.

Our government takes the safety of our citizens, particularly children, very seriously, whether in cyberspace or out in our communities. The creation and distribution of child pornography is an appalling and odious crime in which children are brutalized over and over again.

A mandatory reporting regime across Canada will improve law enforcement's ability to detect potential child pornography offences, help reduce the availability of online child pornography, facilitate the rescue of victims and help identify and apprehend offenders.

Through this legislation our government is continuing its progress in protecting Canadians, improving our justice system and ensuring that it keeps pace with modern technologies. At the same time, we are reiterating our commitment to protect children from sexual exploitation.

[Jim Maloway, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I ask the member who has just spoken whether the government has done some best practice searches across the world to see whether there are other jurisdictions that maybe have dealt with the matter more effectively? Has the government looked at Sweden, Brazil, Germany or other countries in the EU as examples of places where more effective options may be found?

[Gord Brown, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I know that the government has looked at what a number of countries, provinces and territories have been doing, because I know that Canadians consider this issue to be very serious.

I know that we need to look at all of the possibilities to ensure that we do protect our children. This bill does so much to remove what has stood in the way of police being able to investigate and get at the perpetrators of this terrible crime.

[Rick Casson, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I have a question for my colleague. Maybe just to preface that a little bit, a number of years ago I tabled a private member's bill in the House to deal with child pornography. We had noticed at the time that the Criminal Code contained no provision to take away the equipment and materials used to create child pornography. Thus we brought forward that bill, and to the government's credit at the time, it included the provisions in a bill, which became law. So we feel pretty strongly about some of these issues.

I ask my colleague how many cases of Internet child pornography are investigated annually in Canada? He indicated that the ISPs are offering information now, but I would just like to know what is happening presently in Canada.

[Gord Brown, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the hon. member for Lethbridge for that question because it is very important and I know it is something that is very important to him.

The latest statistical data we have relating to child pornography is from 2007. During that year there were over 1,400 police reported child pornography incidents, 440 of which resulted in charges. Unfortunately we have no way of knowing if any of those cases were initiated by an Internet service provider report.

What we do know is that the proliferation of images over the Internet really is a growing problem. According to the special report by the Federal Ombudsman for Victims of Crime, “Every Image, Every Child”, which I spoke about in my presentation, the number of images of serious child abuse quadrupled between 2003 and 2007. The images are getting more violent and the children in the photos are getting younger.

I know that this is something the hon. member for Lethbridge takes very seriously and I do too. I know that our government does, which is why this legislation was introduced.

[Jim Maloway, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Mr. Speaker, the member for Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe outlined in his speech that in Sweden child porn is blocked. Germany and the EU also block access to child porn sites. Brazil has set up ethics rules which the ISPs have signed on to.

I wonder if the member might see these options as being more effective or maybe additions to the effects of this bill.

[Gord Brown, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville, ON]

Mr. Speaker, that is excellent input.

We are at second reading debate on the bill. I think there is strong support among all parties for the bill to move to committee so that the committee can look at it. I know members of Parliament will want to hear about all of the possibilities to make sure that we do everything possible to fight child pornography.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak to Bill C-58. It is important to summarize again what the bill is about.

This bill would impose reporting duties on Internet service providers, ISPs, and on those who offer Internet services to the public when child pornography appears in accounts provided to their subscribers, or if they have reasonable grounds to believe that their service is being or has been used to commit a child pornography offence. That basically summarizes the bill. As a party, Liberal members support the bill at second reading and sending it to committee.

It is important to look at some of the history.

The governing party tries to leave the impression that it is the only party that believes in law and order. However, this has been on the agenda for a long time. We looked at it when we were in government, when I was the solicitor general. We were very worried about child pornography.

Although the Internet is a wonderful tool in terms of providing information to citizens, it is also a tool that others can use to exploit children and exploit people in many other ways.

Although the government tries to indicate that it is the only party that believes in law and order, it is not. I think all of us in this House believe in law and order.

When we pass laws in this place we have to ensure that they are balanced laws and that they will do what they are intended to do without creating unseen consequences and complications for others in society.

As with all legislation that mandates a third party to report online dealings to the police, a balance needs to be struck between policing and privacy concerns to protect Internet neutrality. We intend to examine these questions at committee.

That is why it is extremely important that we send the bill to committee and allow the proper witnesses to come forward, people who work on the Internet system and understand the technicalities and the difficulties of imposing this new burden on providers, albeit for all the right reasons. We need to understand the implications of that in terms of the laws that we make as well.

I might point out another reality, which the member for Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe mentioned yesterday in a somewhat similar tone. The reality is that in 2005 the mandatory minimum sentence of one year for an offence of possessing and creating child pornography was instituted by a Liberal government. The definition of child pornography was broadened by a Liberal government to include depictions, digital or otherwise, in order to trap more perpetrators of the crime. That took us up to late 2005. Then we take the canvas over to January 23, 2006. The hon. member for Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe said:

I have sat through the justice committee meetings and read the literature since that time without interruption. I have not attended every meeting, but I have been there for the whole agenda. There has been nothing on child pornography in that time. If we are all united in Parliament to try to do some good and combat the ill effects of the web and child pornography exploitation in particular, we ought to say to each other that this is not good enough.

The key point the member is making, with which I agree, is that we have to come together quickly. As I said, this was an issue when I was solicitor general in 2003. Each and every day the Internet system is used for the exploitation of others, so we have to get this bill to committee and deal with this issue. It has taken the government a considerable amount of time to bring this bill forward.

As well, I would point out that all attorneys general across Canada, based on the attorney general meetings with the provinces, basically support the move in this direction. Because of the slowness of the federal government in terms of moving forward, some of those governments are taking action on their own.

If we are going to have good laws in Canada, there has to be coordination across the board. That is why it is so important that the federal government take the lead in terms of the implementation of these laws. It is important that we get Bill C-58 to committee, have our hearings and get it acted upon.

While I am on my feet talking about law and order issues, and I have mentioned this before in the House of Commons, there is an area that I am really concerned about and it fits into this debate in some fashion. That is the whole way the Minister of Public Safety is undermining the rehabilitation aspect of inmates by abolishing the prison farms.

I have said before that this is an extremely important issue. We have a government that is talking about law and order, but its law and order agenda seems to be to go out there and build super-jails and put more people in prison. If we are going to have a justice system that works, it has to be one that rehabilitates people. One of the best rehabilitative aspects of that system in fact is for those inmates to work on farms.

There are six of those farms across the country. One of the most productive farms is in the Kingston area. I have been there. In fact, it is in the Speaker's home riding. There are six institutions in that area. Frontenac Pen Farm is in that area. It has one of the best and most productive dairy herds in Canada, and the government is talking about closing it down. It is a farm in which inmates get out there and work with cattle and produce crops and supply other institutions in the Kingston area and across the country to Laval, Quebec, with food. This is productivity in which they take pride.

Contrary to what the Minister of Public Safety states, that skills of farmers are no longer worthy, they are in fact worthy. The inmates do not just learn how to be mechanics or how to milk a cow. They learn teamwork. They learn management. They learn computer skills. They learn how to relate through the use of feeding and working with cattle and livestock.

I want to take the opportunity, while I am on this bill, to emphasize this point again. The government, with no supporting data, has decided to close those prison farms across the country and lose that productivity, lose the rehabilitative aspects of inmates working on farms. That is a terrible decision. It is a wrong decision. I would encourage the minister to come to his senses and recognize that those farms are an important part of our corrections system and should remain.

I will admit that I got a wee bit off track from Bill C-58, but my point in expressing the seriousness of the decision of the government on prison farms is that while it talks about law and order, while it is great on messaging, its actions are not always in the same direction in which it is leaving the impression it is moving forward.

Bill C-58 is important. It stems from an agreement reached at the 2008 meeting of federal, provincial and territorial justice ministers to enact mandatory requirements for ISPs and online content providers to report cases of child pornography.

The major components of the bill that we support are: the mandatory reporting of all website addresses that ISPs are aware may contain child pornography; mandatory reporting to police when ISPs believe that a child pornography offence is or has been committed using their services; and that the provider must also preserve the relevant computer data for 21 days after notifying police, unless required by judicial order that the data is to be destroyed after the 21 day period.

Those are valid reasons and our party is willing to give support to this legislation, to send it to committee to be studied further and to be implemented, I hope quickly, so that this terrible issue of child pornography and the exploitation of children on the Internet can be dealt with.

[Rick Casson, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Mr. Speaker, when my colleague from Malpeque got around to talking about the bill, it was good to hear his arguments in support of it. When it comes to the issue of child pornography, we as members of Parliament need to stand united in any kind of fight to stop this most terrible of crimes. The fact that we are willing to work together to protect the most vulnerable in our society is important.

I want to relay to the member opposite that a number of years ago I believe it was Detective Matthews from the Ontario Provincial Police and others who came to the Hill to talk to us in committee about this issue. Detective Matthews set up his computer in the committee room, went on the Internet and went into, I do not know where they go, a chat room or something and indicated that he was an underage person looking for some company.

By the time our meeting was over, we had reviewed some disturbing images that none of us will ever forget related to child pornography. I do not know how people who deal with this day after day can keep their focus because it is absolutely terrible.

In the matter of an hour, there were a number of hits on that website from people to take advantage of this supposed child. I think the more we can do and the faster we can do it, the better off our children will be. That is simply a comment for the member.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Mr. Speaker, I just want to re-emphasize the hon. member's point, Detective Matthews, who appeared a considerable number of years ago, is one of the leading people in getting not only the Canadian government but governments around the world to deal with this serious issue.

I do not think any of us who were sitting in the room that day will forget those images. As I sat there looking at them, I wondered how human beings could do to other human beings what they sometimes do. I guess I will put it that way.

The member's comments remind me of a meeting I happened to attend in Paris as solicitor general on the same subject. This exploitation can take place anywhere in the world and then is viewed across the world. The abuse of human beings and children for people's thrills or, in some cases, financial gain is absolutely shocking. It is one of the worst crimes. It has been on deck for a considerable time and very definitely must be dealt with if we are going to do the right thing for future generations.

I agree with my hon. friend that what we saw that day was very disturbing. I think all of us in the House would agree that police officers and others who track down these kinds of crimes on a daily basis need to be congratulated because it has to be a mental drain to look at these images, track them down and then deal with them constructively.

[Joy Smith, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased today to stand in the House of Commons with parliamentarians from all parties to talk about Bill C-58. In this Parliament probably one of the most important things we are doing is addressing the protection of our most vulnerable citizens, our children.

Bill C-58 would provide a level of certainty for all those who supply an Internet service to the public that they would be held to the same reporting standard with regard to child pornography. We have heard in the House that child pornography is on the increase. The images that are displayed are becoming more and more violent. Our government recognizes the efforts of major Internet service providers in voluntarily reporting this type of material.

However, creating a uniform mandatory reporting requirement with respect to Internet child pornography on all who supply Internet services to the public across Canada will strengthen our ability to protect children from sexual exploitation.

As I have listened to the speeches, there has been a thread throughout and this thread has been that all members feel that this is a horrendous crime against children. Mr. Speaker, you have small children and I know that it must touch your heart because our children are our most precious gift.

The bill would improve the law and improve law enforcement's ability to detect potential child pornography offences and help reduce the availability of online child pornography. It would also facilitate the identification of victims so they may be rescued and help identify and apprehend offenders. This is a very important piece of legislation. We have heard in the speeches that there are 1,400 police reported child pornography incidents of which 440 resulted in charges, and that is not even up to date. There are more today in the year 2009 going into 2010.

Many good people across this nation are watching and putting the lens on what Parliament is doing in terms of protecting our children. Traditionally speaking, Parliament is a place that sometimes can go wonky. Even though a good bill is presented, sometimes it does not get passed. We have a lot of unnamed people making a lot of unnamed speeches that sound good, but in the end the laws sometimes do not get passed.

As we know, after we deal with the laws here in the House of Commons, they then go into the Senate where they must be examined before they can receive passage.

I want to talk about people across the country who have made a big difference and who are watching what our government is doing in terms of child pornography. I am proud that our government also introduced related bills that have supported Bill C-58. So there is a concerted effort with our government to address our most vulnerable citizens and to protect our children.

Our government recently produced three hard-hitting related bills and one is Bill C-46 which was brought forward on June 18. That bill would require Internet service providers to provide police with email and ISP addresses of those viewing child pornography. It also would require ISPs to freeze child pornographic data for 21 days. It also would require cell phone companies to assist police in tracking child porn on cell phones and BlackBerries.

Again, Bill C-47, which was passed on June 18, was a bill that permitted police to obtain information about clients from ISPs and requires companies to acquire the technical ability to allow police to intercept information. Bill C-58 is just another building block on this foundation that helps protect our children.

In my travels over the past decade, I have met many of the people working on this issue of human trafficking and child porn in our country. As a mother of six children and the mother of an RCMP officer who used to be in the integrated child exploitation unit, I have seen first-hand the cost that a lot of these police officer have paid. They sat there and viewed those images. They went out and tried to get the bad guys. I pay honour and respect to all the police officers who have done that.

Many of the projects across the country outside of Parliament Hill have really put pressure on all of us as members of Parliament to stop this horrific crime. When we talk about child porn over the Internet, it brings to mind Mr. Brian McConaghy who was the founding director of the Ratanak Foundation. He is a forensic scientist with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and has served with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for 22 years. He worked tirelessly to help build the case against Donald Baker. For 19 of those 22 years, he performed his duties with the RCMP while setting up and running this foundation. After that, he continued on.

I was talking to Mr. McConaghy yesterday. He and I work on different things.

When we are talking about the Olympics, human trafficking or child porn, they are all connected. What makes these police officers and front line workers who work with the victims of Internet child porn so special is their heart.

The Baker file has been forgotten in some cases but other files keep coming up. They come and go. They are horrendous and yet they are forgotten. I know everybody remembers the Willie Pickton file in B.C., which was a horrendous case that hit the front pages. The RCMP officers and the police vice officers who were working on Internet child porn and on these cases were deeply touched by the victims of this crime.

When we have people watching these images on the Internet and when they go across the ocean and act on those images and fantasies, they come back and continue that appetite for acting on the fantasies because they have allowed themselves to go into that dark place that human beings often have with child pornography.

We talk about the front line officers and we talk about the victims but I want to talk about one victim just to impact our Parliament today so that we understand.

Serena Abbotsway was killed by Willie Pickton. She was a kind young girl who was on the streets helping young people who were victims of human trafficking and child pornography. She underwent many beatings in trying to rescue people because she herself was a street person.

Mr. McConaghy is off to Cambodia right now but when I was talking to him the day before yesterday, he was telling me, as a forensic scientist, how he became attached not only to the cases but also attached to the victims.

He told me what it felt like to look at the skull of Ms. Serena Abbotsway and to look at the picture he had of her. She was baptized at a church on the east side. She worked on the streets and was involved in all kinds of different things. There, before him, was her remains.

He treated her remains with respect as he went through her particular case. When he finished doing his forensic science work, he put her skull away and said goodbye to her. He told her that he would never forget her and that he would do the best he could to ensure that other victims were not hurt.

We can talk about people like Matt Logan. In Parliament the public needs to know about these unsung heroes who work so hard every day. Matt Logan is a recently retired RCMP officer. He has penetrated the psyches of countless psychopaths, pedophiles and hostage-takers. He has spent time in the jail system assessing predatory sex offenders. He is one of only seventeen people in North America who are both police officers and qualified psychologists, and one of even fewer who specialize in the criminal mind.

The member opposite mentioned the toll it took on the police officers. I know many police officers who have taken that toll because of their work. Matt Logan knows an awful lot about pedophiles and about their minds. He knows how to get into those minds and how to rescue the victims.

Staff Sergeant Logan has done so much to bring this issue to the forefront on our national scene. He said that he had a hard time believing that, given an opportunity, the child predators, when after watching victims, would not act on their fantasies. He said, “Child pornography exists primarily for the consumption of predatory child molesters”.

It is the beginning of something that can grow. Logan, who is a criminal psychologist in the RCMP's behavioural science group, has done extensive work with sex offenders. He has been called on more and more to consult on child exploitation cases.

RCMP Matt Logan describes two types of child molesters, the situational and the preferential. He says that most molesters fit into the situational category. He says that means most are male and are indiscriminate with victims, committing sexual assault based on accessibility to a victim. If they have a pornography collection, child porn is usually a small portion of it. He says that the preferential child molester can be of any age, driven by fantasies centred on a specific age, gender or even the look of a child. Most gravitate to prepubescent. Is that not shocking?

RCMP Logan said that although he had worked with some whose fetish was newborns, preferential child molesters also had a long-term pattern of behaviour and almost certainly collect child porn. He says, “The images and erotic stories fuel the fantasies that “drive the bus” to hunting and molesting a child”. This is a statement from a seasoned 22-year RCMP officer who worked in this area.

Bill C-58 is extremely important.

Talking about close to home, my son is an RCMP officer and is in the ICE unit. On his days off, he goes all over the country, talking to associations and groups about how to protect their children against child molesters. In fact, next Friday night he and I will do a joint presentation at one of those locations.

There are other people, like Lianna McDonald, who is the head of the Canadian Centre for Child Protection. She does so much to try to get the cybertip lines up and running. She works hand-in-hand with Beyond Borders, with Roz Prober.

For the first time, businesses across the country are putting money toward organizations that are fighting child trafficking and child porn. One of those organizations is The Body Shop. It has recently launched a huge initiative about hand cream. My Christmas baskets are going to be filled with its hand cream because of its support for the protection of child victims from human trafficking and from child porn.

I want to talk about Paul Gillespie. Paul Gillespie was on the streets protecting children, victims of child abuse. He worked on the ground with many of these young women. I have met some of the young women whom he has rescued. Now he is with KINSA, the Kids Internet Safety Alliance. He works with Canadian law enforcement and other partners to deliver training and build capacity among the police of developing nations to help them find and rescue victims of child abuse, whose images are shared on the Internet. Once rescued, he helps the victims and their families receive support to help them heal through the Mothers Online Movement, MOM. It is a powerful community network. These are the unsung heroes who are listening today to what is going on in Parliament.

Paul Gillespie, a former police officer, built and led the child exploitation section of the Toronto Police Service Sex Crimes Unit. He has become widely known as a world leader on this issue. I consider him a very good friend of mine and someone who is one of those unsung heroes. He has never been brought to the forefront for his work. Today I want to do that and to thank him.

Then we have the small groups that are springing up all over our nation, those groups that do not receive any money from anyone, but they find out about human trafficking and child porn. They go out and educate people. I have always said that education is our greatest tool.

We can talk about Naomi Baker from Canada Fights Human Trafficking. She has brought so many people together and educated many of them on how to protect their children.

We can talk about Natasha Falle. She is my hero because she was a victim of trafficking and was the daughter of a cop. She is off the streets now. She has helped so many people. She now runs Youth Unlimited. We will never find a more articulate, more beautiful, more grounded person than Natasha Falle. She is the poster girl for getting programs in place that will protect and help these victims because they can be rehabilitated.

We can talk about the beautiful Temple Committee Against Human Trafficking in Montreal, started by Rabbi Lerner.

Many people are working so hard to ensure that this horrendous crime is suppressed. Even today in the other chamber, Bill C-268 is awaiting the passage by the Senate. We look forward to all senators supporting that bill.

Over and over we hear in Parliament that this issue has to be a non-partisan one. When it comes to the protection of our children, parliamentarians have to work together. It is so important.

The Olympics are coming upon us in a very short time. I happen to know the bad guys now are getting all the girls together. I know some towns from where they have taken some of these girls.

We cannot sit and wait. This is Canada's hidden secret. This is one of our darkest spots in history when child sex slavery is allowed and when child porn has become something of a joke to some of the people in our country. We have to take this seriously. We have to speak out. As parliamentarians, we cannot afford the luxury of in house bickering. We can only afford the luxury of the privilege of putting laws forward that will protect our most vulnerable victims.

[Rick Casson, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague from Kildonan—St. Paul for her message today and for her tireless work on the issue of human trafficking. She has chosen that as a focus for her efforts and she has done a tremendous job on that.

I would like to ask for her opinion and her thoughts on the fact that our government has passed legislation to increase the age sexual consent from 14 to 16. I was certainly in favour of that and we worked for many years to make that happen, hoping to protect our children for two more years of their lives.

In the hon. member's focus and in her specialty on human trafficking, has the bill worked? Has the raising of the age of sexual consent helped our police officers and our authorities in the fight against the terrible crime of human trafficking?

[Joy Smith, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

Mr. Speaker, raising the age of consent was long overdue. I wish we could have raised it to 18 or 21, but we did get it raised to 16 and I am grateful for that.

Throughout the country children are now being targeted. Children who are virgins get a higher price when they are sold to predators. This is alarming and unconscionable. We always thought it happened in other countries, but it is also happens in Canada.

Our government has put a lot of very strong laws in place that are very important to protect our most vulnerable citizens. I applaud members opposite who have supported these bills and these initiatives. I know there are many good members in opposition who take the welfare of our most vulnerable citizens seriously over their own personal gain.

Parliament is about that. It really does not matter who is in front of the cameras. It really does not matter who gets the credit. We have to stand very firm as a federal government, with the support of opposition members, to help these bills go through.

[Mario Laframboise, Bloc, Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak on behalf of the Bloc Québécois to Bill C-58 on mandatory reporting of child pornography sites, which requires Internet service providers to report child pornography activities they are aware of.

I will start by saying that the Bloc Québécois supports this bill in principle. We will vote in favour of the bill at this stage so that it can be analyzed in depth in committee.

It is always necessary to examine Conservative bills individually, because of the Conservatives' approach to tackling crime. We have to be extremely vigilant. It is important that the men and women who are watching are aware of this. The government may want to crack down on crime, but it has decided to replace the judiciary with minimum sentences—that is its approach—instead of addressing the issue of judicial appointments. The government sees that people are very much opposed to this. In any case, should judges be replaced or brought into line with the right-wing Conservative philosophy? Yet the government has decided to introduce minimum sentences in bill after bill. Its goal is to increase sentences and fill the prisons with criminals, and yet it wants to abolish the gun registry.

What does this mean? It means that everyone could have hunting rifles at home, yet the government is going to try to fill the prisons with criminals and to increase sentences. I have a lot of trouble following the government's logic when it comes to issues like the gun registry. I just renewed my licence, because I used to be a hunter. I say that I used to be, because I do not have time to hunt now. I have other demands on my time. In politics, you often have to give things up. I do not have time to hunt now, but I still have my hunting rifles. I had to ask my wife to sign my licence form, but I did not have a problem with that. She was very proud to sign it, because she knew I did not have a history of violence or anything. She signed. I think that this is a good way to ensure that couples continue getting along and also that people who might be violent think twice about getting a licence. Obviously, if I had been violent, I never would have dared ask my wife to sign my form. I would have known she would refuse.

I cannot understand how anyone could be against the gun registry when one of its purposes is to prevent violence against women. I have difficulty understanding the Conservative philosophy. But again, only the Conservatives and their republican way of seeing things can answer my questions. Nonetheless, it is only logical that a spouse's signature be required on forms or applications for obtaining a firearms licence for owning a gun or maintaining ownership of a gun. I am having a hard time understanding the Conservatives' philosophy behind this.

Meanwhile, next week they will be all worked up in the days leading up to the national day of action on violence against women. Once again, they will get all dramatic and say that we must do something about violence against women. However, they are against the idea of getting the spouse of a prospective gun owner to give permission by signing a form.

That is why, every time the Conservatives introduce a justice bill, we have to ask questions. That is what the Bloc Québécois has done. We will not rely on the Conservatives' conclusions to support Bill C-58, but on statistics and studies conducted by the Canadian Centre for Child Protection.

We have to wonder how it is that today, in 2009, Internet service providers can allow themselves not to have a policy to prevent child pornography from ending up on their sites. It is scary, but that is what it boils down to.

I have had many discussions with my teenage son. He is an adult now. He is part of the Internet generation.

For this generation, all information should be available and accessible. The Internet is a global meeting place where anything goes. I have had some serious discussions with my son and I told him that even though all information is accessible, illegal information should not be on Internet sites, no matter their origin.

Even though it should not have happened, it has. I will give some statistics from the analyses and surveys prepared by the Canadian Centre for Child Protection. That way we will have some benchmarks.

The following statement is found on the centre's website: “Parents list abduction and sexual exploitation as 2 of the top 3 concerns facing Canadian children.” Naturally, every good parent wants their children to be protected against exploitation or abduction. It also states that: “Most Canadian parents are using outdated and ineffective information to teach their children about personal safety.”

It is difficult for parents to be told by an organization such as the Canadian Centre for Child Protection that we are using outdated and ineffective information to teach our children. However, that is the reality. But why is that?

For one thing, I did not grow up with the Internet but my children did. Inevitably, parents of my age, in their early fifties, are not accustomed to this new technology. Because of my work I have had to learn quickly. But it has not been easy for some of my friends. Our children have learned to use this technology much more quickly.

The Canadian Centre for Child Protection is right: parents are using ineffective and outdated means to teach their children about safety, especially on the Internet. The following statistics are from its website.

Children account for 61% of all victims of sexual assault reported to the police and 21% of all victims of physical assault.

Thus, children are involved in many sexual assaults.

I will continue.

72% of Canadians feel that if someone wanted to access child pornography online, it would be very easy to do so.

92% of Canadians are concerned about child pornography being distributed on the Internet and 96% feel it is important to have a place to report child pornography online.

Cybertip.ca processes over 600 reports per month relating to the sexual exploitation of children on the Internet and receives over 800,000 website hits per month from people seeking educational information.

In homes without rules about Internet use, 74% of children report that an adult is never present when they use the Internet

Cybertip.ca is a tip line operated by the Canadian Centre for Child Protection.

According to a study conducted by the centre, parents are using outdated and ineffective information to teach their children about the Internet. Some 74% of children say that they are not supervised at home. Parents need to understand how important it is to supervise their children's Internet usage.

There is software that prevents certain kinds of data from downloading. Computers look harmless. They are just machines that we turn on, nothing more. But there is all kinds of information out there on the Internet, and more and more abusers. We have to take control of the situation.

Why does the House have to discuss Bill C-58? Because this is 2009, and website owners are still allowing child pornography on their websites. That is unbelievable, but it all comes down to money. Where there is money, there are humans, and where there are humans, there is human nature. People will do anything to make more money, so they allow child pornography on their websites, or they do not take necessary measures or spend money to keep it off their websites.

The purpose of this bill is to make the operators of these sites responsible. They will have to pay the fines because they were not vigilant and did not do their best to prevent this. Legislators are often accused of passing laws, putting up obstacles and going in circles. I am sorry, but these website operators have gone too far; it is over.

The Bloc Québécois wants this bill to be passed as quickly as possible. However, it must be carefully examined in committee, because this bill deals with parts of Canada's and Quebec's charters of rights and freedoms. We must ensure that human freedoms are being respected. But when we are talking about child pornography, rights and freedoms will have to take a back seat. We must carefully protect our children. Once again, we must hold those who run these sites responsible.

According to statistics from the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, 21% of children report having met someone in person they met first online. That is very worrisome. This study was conducted in 2005. This means that one out of every five children reports having met someone in person they first met online. Since we know that there are predators online, we cannot ignore this statistic.

My teenager would not like to hear me say this, but children are often naive. That is the truth. They think they are the best at everything. We must try to understand them and try to remember how we were at their age. They must all have their own experiences, but when we know that 21% of children report having met someone in person they met first online, that is worrisome. Good for them if they are meeting people their own age. But the problem with the Internet is that people lie about their ages and claim to be teenagers when they are really adults.

We know this, and we know that 74% of children use the Internet at home without an adult present, because as parents, we think that the computer on the desk is not that important or dangerous. We think all they do is play games on it. But that is not true; they do more than play games. They chat and talk, and can fall victim to online predators. More and more pedophiles are showing up on the Internet, to the point that now, we need to protect our children from sexual exploitation. That is what Bill C-58 would do.

I would also like to read part of a press release issued on November 18, 2009 by the Canadian Centre for Child Protection. I hope everyone is listening, because this is important. It says the following:

“What makes this particularly concerning is the very young age of the children in the images [the child pornography sites were analyzed]. These children are most likely being accessed and sexually abused by someone they know. Not only is it devastating for a child to be abused, but to have the abuse recorded and distributed on the Internet adds another layer of trauma,” said Lianna McDonald, executive director of the Canadian Centre for Child Protection. “This is a call to action to all Canadians to learn to recognize the signs of abuse, and to report their suspicions of abuse. We need to disrupt and hopefully stop child sexual abuse and prevent it from being memorialized and traded on the Internet.”

This is important because it has become a money maker. That is what I was saying earlier. We might still wonder why, in 2009, the operators of these Internet sites have not resolved this problem. The answer is because there is money to be made.

I am not accusing them. I do not want to make any accusations, but the fact remains that technology certainly must allow them to block these images on their sites, to track down these people wanting to send them links to a website or images of child pornography, and report them themselves.

That is what should have happened. We should not have to legislate this issue. However, because of business and money, certain situations arise, and of course I mean exploitation. Any time there are images of young men and young women on the Internet, this generally implies sexual exploitation. We must track down all these exploiters, these abusers and these criminals, because exploiting children is a horrible offence. That is why the Bloc Québécois supports this bill.

I wanted to come back to the study done by the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, which issued 12 recommendations in the areas of education and public awareness, technical and policy development, and research opportunities. This goes well beyond simply saying, fine, we will pass legislation in order to find the perpetrators of those horrendous crimes or we will impose specific fines on the operators of the sites that break the law. The fact remains that we all need to be more socially aware.

I would like to talk first about the importance of the bill, because it addresses situations that need to be addressed. First, under the bill, providers of Internet services—Internet access, email, hosting and social networking sites—will now be required to report to a designated organization any information they receive about websites or child pornography that may be available to the public. They will be required to do so once the bill is passed, because the bill still has to go through a few readings and needs some work, and it has to go to the Senate. I will not talk about how useless the Senate is, but once again, because the Senate has not been abolished, we will have to waste two or three months talking with the senators, when they spend half their time sleeping.

Now, operators who provide Internet access, email and hosting and networking sites will be required to report to a designated organization any information they receive about websites or child pornography that may be available to the public.

Second, they will be required to notify the police and preserve the evidence if they believe that their Internet service has been used to commit a child pornography offence.

Again, we should not have to pass this bill. They should be dealing with this themselves. But no, we will force them into it because they have taken this a bit too far.

Failure to comply with the duties under this act would constitute an offence punishable by graduated fines of up to $1,000 for a first offence, $5,000 for a second offence, and $10,000 for a third offence. Obviously, there is something in place for sole proprietors and corporations. For a corporation, the graduated fine scheme would be up to $10,000, $50,000 and $100,000. This legislation covers more than just Internet service providers, a term that is commonly used in relation to those who provide access to the Internet. The legislation would apply to all persons who provide an Internet service to the public.

Since I have just one minute remaining, I would also like those who are watching us to know that the Canadian Centre for Child Protection issues very important recommendations to all members of the community. Parents, families and friends have to take charge and educators and the entire system have to do whatever it takes to make sure these pedophiles who use cyberspace to commit their crimes are reported. The sexual exploitation of children is a horrible crime. Rest assured that the Bloc Québécois will support this bill.

[Paul Szabo, Liberal, Mississauga South, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the hon. member for his contribution to the debate. I must admit that when this member gets up, he always adds to the debate. I was most interested in, and I would like to speak to it as well, other things that we should be doing, particularly, in the area of prevention. We need to anticipate much more than to simply punish after we have a problem. A dollar best spent in most situations is a dollar spent on preventing a problem, in the first case.

The member outlined a couple of items, such as the need for public education, awareness, et cetera. I wonder if the member would like to simply highlight some of the other approaches that would be appropriate with respect to the matter before the House.

[Mario Laframboise, Bloc, Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his excellent question. This will allow me to quote some of the recommendations made by the Canadian Centre for Child Protection. Its recommendations for public awareness include the following:

The creation of educational materials for children 12 years and under in order to help young children recognize signs of the abuse process...

Collaboration between tiplines such as Cybertip.ca around the world to begin tracking infants and toddlers in child abuse imagery...

Creation of gender-related educational materials in response to the large percentage of girls depicted in abuse imagery.

Working with law enforcement and Internet service and content providers to remove illegal content from Canadian servers.

Establishing international standards for the personal information a registrant is required to provide when registering a new domain name [for the entire Internet].

Partnering with domain name registrants to have domains hosting illegal content discarded from use so new website owners cannot purchase domains known to host child pornography and reuse it for the same purpose.

Need for further research on the impact of child sexual abuse on victims and whether the Internet has changed the nature and extent of their trauma and healing process.

Collaboration and data sharing between organizations...

Research is needed to determine how words are being used on websites...

There are three other recommendations but I am short on time. We have to be able to foster awareness in the entire community. The sexual exploitation of children is a very serious crime, a horrible crime and a scourge that will only be eradicated by our entire society working together.

[Jim Maloway, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Mr. Speaker, the member for Mississauga South talked about prevention being the answer. I think he is totally right. It seems that this bill, while it is well-intentioned and one that we can all support, in fact, would perhaps just slow the problem down a bit because it would depend upon how many people reported.

The fact of the matter is we had a member in the House report yesterday that there are better practices in other jurisdictions, such as Germany, Sweden and Brazil. I asked a government member earlier today whether the government had even looked into those cases and he could not answer the question as to whether it had or had not.

In the case of Germany, for example, it simply blocked access to the sites. To me, that makes sense because that provides a solution to the problem rather than simply tinkering with the problem. We already know we are not going to get very solid results, or at least not as good results as we would get if we simply blocked the site in the first place.

[Mario Laframboise, Bloc, Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague is absolutely right, and that is why the committee will carefully examine this bill. Our problem is that we have charters of rights and freedoms in both Quebec and Canada. In both jurisdictions, there are website operators, and these businesspeople will say that they also have rights and freedoms. So what I was saying is that perhaps the charter of rights and freedoms will have to take a back seat to the prevention of sexual exploitation of children on the Internet.

This is an issue that could probably be resolved very quickly but, considering the laws that protect our rights and freedoms, we will have to examine this bill carefully, so that everyone, including website operators, understands its objective.

[Yves Lessard, Bloc, Chambly—Borduas, QC]

Mr. Speaker, first of all, I would like to congratulate my colleague, the member for Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel on his speech. The member brought up how difficult it is to follow the Conservatives' logic regarding the firearms registry. The only explanation for this is their ideological position.

I would like to hear some more about how he feels about the Conservatives' attitude. We agree on the principle of the bill; that goes without saying. The government knew and tolerated, for example, that a child soldier was tortured at Guantanamo. It also tolerates the torture that goes on in Afghanistan.

[Mario Laframboise, Bloc, Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague is right. Because of how they do things, we have to analyze and pick apart every justice bill the Conservatives introduce. Often the only thing they are trying to do, especially when it comes to justice, is win the public opinion battle so they can go up in the polls. That is how the Conservatives operate.

That has never been the Bloc Québécois' position. Everyone knows that we have always been very respectful. We have always stood up for Quebec. We have always opposed all forms of pedophilia and child abuse. We have always been consistent in our stances. We have always trusted our judges, and we have always believed in our justice system.

Judges have been appointed. Every case is different, and we have always had faith in the justice system. We have never been drawn into the media storm whipped up around certain cases. That is not what the Bloc Québécois has chosen to do. We have always been against torture, not just when the media are paying attention, like the Conservatives. Since first coming here, and for as long as we are here, we have always been and will always be against the torture of children and prisoners. That has always been our position, and we believe that it is consistent with the values of Quebeckers. That is what we have stood up for every day in this House, and that is what we will continue to do, as long as I am here, at any rate.

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

Madam Speaker, I have a question for the member about the situation in Quebec in particular.

I would like to know whether the police have enough resources to enforce the provisions of this bill. When this government introduces new legislation to combat crime, it does not give the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights enough information to determine whether there will be enough money and resources to enforce this legislation.

The hon. member may know the situation of the Sûreté du Québec very well. In his opinion, does it have sufficient resources to implement this bill?

[Mario Laframboise, Bloc, Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC]

Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for his question.

Before I came to the House of Commons, I was head of the Union des municipalités du Québec. Quebec has the Sûreté du Québec, and municipal police forces, as well, which are also important. Successive ministers of public safety in Quebec have always said that to strike the right balance, it was necessary for the Montreal urban community to have one-third of the police officers, the Sûreté du Québec to have one-third and the other municipal police forces to have one-third.

That is the reality. My colleague asked a good question. We are probably going to pass a law, but will there be enough money so that the police forces can work together? In order to combat cybercrime and child sexual exploitation on the Internet, there has to be enough funding.

As I said earlier, the Conservatives' goals are to score political points in the short term in order to boost their popularity in the polls. They have introduced a bill, but what will happen once it is passed? It will be difficult to implement, and it will take money. The necessary funding will have to be in place so that all the police forces can work together. In Quebec, the Sûreté du Québec and the municipal police forces will have to get their share in order to combat cybercrime against children.

[Paul Szabo, Liberal, Mississauga South, ON]

Madam Speaker, I am pleased to participate in this debate at second reading of Bill C-58, the latest bill the government has brought forward.

It struck me as peculiar that the bill was just tabled and, all of a sudden, it is before the House for debate without briefing notes from the minister, without a legislative summary, and without consultation or somehow engaging the members to consider the issue before us.

The issue is not really about Internet laws, but about the protection of children. That is what the bill is about. If we put it in that context, we will understand that this specific bill relating to child protection is a very small piece of the discussion. That concerns me, and I think that concern is slowly emerging.

We are at second reading of this bill. The reason I wanted to rise is that I would like to encourage members to put on the table as many recommendations as possible for committee to consider, not just this very narrow bill as it stands. We need to examine how this bill could have been part of a comprehensive approach to child protection beyond simply dealing with those who happen to detect child pornography on a computer, whether they be individuals or organizations.

When I saw the penalties for a first offence, in this particular case a $1,000, I thought, “My goodness, child pornography probably generates millions of dollars, so the $1,000 just does not seem to be in the ball park”. My premise is that if one is not part of the solution, then one must be part of the problem.

The previous speaker from the Bloc raised for members' consideration the issue of prevention and, of course, the Canadian Centre for Child Protection raised the need for us to do much more.

Whenever a criminal justice bill is before the House, not being a lawyer, I can enjoy the luxury of asking, what do I know about and how do I feel about this bill and what does it do to address the problem before us? I look at the issue that we are talking about and why we are doing what we propose and the elements of penalties and incarceration that are included. I also ask what are the issues with regard to rehabilitation, if possible, and what are the issues with regard to prevention?

I say this because when we talk about criminal justice issues, we have to deal with them before and after we have the problem. We know from all of the work that has ever been done on health and justice issues and from wherever we have social problems that understanding and admitting that we have a problem is the first step. The next step has to be, how do we prevent some of these problems?

I should say at the outset that the bill, in its narrow way, is worthwhile sending to committee and, I suspect, supporting to become law. But it is so narrow in its approach, it is tinkering. How many times have we asked why does the government not come forward with comprehensive legislation that actually addresses the issue? The issue is child protection, and we have problems there.

When I looked at the speech by the Minister of State for the Status of Women, who gave the government's position, I am pretty sure that somebody wrote it for her. Nonetheless, at least two or three times it mentions that Canada has “one of the most comprehensive frameworks in the world to combat child pornography” and that “we can and must do better”. A little later in the speech, the minister continued that “Canadian criminal laws against child pornography are among the most comprehensive in the world and apply to representations involving real and imaginary children”. That point is later repeated.

We can say that is the truth, but if Canadians look at the statistics, they should know that 39% of those accessing child pornography are viewing images of children between the ages of three and five years of age, and 19% are viewing images of infants under three years old. The public does not really know that, but we should consider that we are talking about a significant problem of children five years of age or younger. The vast majority of this problem is among children five years of age or younger.

Why does the government not ask itself how is it that a child five years or under could actually be a victim of child pornography? Can we imagine our own children being involved in this? If so, why? If not, why not? From our knowledge and experience, we know collectively the conditions that are fertile for bad or wrong things happening. We understand those things, but we are tinkering here. We have a serious problem. The minister of state admits it, but also says that we have the most comprehensive framework to deal with it. Well, we do not.

When we have a problem as pervasive as this, we can look back at some of the history of it and recall that we had a joint Commons-Senate report entitled “For the Sake of the Children”. It dealt with issues of family breakdown and recommended, for example, that if there were a custody dispute in an acrimonious divorce, there must be a parenting plan in place before a divorce can be granted by the courts. That was a joint Commons-Senate report done years ago.

It never happened. I have spent a fair bit of time working on children's issues. I wrote a book called The Child Poverty Solution dealing with the causes of child poverty. Child poverty is one of those things that tugs on the heart. Who could be against dealing with child poverty? However, it is family poverty, because every child in a poor family is poor. Why are families poor? On a scale divided into quartiles, no matter how much anybody makes, somebody will be in the fourth quartile.

Under the definition we have right now, if one is in the fourth quartile, one is basically counted as being among Canada's poor. Poverty needs a definition, but I am not going to get into that because the bill is not about child poverty other than the fact that such poverty is a contributing factor to a child being accessible and vulnerable to being a victim of child pornography.

I wrote another book called Divorce—The Bold Facts, which also dealt with family breakdown and the impact on children. The research that I did was just amazing. The implications for children of family breakdown are enormous. Where those children end up and the quality of care they get and the circumstances they have to live in, tell me that these are fertile areas for bad things to happen.

I wrote another book called Strong Families... Make a Strong Country dealing with the same thing. It showed statistically that the intact family, a child with a biological mother and biological father, had the least incidence of bad outcomes for children. The statistics show this out; it is not a subjective opinion. It is subjectively determinative, and this has been shown so many times. Another related book I wrote was called TRAGIC TOLERANCE... of Domestic Violence.

I am wearing my white ribbon because we are talking right now about an area that is extremely important. Domestic violence and violence against women are still rampant in our country. I spent five years on the board of my shelter for battered women, called Interim Place, and helped them get a second shelter built. However, I am hoping that these shelters will go out of business. In a perfect world, we would not need shelters for women and children who are abused.

We just considered Bill C-36, the bill dealing with the faint hope clause. Here, four out of the six women who applied for the faint hope clause were abused women who had killed their husbands and been convicted of first degree murder. All of them had children. Four of the six who applied actually were granted early parole, and while they still have a life sentence, they were granted early parole because of the compassionate understanding that bad things happen. In a couple of those cases, the husband was having an affair on the side and there were other consequential things, but there was a first degree murder. It is terrible that murder occurs, but Bill C-36 eliminates the opportunity for parole after 15 years. It says that if someone commits first degree murder, that person is going to serve 25 years before he or she gets the first opportunity for parole. Can we imagine what that does to a family with children? I do not understand why repeal of the faint hope clause is going to happen. I do not support the elimination of faint hope, but that is not before us right now.

I have said so many times in this place that public education—

[Brent Rathgeber, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

You did not vote against it.

[Paul Szabo, Liberal, Mississauga South, ON]

I did.

Public education is always part of the solution for all of our problems. When there are social problems, we have to look at them and understand them. Canada cannot pretend to be the creator of all good ideas; those ideas do come from other places. Other countries have done a lot of work on this, and yet the bill was so hastily put together that it actually is anemic in its approach to the issue of child protection. While it is okay to do what the bill proposes, and it will not harm things, I do not think the bill is going to help as much as people think it is.

We even have a question with regard to how we should police this and how we should make this happen. When we pass laws in this place, by and large, the federal police, the RCMP, will not be responsible for enforcing the laws we pass, but the provincial and regional police forces across the country. They are the ones. Ask them today. Ask them province-by-province, region-by-region, territory-by-territory, what is the shape of their budgets with regard to policing.

Why pass laws that we cannot enforce or whose potential we cannot actualize? If we cannot support the policing, is it there? Have we talked concurrently of a special fund being set up, or special task forces or special policing forces, because when one finds a “little nest”, that nest may be part of a whole colony. It is going to take time, but if we are serious about dealing with child protection in the context of child pornography, there has to be a strategy. The strategy should not be a matter of our tinkering with this and that. Then we cannot boast that we have the most comprehensive strategy and are the best in the world. It is misleading Canadians.

The previous member from the Bloc who spoke said that we have to make people aware. We all have to be part of the solution. We all have to be aware. We need the tools and the information, but here we are as parliamentarians and what we have is: a bill. Here is the bill. After one rips out all of the boilerplate pages that have nothing to do with the law, the document comes down to four items: Situations where there may be an offence by individuals or persons, and then there are the offences and the punishments for them.

For the first offence, an individual who has knowledge of but does not disclose that there is child pornography on a particular site can be fined not more than $1,000. When I read that, I thought we are not serious. We cannot be serious.

If we think that maybe the ISPs just did not realize what their legal obligation was, and that probably will be the case, that in itself is a reason for us to launch a major national public education and awareness campaign about this problem and about the tools we have and we should ask Canadians to be part of it. However, that is not in this bill.

Somebody decided that we ought to do this just because of what is happening in the world regarding domestic violence and crimes involving children and because we should get tough on crime. This is about punishing people after problems occur or after people get sick.

When I was elected to Parliament, the first committee I wanted to be on was the health committee. I remember that at the very first meeting I attended, officials appeared to give us the state of the union of the health care system in Canada. They told members of the committee that 75% of what we spend on health care deals with curing people after they have a problem, and 25% is spent on prevention. Their conclusion at the time was that the model of 25% prevention and 75% remediation after the problem occurs was not sustainable.

They built on it to say that the benefit of $1 spent on prevention was worth three times more than the benefit of $1 spent on cures and remediation. In other words, the value of prevention has a multiplier effect in terms of good and better outcomes. The same principle applies to criminal justice.

It is not good enough to say that if people do the crime, they will do the time, that we will throw people in jail and throw away the key because they are bad people. If we could reduce the number of people who are in jail or who have to be fined, that would be a good outcome.

We know statistics bear that out for things like conditional sentencing. They say that people who qualify for conditional sentencing, house arrest or whatever actually have a lower recidivism rate than do those who have to serve all of their time in jail. That is not just my opinion. Those are the facts, that there is lower recidivism if fewer people go to jail and more get conditional sentencing or early parole.

It makes some sense, but we do not make sense when we come forward with bills that are so narrow. They are almost political documents as opposed to justice documents. This is a political advertisement.

We will support the bill, but why not come forward with notes and information for members of Parliament so they can discuss it and make recommendations to the House, so that when the committee receives this bill it will be able to address some of the items that we addressed? That is what we should be doing at second reading, telling the committee what we are concerned about and asking it to look at our concerns. It has the opportunity to do it. I know the members on the justice committee will look at it.

We have to stop bringing bills forward that are not our best work. They could be much better. I hope that hon. members will get engaged, start debating this bill, and instruct the committee on the kinds of approaches we should take to make this legislation better, and, further, recommend to the House that there are other areas in which we should consider bringing forward legislation for the protection of children.

[Brent Rathgeber, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

Madam Speaker, I thank the hon. member for his contribution to this debate, which I listened to with some interest. I have a couple of questions.

He talked about the faint hope clause. I am not sure there is a clear nexus or relation between that and the bill under consideration, but he spoke in favour of the faint hope clause and, by definition, against what happened yesterday when the House voted at third reading to abolish it. I am curious as to why he did not vote against Bill C-36 yesterday if he felt so strongly.

With respect to his rhetorical question as to why a child under five could be the subject of sexual abuse, which is a very good question, I am curious as to his thoughts respecting this government's universal child care plan, a plan that provides families with support to make choices and to provide balance between work and home thus allowing parents to be more interactive in the raising of their children.

[Paul Szabo, Liberal, Mississauga South, ON]

Madam Speaker, we should not be talking about the faint hope clause. The issue was that there was a feeling that we had to punish rather than prevent.

With regard to the faint hope clause, I gave the example that four out of the six women who were abused and who murdered their husbands, after going through the very rigorous process, were able to apply for early parole.

I voted in favour of the motion to strike out everything in the bill and refer it back to committee. That was my vote, to negative the bill. That was a clear vote. I voted to scrap the bill and throw it back to committee.

With regard to the universal benefit, it is not universal in the same sense because $1,200 a year is not enough for a family to be able to afford to put one child into child care for more than about three or four weeks.

I would suggest to the member that it is a very weak argument in regard to child protection issues.

[Jim Maloway, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Madam Speaker, I want to thank the member for his comments. Yesterday when the minister was introducing the bill, she said that $42.1 million over five years was being provided to law enforcement as more resources to deal with the problem.

When I asked her whether that was new money or not, she said that she did not know and she was going to get back to me. I guess that just points to what the member for Mississauga South has said, that the bill has been rushed, the notes are not available, and the government has not done the research it should have.

For example, earlier on today I asked one of the members from the government side whether or not they had done any research as to best practices in other jurisdictions. That is a logical thing to do. Clearly, the government has not been doing that in some other cases, for instance when it followed the California prison system, which has been a total failure for 20 years. The government does not really have a history of checking around the world for best practices.

Yesterday the member for the Liberal Party very clearly pointed out that in Sweden they block child porn. In Germany they block access to the sites. That takes care of the problems.

This bill is only going to take us partway. It is a bill that we are going to support and it should be supported. The horse is out of the barn here, and the way to deal with the problem is to look at what works in other countries.

[Paul Szabo, Liberal, Mississauga South, ON]

Madam Speaker, I think the member is quite right.

First of all, this was not the best effort of the government, quite frankly. It has not thought it through carefully. It has not taken the opportunity to look at ways in which we can have legislation that is going to deal with the incidents.

For some odd reason, the government seems to think that if we have a tough enough penalty out there, that is going to be a deterrent. That does not work. Bad criminals simply do not respond. They do not think about what the penalty is under the Criminal Code, and then decide whether or not they are going to do the crime. That is not the case.

With regard to the question about the money, the member is quite right. If the government has a bill and is prepared, then it has anticipated the questions and it will have the answers.

When Bill C-36 was before committee, the government did not even have an answer about how many people actually applied under section 745. Why is it that the government does not get it? It does not understand that if it is serious about legislation, it better bring forward the facts and the information, put it all on the table and let it stand on its merit. That would be good legislation.

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

Madam Speaker, the hon. member will recall, and I will not because I was not here, that in November 2005, in the last days of the last Liberal government, there were changes to the Criminal Code, which broadened the definition of child pornography. The changes included more offences out there, which was a good thing, and mandatory minimum sentences were introduced for this crime. That was four years ago.

The hon. member has been sitting in Parliament with me for four years while we have heard train after train of the Conservative government's crime agenda come in and out of the station so often. Why does he think the Conservatives have forgotten this very important aspect?

We know from Cybertip.ca, and everybody in the House also admits, that because of the burgeoning distribution through the Internet, this is a very quickly growing crime. Why did the Conservatives wait four years to do something about it? Why have they not moved the minimum mandatory sentences, and they seem to love minimum mandatories, for simply making pornography to one year and for possession of pornography to 45 days? Why have they not attacked those in a bill like this rather than going after the Internet providers in a private, out of the Criminal Code bill, and why did they keep the defences? There are defences to making child pornography. Why did the Conservatives not take those out of the code?

[Paul Szabo, Liberal, Mississauga South, ON]

I could not say it better, Madam Speaker.

I ask why we have this bill and why now. Why is it so weak? Is it just another facade? Is there any commitment to the issue of child protection? We can use all the words we want to say that we really care about that, but I bet I could pick a half-dozen people out of this place, get together as a committee, look at best practices around the world, get the facts, hold some public hearings and come up with a draft piece of legislation for the government to consider. I would love that opportunity, because I think that members in this place who were not muzzled and were not forced to follow linear thinking on criminal justice issues, members who were free to openly discuss and deal with these things would come up with much better legislation.

[Cathy McLeod, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, BC]

Madam Speaker, I have listened to both the speech and the questions and answers. The hon. member talked about prevention at length. Prevention comes through the health transfers, the social service transfers, which of course we have increased every year compared to what the Liberals did when they were actually in power, because it is the provincial governments that are dealing with a whole host of issues in that area.

There are a number of things that I have done in my own riding in terms of prevention, which the federal government has funded. We are not talking about prevention here. We know prevention is important. We are talking about protecting children. Instead of ambling into many areas, this is an important bill, and if the member could clearly speak to the importance of the bill in protecting children, I would really appreciate it.

[Paul Szabo, Liberal, Mississauga South, ON]

Madam Speaker, the member has to admit that fining someone $1,000, as the penalty for a first offence, for having pornography on their website that is available for distribution is an anemic punishment.

The member has to admit that this has nothing to do with protection; it has to do with punishment. Somehow the member thinks that the bill and its anemic response to the problem will reduce the incidence. It will not. That is the difference in the Conservatives' thinking on criminal justice issues. They think it will provide some sort of prevention or deterrence. That is just not the case.

[Jim Maloway, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Madam Speaker, I am very pleased to speak to this bill today, Bill C-58.

It is our second day of debate and I would expect that we will be moving this bill to committee in very short order because it seems to me that all of the parties are onside.

There are certainly some criticisms as to the government's role, how it promulgated the legislation, and how it presented the legislation in the House, because as the member for Mississauga South has just said, there has been no legislative summary, no briefing notes, no nothing. As a matter of fact, the first we heard of it was from CTV's 24-hour news coverage from Monday morning on and we never got a copy of the bill until yesterday.

Nevertheless, it is a bill that is going to be supported and hopefully will be improved in committee. Certainly, when the minister announced it yesterday, she said that $42.1 million would be provided over five years to provide law enforcement more resources, so I asked her about that because it seemed to me that that had to be the focus.

We have a very effective law enforcement system in this country. As a matter of fact, the police tend to be the ones who do catch the guilty people, up to this point anyway. Our concern is that they do have proper resources, so I really wanted to know whether this was another $42 million on top of what they are already getting or simply previously announced money that they were dealing with, and she was not aware.

As the member for Mississauga South said, one would think that on a basic information piece like this, the government would have that answer available.

Best practices is another area that we should always look at when looking at legislation. I have made the argument that while the Conservatives claim to be tough on crime, we on this side of the House want to be smart on crime. We are prepared and we have examples where jurisdictions have used best practices, have looked around the world and picked examples of where a certain action worked, and simply adopted that, as opposed to the Conservatives who simply rely upon old, outmoded crime initiatives from Ronald Reagan's days in California, which have proven not to work.

They seem to be very still in their ideological approach to government. I know that it is dissipating over time. They are moving slowly but surely to the middle, and I think we are going to see more of that in the future.

I want to give a brief history of this problem, how it developed in regard to dealing with the web.

It was not until 1995 that email became prevalent. It had been used in universities for a few years before that, but email became prevalent right around 1995 and the web started after that, but at that point, most people still had monochrome screens. The frame rate was very low. It started at 15 frames a second and then they got it up to 30 frames a second.

I recall the Rolling Stones, just about the time they were appearing in Winnipeg a number of years ago, claiming to be the very first rock band to put one of their songs on the web. I looked at it and it was very slow. People here will remember when the first webcams came out. People were trying to talk to their relatives in other parts of the world and the voice did not match with the picture, and the picture was very choppy.

There was a period there where this really was not a problem. In fact, bandwidth became a problem around the mid-nineties.

Once again, to make this system work successfully they had to get faster speeds and they had to have better bandwidth. The ISPs had to do that in order to be able to transfer the material that we are talking about right now.

As other members have alluded to, we have had a virtual explosion of child pornography on the web just in the last five years. Once again, clearly the horse is out of the barn. As usual, the government is in a reactive position. Governments rarely lead. They usually are found to be following. In Canada, over the last few years, we have had a lot of instability with a change of government and an election every two years, starting back from scratch again on legislation and a fairly substantial slowdown.

The development of peer-to-peer computing was mentioned yesterday. That was a very big development that basically exploded overnight. We have all heard of Napster. It is out of business right now, but that was basically the beginning of peer-to-peer computing and making file sharing easy.

Therefore, logically when the technology developed the way it did and as fast as it did over time, it was just common sense that organized crime would be getting involved in the system. The police forces are aware that it is not only child pornography but it is also organized gambling rings who set up their servers outside of U.S. jurisdiction because they did not want to be prosecuted and put in jail by United States laws. Clearly, laws have had some effect.

There was a Bloc member yesterday who pointed to the bill and was touting the fact that these offences are going to slow these people down. However, as mentioned by the member for Mississauga South today and others, the fact of the matter is the penalities are not that large at all considering the money that is involved.

When we are dealing with organized crime and drug dealers, fines of $100,000 are probably just part of the cost of doing business for these people. These are not particularly strong fines in any sense.

We have the organized crime syndicates involved, so a system of penalties, fines and imprisonment and so on will deter some people for sure, but I think at the end of the day, if we pass this legislation and we find after a couple of years, and hopefully we will monitor its results, that the legislation is not working and the fines are not high enough, we will have to increase them. If we find that child pornography is still be produced at an increasing rate, then we are going to have to look at something more drastic.

I asked one of the government members of the government today whether the government had looked at best practices in other jurisdictions and the member said no, that he was not aware that the government had looked at other jurisdictions at all. Yet, yesterday the member for Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe was very clear in his presentation on the bill when he pointed out that there are other jurisdictions that have taken action and have dealt with the problem. These are his words and his claims. I would assume that he is correct in making these assessments and it should be easy to check. For example, the member drew our attention to Brazil where he said that the ISPs in Brazil have to follow a set of ethical rules that govern what they accept on their sites

He mentioned Sweden. It had a policy of blocking child porn. He mentioned Germany and the European Union as the best examples. Once again, he said that Germany was blocking access to the sites.

So, who are we trying kid here? If the answer is to simply block the sites, and if it works in Germany, then why are we getting ourselves tied up in knots here, spending huge amounts of money on police forces, $42 million over five years? That is probably on top of what we are already spending. Police forces are doing great work, and there is no doubt about it, to basically play a hide-and-seek game with these perpetrators over the Internet.

To me, a far more decisive, a far more effective, certainly cost effective, way of dealing with this would be to simply block the sites completely, and it is being done. I do not know what the rules are in Cuba, but I believe there is no Internet porn there either. It is certainly technically possible.

I know members may not agree with that and that is fine. The fact of the matter is, when the United States set up its penalties, people simply went offshore. To get around the American penalties, they simply took the path of least resistance and moved to a country that does not have penalties, that does not have these laws.

Another member, yesterday, pointed out that Canada is very high up in terms of not only sales of child pornography but also the production of it. This country is either number two or number three in not only the production but the distribution, the selling and the possession of child porn. So, it is certainly a major problem in this country and it is certainly growing.

Another fact to mention is that local computer repair depots have been reporting child pornography on laptops and computers brought in for repair. Recently, the customs people have been finding it on laptops. They have been checking laptops routinely for the last three or four years now at airports and customs sites, especially when people come from Thailand and places whether there is a lot of sex tourism. This is just basically, I think, making a small dent in the problem. As a matter of fact, the statistic I picked up on in the conversations over the last couple of days is that Canada is second in the world for hosting these sites.

In September 2008, the federal, provincial and territorial ministers responsible for justice agreed that Canada's response to child pornography could be enhanced by federal legislation requiring any agency whose services could be used to facilitate the commission of online pornography offences to report suspected material.

I know this was an initiative of the provinces, and I do give the provinces top marks. Yesterday we had a couple of Liberal speakers pontificating about how it was their party who started the ball rolling in this whole area and how the irresponsible Conservatives in government did not do anything for four years, and here we are today. That is fine for parties to pick their own little victories here and there, and try to embarrass the other side.

However, there has been activity at both the federal level and the provincial level over the years. My home province of Manitoba is one of three provinces that has rules stating that all people must report child pornography. I believe Nova Scotia and Ontario also have laws in place right now. Manitoba was an early mover in this area.

The Government of Canada's proposed legislation would enhance Canada's capacity to better protect children against sexual exploitation by making it mandatory for those who supply an Internet service to the public to report online child pornography. This legislation would help safeguard children by improving law enforcement's ability to detect offences and reduce the availability of child pornography on the Internet. This is a requirement in the bill but providers would not be obligated to search for it. If they happen to notice it, then they are obligated to report it.

There also is a 21 day rule in the bill but I do not know if that is a long enough timeframe. I am looking at a lawyer here in the House who could probably tell me whether that would be long enough or not. However, when the bill goes to committee it might look at making that a longer period of time because 21 days might be too short.

Under the proposed legislation, suppliers of Internet services to the public would be required to report to a designated agency tips that they might receive regarding websites where child pornography may be available to the public. They are required to notify police and safeguard evidence if they believe that a child pornography offence has been committed using their Internet service.

I am told that the well-known large ISPs are fairly cooperative in this area and that it is the smaller ISPs that are evidently less inclined to want to report, so they are the ones that will need to be given a bit of extra attention.

The legislation was carefully tailored to achieve its objectives while minimizing the impact on privacy. We will want to deal with that issue at committee because members of our caucus are concerned about that aspect.

Suppliers of Internet services would not be required to send personal subscriber information under this bill and that would be helpful as well.

Failure to comply with the duties under the bill would constitute an offence punishable by graduated fines of up to $1,000 for the first offence. The member for Mississauga South, among others, has taken exception to that as being too low. We might be looking at making an improvement there in committee, maybe a higher limit.

The bill also indicates that for a second offence the penalty would be $5,000 and for subsequent offences the possibility of a fine up to $10,000 or six months imprisonment, or both for sole proprietorships.

If it is a corporation, I would suspect there may be some sort of organized crime involved in it, but I may be wrong in that. However, if a corporation fails to comply with its duties under this act, the graduated fine fee would be $10,000, $50,000 and $100,000. Once again, I do not have a comment about whether that is a high amount or a low amount but it seems to be awfully low. If a criminal organization is producing child pornography and making a huge amount of money, although I have no idea how much money it would make on something like this, but $10,000 might be nothing more than the cost of doing business.

Again I find that I am short of time and once again only about halfway through my comments. I am used to those 40 minute speech slots that we had in Manitoba for many years. It is a hard habit to break. As a matter of fact, in the House of Commons just 30 years ago members had longer periods for their speeches. However, I do like the current time allotment as well.

[Malcolm Allen, NDP, Welland, ON]

Madam Speaker, I think my hon. colleague was right when he said that when we think about the Internet, pornography and child pornography, all of us in the House agree that it is an odious thing that happens to young children and we need to put a stop to it.

I would like him to articulate a little further about how we should address the issue to ensure it ends and that we protect our children, which, in the end, is what we really want to do. Clearly, the bill is lacking in some areas where it perhaps needs to be stiffened and could be helped out.

The hon. member started out to explain jurisdictions in the world that are making progress on this very heinous crime that is perpetrated on our young. I was hopeful that he could perhaps take some more time. I know he indicated that in other legislatures in this country members gets a little more time and perhaps, through my question, he could take some more time to explain to us what other countries are doing and how effective they are in ensuring these crimes are not perpetuated against children.

[Jim Maloway, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Madam Speaker, from what I have been able to glean from the comments of pretty much all of the speakers on this side, no one is super critical of this bill. We are all saying that we will support it, but we just do not think it is tough enough to deal with the problem.

This probably would have been the measure to take five or six years ago when the problem was not as big as it is now. I think the member for Mississauga South was right. We should be looking at the best practices we can find. There may be others. We mentioned that Sweden simply blocks the porn sites and that Brazil has set up ethical rules.

If we do not want to follow Sweden's example and block the sites, then maybe we should look at Brazil where the ISPs have ethical rules set up that somehow must restrict access to them. We are told that Germany has the best system where it blocks access to the sites completely. To me, that would grind it to a halt, at least as far as our jurisdiction is concerned.

I was not born yesterday. I know the criminal elements will try to find a way around it. Maybe they will move their servers to some other country and then at a certain point we would need to chase down the perpetrators somewhere else. However, the bill covers the whole range. It covers production and possession.

Once again, I am saying that we need this bill because it is important. The provinces want it and they agreed to it. It is all part of a package.

I know the member for Mississauga South thinks we should have a complete package and add even more things into it, even beyond the scope of the bill. I do not think we need to look at that right now, but in terms of this bill, I think the government should seriously look at other possible alternatives that it can throw into this as a package and move along together with this bill.

[Malcolm Allen, NDP, Welland, ON]

Madam Speaker, at the beginning of my colleague's speech he talked about some of the questions he had asked the minister about resourcing. He asked some other members whether they had done this or done that when it comes to resource allocation, new moneys and old moneys, but he could not get a response because they were not sure.

This leaves one to question. If the bill is so seriously needed, one would think that they would want to resource it appropriately so that we can act on it. We need to not only get this done, we need to resource those law enforcement agencies.

As my colleague pointed out, we can go after and get ethical rules around ISPs, perhaps following the examples of Brazil and Germany in doing that, but what happens if there is a criminal element? We need the resources and a police function that will attack that. Some of the police agencies across this country have said that they are underfunded and under-resourced. They do not have the people because of the resource part of it to get the job done that they need to do to curtail this heinous sort of crime. All of us in the House agree that child porn is heinous and that we need to stop it.

What does my colleague think the government should do when it comes to resourcing? If it slides toward the criminal element and away from the legitimate providers, how will they be resourced and how should they tackle that particular crime group that would want to do those sorts of things?

[Jim Maloway, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Madam Speaker, I would draw back to the original speech by the minister in the House when she said that $41.1 million over five years would be provided to law enforcement to give more resources. Properly resourcing the police force is something that we on this side of the House are particularly interested in because the police are the ones who will be dealing with the problem.

I think the bill was hastily drawn together. The government basically lurches back and forth like a ship in a sea. One day it is doing one thing and another day it is doing something else. The bill starts to be reported on CTV News on Monday morning. Every half hour it is being reported on and Parliament does not have a copy of it. We have no notes to go on. When the minister does make the statement and I ask her about the $41 million of resourcing for the police, she has no idea whether that is new money, old money, enough money or what it will do. Surely members who are going to speak on the issue would be well briefed, would have notes and would have answers to possible questions.

Even today, when I asked the member for Leeds—Grenville, who made a very well informed speech, for best practices, he could not tell me whether they had even looked at any other best practices.

I worked on bill 31 in Manitoba, which, at the time, was the electronic commerce legislation, the most comprehensive of its kind in Canada about 10 years ago. We used a uniform law template to put that legislation together. We cannot just make things up as we go along. There is always some sort of basis upon which we start when drafting legislation.

We know the Conservatives must have looked at other jurisdictions. I would be shocked if they had not. I just want to know who they looked at and why they rejected, for example, Germany. If they did look at the rules in Germany, I want to know why they decided not to follow the German example. If they looked at Brazil, I want to know why they decided its system was not what they liked. If they looked at the Swedish example, I want to know why they decided its system was not what they wanted.

The member talked about organized crime. We tend to think that people involved in child pornography are average people. I am sure thousands of them are, but given the amount of money that is involved in this business there has to be the long tail of organized crime. If we do not know that, we had better start looking. If we talk to police forces that deal with organized crime they will tell us that, certainly those in my home city of Winnipeg,

I want the focus of the criminal justice system to be on chasing the Mr. Bigs. We keep chasing the little guy at the bottom of the totem pole who gets nailed for a little bit of cocaine or distribution, but the reality is that it is the guys at the top who are making the big money. Those are the guys wearing the suits. As a matter of fact, most of them do not even own motorcycles in Winnipeg and they live in fancy houses in the suburbs. That is the kind of criminal that I want to see us focus on. I think we will see that some of them are involved in this area as well.

[Dan McTeague, Liberal, Pickering—Scarborough East, ON]

Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to speak to a bill that has been a long time coming. This bill is important for all members and for all Canadians. It is absolutely crucial that Parliament take a closer look at this bill and address an extremely important issue, that is, the protection of our children.

This is not a new issue for me as a member of Parliament. It is not a new issue for some of my colleagues who were here with me in 1999-2000 when a decision was made in British Columbia by Justice Duncan Shaw with respect to the Sharpe decision. That decision created a panic throughout Canada. The protections that had been passed by Parliament in the past were then subject to judicial review and many provisions meant to protect children were knocked out.

It became very clear to parliamentarians, many of us who took these issues very seriously on a bipartisan basis, I might add, that what we were witnessing at the time was a lack of understanding and appreciation of those who were excited, those who would offend and those who would continue to use any means at their disposal, including technology, which I will come to in a moment, the purpose for which this bill has been created, to feed their addiction of exploitation of children.

It appeared at the time that there seemed to be a lot of misunderstanding, if not innocent ignorance, as to what was behind it. Many people thought this was a matter of expression, that we could not ban some of this information, particularly if it was written, because it might be analogous to banning the book Lolita.

No one wanted to put those two imperatives of protection of children against the right of privacy, one against the other. Rather, what we have seen in the past eight or nine years from parliamentarians, Canadians, psychiatrists, police forces and coordination through our crowns and judges is a better understanding of the pernicious nature of child exploitation and child pornography.

I want to give a message of a much stronger Parliament. I know there has been some discussion about where Canada falls short, but in my experience of working with the Toronto police force, going back to 2001, with the Ontario Provincial Police, under Project P, and with the RCMP, we are further ahead than we give us ourselves credit for. I am not here simply to toot our horn, but we are teaching other countries how to coordinate and build capacity to combat child exploitation, particularly through cyberspace exploitation or exploitation through the Internet.

Part of what is being addressed here today is about obligations. Many colleagues have spoken about how Internet service providers are in fact responding to the call and helping our law enforcement agencies trap, monitor and detect those who are engaging in the distribution of this information. This no doubt leads at one end to exploitation and at the other end to deal with providing people the medical and other kinds of interventions and help they need. What we have before us today is a very important first step in terms of ensuring and compelling Internet service providers to do what is necessary.

Some of this did not just happen in a vacuum. We will recall in April of 2002, I convened a meeting in which about 40 or 50 colleagues from all parties joined in a film or demonstration or depiction of the seriousness of the problem. I recall full well Paul Gillespie, who is now with the Kids' Internet Safety Alliance, a pre-eminent advocate, as well as Detective Sergeant Gary Ellis, who later became inspector before his retirement, along with Sergeant Bob Matthews from Project P, Roz Probert from Winnipeg and others attended a conference organized very quickly by members of Parliament.

After that 30-minute presentation, we got it. Not only did we get it, but within about two months our good and capable parliamentary secretary at the time, Paul Macklin, former member for Northumberland, was able to convince the government to provide the initial fund and first tranche of some $50 million to create a cyberspace network to help and facilitate so in smaller communities across Canada police could get the kind of training they needed to detect, share and arrest the behaviour.

We have done a lot over a period of time dealing with Internet service providers. We have also encountered some very unsavoury examples of where there has been reluctance by carriers not to provide information for whatever reason, such as privacy, cost, et cetera. We got around some of those.

However, I suspect the biggest stumbling block we faced then continues today. When a police officer is confronted with all these images, perhaps in the thousands at any given time, and a charge is brought against the individual, in order for the process of the charge to be laid and to be heard in a court, the evidence has to be sworn through each and every image. Because of a decision in the R. v. Stinchcombe case, it makes the job of our police forces practically impossible.

We are at a stage now, although there is better understanding of how to help police do a better job, where we need to do more. Certainly the bill goes in that direction.

I want to talk about something that is far more important to where we go. The minister was asked by several reporters what would be done once the domain of someone who was distributing child pornography was identified. We have no way of breaking down or knowing how to combat or how to address this issue. It is great to have a database and to be able to provide and get this information, but can we go after each and every one? I am not sure. We need to look at whether we have the ability and the resources to tackle the great numbers that we see out there.

This leads me to a bigger point, which I hope the committee will be able to address. I would ask the indulgence of all colleagues in the House to understand that it is more than just Internet service providers and people downloading information. It is really the peer-to-peer expression or the peer-to-peer sharing of files that is the most pernicious part of this. I am not sure if the legislation will be able to cover this, let alone if we can get our minds around the more modern way of distributing this information, which is undermining the integrity of young children and destroying their futures.

Short of going to the Orwellian perspective of big government watching everything people are doing, we need to come up with a better solution, not just for Canada but around the world. I salute those many organizations, including our RCMP, the Toronto police force and the OPP in my province, that have done yeoman's work of training the rest of the world.

However, we need to begin to look more fundamentally, more specifically, at the underlying new way in which information is shared, file to file. How we get around that will require a bit of dexterity in looking at these networks. We will have to find ways to train them. We will need to have the best practices, but we will also have to avail ourselves of the greatest technology out there.

Yes, questions will be raised about privacy. I suggest, as the RCMP has done in the past, that the number of people who may be sharing this information is not 65,000. There was some information a while ago from the RCMP that there may be as many as 65,000 people in the country who are in receipt of this information and share it. However, this number could easily exceed one million.

I am not one who is given to the notion of throwing numbers around, but the committee that looks into this legislation will need to know and be comfortable with the size, the dimension and the seriousness of this issue. While we have a number of solutions, there is no point in talking about solutions if there is not a better understanding of the problem.

As we look at not only trying to provide practices and building capacity in other countries and recognizing the mandate of Parliament, I hope we are prepared to give a very strong and important blank cheque to our law enforcement officials, to those on the front end, the smart people, those who understand how the Internet works.

We need a forum and focus to match what the private sector does. I think of the Kids' Internet Safety Alliance that is going it alone. It does not have support from the government. We have nice words coming from the government about how it is going to do this and it is going to set up a facility here and there. Frankly, this is taking off. Canadians understand this. Agencies involved in good will recognize the ability for us to use our collective strengths, the brains that we have out there, the technological wherewithal to understand the complexities by which child pornographers try to hide and disguise their craft and their evil.

I suggest for all members and colleagues that each and every one of us can talk about this issue, but we do ourselves a service as members of Parliament if we anticipate the road ahead, not just for the purpose of protecting our children but to help other countries that do not have the technological capacity yet alone the resources.

On the road of goodwill, we have lost a few things along the way. Frankly, we are going down a road and we do not know where it is taking us. It is very clear to us that if we are not prepared to recognize that the bill, which is several years late, and I will not get into the politics of it, is really to address an issue that took place some time ago, the next big challenge for Parliament will be to deal with new technologies in the digital age that are used to circumvent, to get ahead and to continue exploitation.

Canada does not play a minor role in this regard. We have heard stats provided by a number of colleagues in the House of Commons as to the number of Canadians who may be involved with it and where we are in terms of protection of children. On the surface, the statistics look grim, but there is no doubt there is a will within Parliament. There are other very good statistics that demonstrate that our front line men and women, psychiatrists, police officers and those in the judicial system, are doing yeoman's work and are trying to find what is the best way to approach this ever-changing challenge.

Someone said that it was a little like trying to tack jello on to a wall. However, the frank reality is we have to continue to be aware of where the emerging problems lie in order to provide the kind of solutions that we owe our next generation.

Behind the technology are broken individuals who exploit. These are individuals who, short of legislation, also need therapy. These people cannot help themselves. These individuals need the state, they need society and they need rehabilitation. We can talk about penalties, but we also have to talk about prevention, as my good colleague from Mississauga South alluded to a little earlier. I cannot think of a better example of where we have to get it right for the benefit of all the children out there who might otherwise be exploited.

These are not comments that we simply take as members of Parliament wanting to do good. We recognize in our country and around the world that the issue of child exploitation is a greater threat than most, perhaps, against the next generation. We have to marshal the collective forces in our country and around the world to work co-operatively. I do not see that in the bill. I see we will do our own job from the ISPs' perspective, and this is only ISPs that exist within Canada, because we have no international reach. I suggest that is the way we ought to go.

I want to point out something we did in 2002, with a number of colleagues present. I recall one colleague, who was also very big on this, and I miss him a lot, Myron Thompson, the member for Wild Rose, who, with myself, made it abundantly clear that on both sides of the House we would work very hard to see this legislation would someday be a reality. Though he is not here today, I am sure he is very pleased to see we have moved down this road.

In 2002, to be specific, we suggested that there ought to be some changes on retention of information by Internet service providers. I will read what all colleagues at the time, or their predecessors would have known and were participating in legislation required or an amendment to the existing legislation at the time with Bill C-15, said concerning the retention of client information, records by Internet service providers. They said that ISPs must be able to furnish police with data, records on suspected child pornographers. We also urged, at the time, to make it mandatory for ISPs to keep client logs for at least one year, following the U.S. model in subjecting ISPs to substantial fines for non-compliance.

Those were some of the ideas that flowed from a very quick meeting that members of Parliament had. There is no doubt that the intention of Parliament has been focused on that ever since. Yes, there have been several elections in between, but thank heavens we have continued in the belief that we can stand up for those who have no voice and who would otherwise see their lives destroyed by those who truly need our help.

I am also convinced of the proliferation, the sophistication, the pervasiveness of technology. I had my BlackBerry here a few minutes ago. When I was elected as a member of Parliament in 1993, such devices did not exist. The ability to communicate, good and bad, is ever present and, as I suggested earlier, pervasive.

This requires parliamentarians of all parties to recognize that the changes that are taking place are challenges that we can overcome, particularly if they are used for nefarious and heinous ends, such as exploiting children, not just in Canada but around the world. We have an obligation to listen to those who can demonstrate a better way.

There is only so much bandwidth. I will not get into the issue of telecommunications; I will leave that for a consumer story at some point down the road. We have the ability to monitor the traffic. We cannot be seen as intrusive but at the same time we have to be ever vigilant. If we know something is taking place and it is being done by certain modalities such as, file sharing, network to network, or computer to computer, the government has an obligation to look and to test judicial chill, or Cartesian charter chill, with a view to saying that what must be done here is in the higher and best interests of Canadian citizens.

It is not good enough to say that we will adopt best practices from other countries or that we are going to look around the world and vicariously get some form of child protection in Canada. We have to be at the table. We have to recognize the changes that are taking place. In none of the speeches that I have heard today have members been focused on the next concern, which is the existing means by which child pornographers are disseminating their material.

I am asking parliamentarians, as they go through the committee process and as they ponder and consider this, to be more focused on what are some very obvious challenges to us, but ones which I think we can overcome.

I would also like to take a moment to thank the former members of this House who helped develop this bill and to point out some of the measures previously taken by our Liberal government.

I was proud to be here to see the changes and to see the amount of money invested to ensure that our agents, our police officers and Crown officials are not only aware of the scope of the problem of the exploitation of youth, but also that they can continue to promote and ensure best practices for other police forces around the world.

Last month, I attended a conference in Durham, in my region, at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology. A KINSA agency was giving training to representatives of police forces from Indonesia, Chile and Brazil. Other countries may know what to do, but we also have practices that are the envy of the world. However, we still need to make some improvements and recognize the people who work with us.

My hope and experience leads me to believe that the committee will bring forth the experts that I am referring to, the psychiatrists, those who understand technology, the software program writers, those who know how the devices used to exploit are being used against us and against the next generation. These are the people we should be hearing from.

If we really want to protect and stand up for the next generation, for posterity, I suggest we get with the program, that we understand the technology and bring in the bright lights. In that way we will guarantee for the next generation a much safer future and at the same time, keep Canada where it ought to be, defending the interests of those who have no voice.

[Maurice Vellacott, Conservative, Saskatoon—Wanuskewin, SK]

Madam Speaker, I appreciate the good work the member opposite has done over the years. I know he has put a lot of time and effort into this issue. He has hosted various seminars on the Hill, which members who were around in those days definitely benefited from in terms of the specific help, the specific exposé the police gave on those occasions.

The member opposite mentioned the very important need of monitoring, keeping on top of the ever-changing technology. We need to be vigilant so that we can truly protect our children the vulnerable, innocent children of the present and the future, from these heinous crimes against these most innocent vulnerable children.

Having said that, I would be interested to know at this juncture, either in a private member's bill or maybe some very specific amendments for the committee, what might be the major outlines going ahead from here, acknowledging as he did the good benefit of this government bill?

What might be the major outlines of a bill that he would do to even improve upon this bill, or that he might see in the future in terms of things that we could do further to get at and stomp out this very pernicious evil that we have in society today?

[Dan McTeague, Liberal, Pickering—Scarborough East, ON]

Madam Speaker, I know the member for Saskatoon—Wanuskewin was there back in 2001 and 2002.

It is a reflection of the genuine belief that we can do better. We should look at having a full-time committee, a blue ribbon panel that would report to the Minister of Justice, but more important, to Parliament as to the evolution of best practices. It should be something that provides an annual report on the state of cybercrime in Canada and the state of the level of child exploitation in this country. It should not be used to panic people but to actually give some focus and perspective.

Some of this commissioning of information is done through the victims of crime organizations, but to put this in proper perspective, the RCMP and a number of agencies that are involved with child exploitation internationally and domestically who hold conferences could also bring out what is being done internationally and relate that to whether Canada is a hindrance or part of the solution.

We need annual reports and updates. By the time we get through elections and parliaments get around to doing good work, often those who exploit children have moved on. We need to continue to have a rapporteur, for lack of a better term, that would provide an update to Parliament each and every year on the best practices and most important, on what we are doing and what we are not doing.

I appreciate the hon. member's suggestions. That is an area the committee should look at. We have a bill and that is great. It deals with the problem today or perhaps the past few years but we need to look ahead.

[Jim Maloway, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Madam Speaker, the hon. member for Pickering—Scarborough East said he was elected in 1993, but I remember him from when I was the consumer critic for gas prices among other things in Manitoba. I would listen to him quite often on the radio and I would marvel. He is a very knowledgeable guy.

I notice that the definition in the bill includes more than ISPs. It also includes those who provide electronic mail services, Internet content, hosting services and social networking sites. Does the member think that is the all-encompassing, all-inclusive group? I am not up on all these issues as much as I used to be.

I would like to ask the member about peer to peer. Peer to peer came in big time with Napster and peer to peer is still around. He seems to think that is the most difficult area to work with.

I would like the member to take some time to explain to us why he thinks peer to peer is the biggest problem.

[Dan McTeague, Liberal, Pickering—Scarborough East, ON]

Those are excellent questions, Madam Speaker, and I am very happy to answer at least some of them to the best of my knowledge.

A cursory discussion with those on the front lines will tell us that peer to peer is de rigueur. It is the new means by which file sharing and downloading is occurring. It does require working through the networks but that seems to be the favourite way of doing things.

When police attempt to break a cyber network the police are actually finding a lot of mirrors. A lot of sites that come up exist for three hours and then move on. It is a very elusive game.

Does this legislation cover this? Yes and no. It talks about things in generalities but does not get to the specifics. My colleague from Moncton and I discussed this over the past few days. It does not actually get into where I think many of those who are on the front line are actually pointing to as being an area on which we need to focus.

The hon. member talks about Kazaa and Napster and other things. Of course those have been regulated in certain ways. I do not want to get into the issue of music or content, but rather deal with where the infrastructure is that is being used to deliver this information. It makes the job of trying to cover so many angles that much more difficult. I want to focus on this.

ISPs are not just the hosts, those who host websites, for instance Google and others. I am thinking of URLs that are used with hotmail. All of these are now caught by this legislation.

I want the committee members to focus on where the problem exists as it stands today. I do not think this is hot off the press but I also think that we have to be purposeful. We should be asking what we are doing with the information too.

Is it good enough to say we are going after ISPs and URLs? We get the domain names, but how are we prosecuting them? I do not think that question has been answered. It is important that we look at that as well.

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

Madam Speaker, I want to get right to a question involving the Criminal Code.

This bill is outside of the Criminal Code. Section 163.1 of the Criminal Code makes it an offence for any person who accesses child pornography. How is it different? Why is it a lesser offence for the people who allow and set up the system and do not report the fact that child pornography exists than for someone who accesses it? I want to know if he thinks that is proper.

In part V of the Criminal Code there is a hierarchy of offences: sexual offences, public morals and disorderly conduct. Why is it that the government is leaving these offences in the realm of public morals and not sexual offences? At the root, these images are evidence of criminal sexual abuse or rapes. The images reflect a crime. Those images, therefore, should be higher in the hierarchy than saying that we feel it is not proper conduct in this realm.

Why is the Criminal Code not used, and does the member endorse using the Criminal Code?

[Dan McTeague, Liberal, Pickering—Scarborough East, ON]

Absolutely, Madam Speaker. I agree wholeheartedly with the member for Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe.

He has raised a point which I had not considered until now, the question of hierarchy of harms.

We all agree that there is child exploitation. Child exploitation is the destruction of human life, whether we like it or not. If the Criminal Code is not able to reflect that, or this legislation is not consistent with the opprobrium that Parliament and the Criminal Code hold against those who exploit children, that also would have to be a decent recommendation or amendment that the party should, on behalf of our critic, propose at committee.

I am not on committee. I am simply trying to provide some guidance with the latest of information which I think parliamentarians from all parties are going to have to look at more intensely.

I say these things because I think it is anticipating where we ought to be and it will put Canada back where it must be.

Yes, some Internet service providers have been helpful, some have not. Some have charged. Some have obstructed. Some continue to use issues of privacy, I think, indiscreetly. I agree with my colleague that optimal legislation would also include the ability to have a reasonable expectation of conviction, a reasonable expectation of stopping the practice in Canada. As well, what I think is the maximum of importance of this legislation is to give enforcement agencies the resources they need. If agencies in this country are creating true centres of cybercrime prevention that are in fact protecting Canadians and the international community, we have to be backing them with resources by Parliament, and not leave it to the private sector to, shamefully, do what we as parliamentarians want our government to do.

[Peter Stoffer, NDP, Sackville—Eastern Shore, NS]

Madam Speaker, I am proud to rise to debate an initiative that is extremely imperative to anyone who is a parent.

Child pornography has been with us in many forms for many years, but it is extremely despicable on the Internet because a lot of it goes underground.

I want to congratulate a former colleague, a long-term member of Parliament, a former attorney general of Saskatchewan, Mr. Chris Axworthy. In early 1994, Mr. Axworthy introduced a child Internet pornography bill that was supported by many police organizations across the country. When he left the House of Commons, I resumed his bill and I have re-introduced it on four separate occasions. Every time I have done that, I have handed the bill over to justice ministers to get them to do something about the scourge of child pornography on the Internet.

I am pleased to see today that the Conservatives, under their justice minister, have tabled a bill that mentions child pornography and what may or may not be done.

We have to ensure that this is simply not window dressing. We cannot just say that we are going to do something about Internet pornography and then not give the people who operate under these confines the resources they need to do it. This cannot just be about political opportunities.

I want to tell the House about an event that happened a few years ago that was told to us by an officer of the Ontario Provincial Police. This particular officer worked eight hours a day sniffing out child pornography on the Internet. His job was to find the scourge of our society and bring them to justice. For over three hours he explained how quickly young children can be trapped by professionals who lure them on the Internet. They entice young children to do acts beyond their comprehension.

He told us that he posed as a father with an eight year old child who were both willing to swing in this regard. That information is put out on the Internet to try to get people to latch on to it. He put that information on the Internet, and by the time he was finished talking to us he had over 50 hits, 20 of them from Ontario alone. In those three hours, 50 people wanted to partake in that type of activity.

I do not know how sick we have become as a society, but the reality is that something needs to be done and it needs to be done quickly. The NDP had a similar bill in the House over many years. We have given it to various justice ministers, asking them to carefully look at it to see what parts they wanted to use in their own bill.

Nothing will come of this if the government does not put the financial and human resources and the tools that are required to allow our police forces, the RCMP, the OPP, the Sûreté du Québec, municipal and regional police forces across the country to do their job effectively, the end goal of which is protecting our children.

Child abuse and child pornography have been with us for a long time. We have heard about the Christian brothers in Newfoundland, the residential school abuse. I just cannot imagine what it would have been like to have been ripped out of my parent's arms, put into a residential school, and then abused for many years.

I am glad to hear that a truth and reconciliation commission will be coming forward in order to help first nations, Inuit and Métis people deal with what happened at that time. I only pray to God that they find some solace and peace when they get their stories out.

It is rather quite ironic that a guy like myself would stand up and talk about the Internet because I do not use a computer. I do not have a Blackberry. I still wish that Blackberries were banned because I find them a lazy way to communicate.

The reality is that the Internet can be a wonderful tool for information, but it can also be a dangerous place for unsuspecting individuals. What we need to do at the end of the day is make ISP providers, large and small, partially responsible for assisting and monitoring their sites. They do not have to do it all on their own.

This is where the federal government has to be proactive and ensure they get the additional resources, so that they can monitor their sites and with judicial oversight, we can protect the privacy of all individuals and ensure that they have legal rights. We must ensure that if the ISPs suspect something is happening that they are able to forward that information to the police. That is enough of what we should be doing.

As a father of two young girls, and I know many of us here are parents, it would be just a horrendous feeling to know that possibly one's child was sexually abused because of something on the Internet. I do not understand that for the life of me. I have tried to comprehend the thinking of an adult who thinks it is pleasurable to have sex with infants or very young children, but I just do not understand that type of thinking. I do not know if there is any type of rehabilitation for those types of individuals, but what is most important is that the government has recognized this as a scourge on our society, and we are please with that. I remind everyone that the number one goal of any government is the protection and security of its citizens including those who are most vulnerable, our children.

We will work with the government through the committee process. I know my colleague, the justice critic for the NDP, from Windsor—Tecumseh is one of the most knowledgeable people in the country and in the House when it comes to justice issues. I am sure he will be offering recommendations and amendments to make the bill even stronger, so that at the end of the day what the government purports to do, which is to rid or as best as possible eliminate child pornography on the Internet, we will ensure that the justice minister gets the help that he needs.

Most importantly, the justice minister in turn must provide those financial and human resources to all the police agencies across the country. They need the technology. They need the human element and they also need the financial commitment to ensure that they have the tools to do the very really dirty job that we ask them to do, which is to protect our children from child pornographers.

If we do that it will not only compliment the minister but it will compliment the House, and at the end of the day maybe one less child will be subjected to child pornographers on the Internet.

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

Madam Speaker, I rise to speak to Bill C-58 today with mixed emotions. We have been dealing with this issue in the justice committee since late 2006 or early 2007. It has been better than three years now. We actually had some consideration of it in Parliament in 2004 and 2006 as well, so it is going on five years.

I rise with mixed emotions because I am concerned. We are supportive of this legislation as far as it goes. Our major concern with Bill C-58 is that there are a number of other issues that should have been addressed long before this. Some of them have now been addressed in this bill, but there is a number that have not been addressed.

Addressing those issues and building a framework so that our police, prosecutors and judges would have greater ability to try to stamp out child porn on the Internet and the technological transmission of it would be a major step forward. We have not gone far enough on this and I am going to address at least some of those points.

I do want to set this in its historical context. When we were dealing with the legislation that dealt with the luring of children over the Internet, what came forward at that time was a good deal of evidence from various police forces, particularly from the Ontario Provincial Police and the Toronto Police Service. I do not want to disparage other forces, but at that period of time they were probably the most advanced forces in trying to combat child porn on the Internet.

The problem that we are now addressing came forward three to five years ago. We are addressing it to some lesser degree in Bill C-46 and Bill C-47, which are now before the public safety committee. The problem is getting at the service providers, which are in most cases the methodology, mechanism and technology by which the producers and traders of child porn are using to trade and sell this child porn.

What came out in the course of those hearings was that a number of service providers were refusing to co-operate with police forces both here in Canada and internationally. As a result of a number of fairly strong comments that came from members of that committee at the period of time when we had to deal with this, we have seen an increase in co-operation from the service providers in terms of giving police officers information, putting them on notice when they identify child porn on their service technology, and co-operating as fully as they can with the police.

That is not universally true to this day and that is why we are seeing this legislation. We really should have seen this legislation at least three years ago because it was very clear at that point that we had a problem. It was only because of some of the threats that came out of the justice committee at that time that we got greater co-operation from the service providers here in Canada.

It is still a major problem when we try to deal internationally. There are certain countries who are very co-operative with us and are actively engaged in trying to shut these sites down and to prosecute those who they trace the child pornography back to. However, there are other countries in the world that have no mechanisms at all to deal with this.

In that regard, I think it is worthwhile to note the assistance we got from Bill Gates and Microsoft. They assisted the police forces in developing a technology at quite a substantial expense to that corporation. It was in the range of about $10 million in human resources to develop the technology and the actual expenditure of funds to produce it.

It is important to note, both with regard to this bill and just generally, how child pornographers work. They put the information on one service provider and then skip it through a number of service providers. We have been told in some cases this material will go through up to as many as 50 service providers around the globe.

Through this technology, which was developed by Microsoft, through the Toronto police force's initiative, and funded by Mr. Gates, we are generally able to trace the material back to the source. So we may skip through a whole bunch of service providers, but we can eventually get back to the source and get the site shut down. We have seen at least several major busts in Canada as a result of this technology being deployed. A number of people were charged and in some cases convicted. Other cases are still working their way through the courts.

The technology was crucial and it was the first time it had been developed in the world. We are now sharing that technology with other countries with whom we are cooperating so they can use it to track things back to the child pornographers.

That was a major step forward. It was interesting to see in the media this week that some of the other technology that we have been working on in order to be able to register sites has not been developed. We had a five-year program that I think was initiated in the 2004-06 Parliament. We are close to the end of that. Under that program, people identify the site and advise the police, and then we have a registry of that.

That registry is still not up and running, because of technological problems. According to the article in the Chronicle Herald on November 25, as much as 40% of the budget that was allocated over that five-year period has not been spent because we do not have enough police officers actually working on this, and we do not seem to have been able to put enough resources into fully developing that technology.

That five-year period is just about up. I have no idea what the government is going to be doing in terms of continuing that funding until the service is up and running effectively. It is quite clear from the article that more police officers should have been specifically trained and designated to work in this area, and that has not happened.

With regard to the bill itself, one of the concerns I have is that, as is typical with the government, the government is out front, promulgating the notion that this is the be-all and the end-all. I am being a bit too harsh on them and I will admit that, but the reality is that the real work that needs to be done by government is to fund our police forces.

There are very few large police forces in this country that do not have at least one or two police officers specifically designated to deal with child pornography, mostly on the Internet but in print as well. We need more of those officers. We need a lot more of those officers in order to be able to deal with this problem.

This is a growth industry. It continues to grow because of the Internet. We have always had child pornography in print and even in paintings. We can go back hundreds and hundreds of years, maybe even millenniums. The explosion occurred with the Internet, which provided for easy transmission of this pornography, and it tapped into a substantial market that was unavailable before, crossing international boundaries and making it very difficult for national police forces to be able to deal with it.

I have to say this, and it is not just about the current government but also about the previous Liberal government and also about a lot of other countries. There are very few countries we can point to, England may be one of the exceptions, that have in fact dealt with this problem in an efficient manner, that is by moving enough human resources into combatting this.

We know that the province of Manitoba was one of the provinces that moved on this by establishing a snitch line. England has done the same thing and has funded it. It seems to be fairly effective in getting the public, when they are scanning various websites, to identify child pornography and to get that information to the police. The police can then deal with it in an efficient and rapid fashion, to shut the sites down and to try to track the producers of the sites.

It is working in that regard, in that we have a methodology, but we do not have enough resources. It is really a shame that our police forces are still struggling with that, because they have nowhere near the capacity to combat the sheer volume of what they have to deal with on the Internet.

In that respect, I urge the government in this coming budget to take another look at this area in particular. If we are really serious about protecting our children, we need to put more resources into doing that.

This legislation will help a little. I do not want to deny that completely, but it is a very small step in comparison with how much more effective we would be in combatting this scourge if there were more police officers working on it and also on developing technology. Police officers need training and they need companies like Microsoft to come into the field and cooperate with them to try to develop better technology to track this right back to its source. That is the only way we can effectively shut it down.

With regard to the bill itself, I have some concerns. There was a lot of debate before the bill got to the House over whether service providers would have a legislatively mandated responsibility to monitor their sites.

Going back to the bill on child Internet luring, the committee heard some evidence to the effect that it was going to be difficult for the smaller service providers to do that. On the other hand, it might, quite frankly, be possible to develop technology so that the computer would do the monitoring.

There are any number of other technologies and services that we use on computers that can do the search on a random basis. That technology needs to be developed and deployed. Maybe that is something we have to impose on the industry.

However, we have just given up. This bill does nothing to require the service providers to do any monitoring at all. All it requires is that if somebody tells them there is a site on their technology, the ISPs have to report it to the locator and a police force. They are under no affirmative obligation to monitor the websites using their technology.

I think the government backed down too much. At the very least, we should be looking at imposing some responsibility on them. It appears obvious that this bill is going to go to committee, and I am hoping that the committee can look at this again and perhaps strengthen the bill in a meaningful way to impose some responsibility.

I want to make a point about the penalties in the bill. The penalties assume that service providers are all corporate, so there are only fines in the bill. We need to take a look at that and see whether we should be pulling back the corporate veil.

I know the test will not be easy from a legal standpoint, but where we have been able to identify service providers that are abusing their responsibility to protect children, we should be pulling back the corporate veil, and police and prosecutors should have the ability to prosecute individual members, whether they are part of the executive or the board of directors, of those companies for these crimes.

We have been able to identify that in some cases it was quite clear that the corporate entity knew about the sites and did nothing about them, simply allowed them to continue on. If we have that kind of a scenario or that kind of conduct, then we in fact should be going after individuals and not just the corporations.

[The Acting Speaker, NDP, Denise Savoie]

The hon. member will have five and a half minutes remaining in his speech as well as time for questions and comments.

The House resumed from November 26 consideration of the motion that Bill C-58, An Act respecting the mandatory reporting of Internet child pornography by persons who provide an Internet service, be read the second time and referred to a committee.

[Judy Wasylycia-Leis, NDP, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to speak to this bill which deals with child pornography and to put on the record the concerns, comments and support of my caucus.

This bill is roundly supported by all parties. We are here today to acknowledge the work of those in our community who have been fighting for decades to stop the curse of child pornography and more recently to put restrictions on the spread of this vile propaganda by the Internet.

I want to spend a few minutes reminding Canadians how we all have to work together on this issue. I want to reference the work of an organization in Winnipeg, Manitoba, that is headed up by Roz Prober, who has been working on issues of the sex trade and child pornography for many years. In fact, just this past week in Winnipeg a number of sessions were held and media awards were presented to organizations and individuals in our country who have been outspoken, vocal, and ever present on the issue of child pornography.

Roz Prober and her organization, Beyond Borders, have started a campaign called “Man to Man”. The reason for that campaign is that it is recognized that in most instances regarding child pornography and the use of the Internet to spread child pornography, the main propagators of this offensive material are men.

The idea of the campaign is to persuade other men, who know the importance of stopping the spread of child pornography, who know where it can lead, and how harmful it can be to our whole society, to encourage those men to speak to other men whether it be in terms of how they treat women generally or how they view women and children as sexual objects.

However, the importance of the campaign is to start at the very beginning with that notion that somehow women and children are the sexual property of men. If we can get at that root cause, if we can understand what drives people to produce, promote and spread child pornography, then we will have won half the battle.

Many in the House have worked for years trying to convince the present Parliament and previous ones to take tough stands and take serious legislative steps to crack down on anything that promotes the use of violence, violence against women, violence against children, and violence against any vulnerable members in our society, as a way to exercise power over others.

Many in the House have worked for years, and I think about previous members of Parliament: Margaret Mitchell, Dawn Black, Audrey McLaughlin, Alexa McDonough, and the list goes on and on. These women have stood in this place to say that we as a society, as a Parliament, and as a country have an obligation to get to the roots of pornography and violence against women and children. The only way to do that is to recognize it for what it is, which is the exercise of power over others.

The House will remember Rosemary Brown, who was a prominent member in Canadian politics, who was the first black woman to seek the national leadership of any political party. She worked as an NDP MLA in British Columbia for years and was well known renowned feminist across this country. I remember her words to this day, acknowledging that she passed away a couple of years ago and we lost a great heroine and a great fighter, but she always said, “If we do not challenge the notion that might is right, [that competition is the basis to survival,] then there is no point to this struggle after all”.

What we are talking about in this debate is power over others, how it is wielded, how it degrades people, how it makes them second-class citizens, and how it puts people on a life cycle of dependency, hopelessness and despair because the victims of child pornography are faced with formidable challenges in trying to overcome that humiliation, that sense of no identity, that feeling of being dirty and second class.

That is something that takes years and years to overcome. Sometimes it is never overcome and the victims of violence, child pornography, sexual degradation, or the sex trade, if they can escape it, they will fight for their whole lives trying to regain their sense of self worth and purpose in life.

This debate is pretty fundamental to our notion of a civil society, our notion that everyone among us, no matter whether we look at people through the prism of sex or race or ability can contribute to society. It is absolutely clear that our job as parliamentarians is to ensure that everyone, regardless of sex, race or ability is able to be who they are and contribute on the basis of their unique talents their individual potential and contribute that to our society. When they become pawns in a massive trade regarding child pornography, we demean not just those who are the victims who are portrayed in child pornography but we, in fact, demean an entire society and reduce it to its lowest common denominator.

Our job must be to use every strategy at our fingertips, every mechanism available to crack down on child pornography. This is not a time for anyone among us to debate the whole issue of freedom of speech because we all know that there is no freedom of speech when that freedom is used to take someone else's freedom away. That is what child pornography does. That is what pornography does generally. It takes away the freedom of that child or woman, or any other victim of pornography and sexual degradation, to be who they truly are as individuals.

Mr. Speaker, I would urge you to ensure that we move the bill as expeditiously as possible through all levels and all processes in this place to honour the work of those who have come before us and to recognize those members in our communities everywhere, whether it is in Winnipeg with Beyond Borders, whether it is a national organization in terms of child protection, or whether it is the women's movement, where feminists have been speaking out for decades to end violence against any individual and sexual degradation of any individual. We need to honour that work and bring it to fruition, entrench it in law, and crack down on the production, dissemination, and the spread of this vile propaganda that degrades and humiliates people and lowers the whole level of civilization in our country today.

I think it is an offence to the very notion of a civilized society that child pornography is allowed in any shape or form. It is contrary to any notion of what we believe in, in terms of a society where everyone is treated with decency, equality, dignity and respect.

I think it is incumbent upon each one of us to do what we can in our respective constituencies and communities, so that we are not just here promoting laws that will actually make a difference but we are on the streets, in our neighbourhoods, at the community level, in the grassroots of our communities, speaking out every time there is any sign, any sense, any whiff of material or actions or activity that shows and reveals children as sexual objects or women as second-class citizens.

So, what I am saying is this debate is more than just about the law. It is about government policies, in general, and whether or not we are there to support those organizations, those non-governmental community organizations, the women's movement, the cross-borders organizations of the country,and whether we are there supporting them through resources and through acknowledging the validity of their work.

While I know the government is very supportive of cracking down on pornography, as witnessed by this legislation, we sometimes wonder if the government is really there, prepared to get at the roots of the problem, and support organizations that need resources of the government to fight, to speak, and to act. We have had huge debates in this place about whether or not government funds should be used to do such things, to advocate on behalf of others. Many organizations have lost their funds because they are seen as advocates, as speaking out for a purpose, as fighting against something.

I know we have disagreements in this place sometimes about the end goal and our very notion of what is a civil society. However, I would implore government members today to think about the wisdom of that kind of approach and decision, and to, in fact, reconsider supporting women's organizations, which are the leaders on this issue, through core funding.

Most of the organizations I know that fight on these terms, on this basis, spend half their time trying to figure out how to keep going as an organization. They spend half their time making applications and trying to fit their program into a government-sponsored initiative, trying to fit a round peg into a square box, trying to be as creative and as imaginative as possible, in order to access a bit of resources just to keep going.

The women's movement has been drastically hurt in its ability to keep being that voice in our communities against child pornography and violence against anyone because it is spending most of its time trying to figure out how to stay alive, if it is still alive. In fact, many important organizations have had to be silenced, have had to terminate their existence because there is no support from a government that should support such organizations since they get to the very roots of the problem that we talk about today. We cannot just do it with the heavy hand of the law.

We support the bill because it takes a multi-disciplined and a multifaceted approach, but we have to fight at the community level, too. We have to deal with the very fundamental attitude that people can overpower others and do so in the most vilest of ways, through the degradation we have seen in some of the most horrific child pornography cases anywhere, as we know recently from the news in terms of pornography rings that have been broken and individuals charged.

That is just the tip of the iceberg. Pornography is everywhere. The way in which we treat women and children is rooted in a society where the powerful are given licence to overcome the more vulnerable, given licence because we do not stop them from repressing women and children and making them victims.

I hope, through this legislation, we crack down on child pornography on the Internet, that is spread electronically, at the speed of light, everywhere and is so readily accessible to everyone in society. At the same time, I hope, in the process, we recognize that we also have to change attitudes.

Every time there is an act of violence against another in our society, any time women are treated as sexual objects or children are seen as pawns in this game of trading pornographic material, anytime individuals in society are not allowed to be who they are on their own terms, then we have to act and we have to support community groups to do that.

We cannot sit back and allow cultural conditioning to overwhelm us, sex stereotyping to be pervasive, second-class status to be attributed to children. We have to recognize every one as an individual who should be unencumbered and free to pursue his or her life's dreams without being defined, stereotyped and placed in precarious situations because of a society that needs to make money off the treatment of others as second-class citizens.

I am thankful for the opportunity to speak today and to recognize community groups that have been there for us. In turn, I would ask Parliament to be there for them.

[Irene Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague from Winnipeg North for spelling out how women have been silenced in Canada by the government and connecting that use of power by the government to the wish to have power over others and not necessarily for a positive reason.

Once children are violated by predators, it is too late. As my colleague pointed out, they live with humiliation and despair. My concern is that the government only talks about punishment. It is so focused on punishment that it has paraded a series of less than effective crime bills in front of the Canadian public, yet has acted negligently in terms of prevention.

Just last week, I received a letter from Mark Biagi from Powell River, B.C. He was very concerned about predators who used date rape drugs to take advantage of young women and the fact that there was nothing in our laws to prevent or to prosecute in these cases. We have also heard nothing about prevention of the crime of child pornography.

Could my colleague comment on the resources that should be in place so we can address the very serious problems of violence against women, violence against children in the form of pornography and physical violence and violence against women in terms of date rape drugs and those who use them and those who allow their use?

[Judy Wasylycia-Leis, NDP, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague, the NDP Status of Women critic, for her ongoing work in Parliament, raising these fundamental issues and questions.

I agree with her that there are too few resources and too little acknowledgement of some deep-rooted problems in our society and of the limited ability of organizations to fight back when government does not take them seriously.

Whether we are talking about cracking down on date rape and stopping date rape drugs or trying to work with young people and with organizations that try to dispel this notion of stereotyping and conditioning that is so pervasive in our society, or whether we are looking at more funding for organizations that provide services and programs to fight back against violence in the home or violence on the streets, or whether we are looking at organizations that simply work to create awareness and understanding about the vile impact, the horrific fallout from any kind of materials that treat people as second-class citizens or sexual objects, all those issues must be on the table. They must be addressed. In fact, this is a pervasive, serious problem that creeps up in every aspect of our lives, and we need to be there to deal with it.

I want to reference other organizations that work to end child sexual exploitation. Recently some of the celebrities in Beverly Hills started to get involved in this whole campaign. Maybe this will help in terms of bringing some awareness, when we see actors like Jason Priestley and race car driver, Jacques Villeneuve, among high-profiled Canadians involved in a campaign to end sexual exploitation of children.

This along with the work that I mentioned earlier of Beyond Borders is so important for getting the message out. Public awareness campaigns have to focus and be ever present. To do that, they need resources, money and support to do that.

Beyond Borders, which I mentioned earlier in my remarks, shows that 90% of those charged in terms of sexual exploitation of children or the use of children for sex or the perpetuation of child pornography are men. This goes back to reasons for their man-to-man campaign.

We need to be out there saying, “It's important for boys and men to hear that using children for sex and profit is not OK”. Those are the words of Roz Prober, president of Beyond Borders.

[Jim Maloway, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Mr. Speaker, when the minister announced the bill and spoke in the House the other day, she said that $42.1 million over five years would be provided to help law enforcement with more financial resources. When I asked her afterward whether this was new money, she could not answer the question. It goes to show us how ill-prepared the government is and how rushed the bill was.

The government did not look to best practices in other countries. Sweden simply solves the problem by blocking access to the sites. Brazil set up an ethical rules committee for the ISPs. Germany and the European Union block access to the sites as well.

Does that not make more sense than to bring in a bill that will simply slow the problem down a bit? We all agree that it has developed in an explosive manner in the last five or six years. It will only get bigger and fines will not solve the problem.

[Judy Wasylycia-Leis, NDP, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Elmwood—Transcona for a very important point. We absolutely must have a comprehensive strategy for something as serious as child pornography and sexual exploitation of women and children. It is not good enough for the government to stand and say that it has $40 million, we are not sure from where, to enforce this bill, yet it takes away money from women's organizations and organizations that stand and say to all citizens, especially young boys and men, that the treatment of women as sexual objects is wrong, that child pornography has dire consequences and they should be aware of their actions, even if they make comments or gestures that are inadvertent.

We have to start from square one in terms of education and awareness, and that takes money and support from the government.

My colleague also mentions the point about other tactics, shutting down sites, other strategies used in other jurisdictions that have proven to be effective in ending these rings that produce and spread child pornography. Surely the government can come forward with a more comprehensive approach than simply this one measure in this one particular bill.

[LaVar Payne, Conservative, Medicine Hat, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to ask questions on this very important bill.

I point out that citizens of the fabulous riding of Medicine Hat have very much been in support of the anti-crime bills that we have put through. They regularly call our office and ask why we have not done something about the criminals in the system.

Although some of the colleagues on the other side appear to be somewhat soft on crime, I am pleased to hear that the hon. member opposite appears to be in favour of supporting the bill through the House. Does the hon. member have the ability to see that the bill will certainly help to protect our children?

[Judy Wasylycia-Leis, NDP, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the question from my Conservative colleague across the way. I want him to know that the NDP absolutely supports the bill and we will help to ensure its quick passage to Parliament. However, we also want our colleagues in the House to know that we are dealing with a very serious and pervasive problem, and it takes a multifaceted approach.

We hope the government may see its way clear to look at other ways to crack down on the spread of child pornography through the Internet. We also hope the government might look at ways to help change attitudes at the earliest stages so we do not end up with people engaged in this kind of activity, which is so harmful to others.

I want him to know that we are here because we believe in this and in the past introduced similar initiatives in the House. Someone just reminded me that the NDP had introduced a bill about Internet luring back in 2006. My colleague, the member for Sackville—Eastern Shore, introduced that bill, the intent of which was to prevent the use of the Internet to unlawfully promote, display, describe or facilitate participation in unlawful sexual activity involving young persons. That was in 2006, so we are glad we finally have a bill in 2009.

[The Deputy Speaker, Conservative, Andrew Scheer]

Is the House ready for the question?

[Some hon. members]

Question.

[The Deputy Speaker, Conservative, Andrew Scheer]

The question is on the motion. Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[The Deputy Speaker, Conservative, Andrew Scheer]

I declare the motion carried. Accordingly, the bill stands referred to the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights.

(Motion agreed to, bill read the second time and referred to a committee)