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.

Disposition of Abolition of Early Parole Act

[Alexandra Mendes, Liberal, Brossard—La Prairie, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to participate in the debate on the motion to prevent debate on the content and substance of Bill C-59. I find it rather odd that the Bloc has supported the government's attempt to stifle any attempt at debate on the substance of this bill.

No one in the House can accuse the Liberals of not supporting the idea of eliminating parole eligibility after one-sixth of the sentence is served for economic crimes. Two years ago, my colleague from Bourassa, our candidate in Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert and our member for Lac-Saint-Louis participated in a press conference with several of Earl Jones' victims to call on the government to quickly bring forward a bill to eliminate parole eligibility after one-sixth of the sentence is served, especially for criminals who commit major fraud and have multiple victims.

No one can accuse the Liberals of not supporting that idea. I think it is really dishonest of the government to make that kind of accusation when it knows very well what the Liberals' position is. This was pointed out by my colleague from Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine.

Now I would like to talk about the debate and the fact that the Conservatives and the Bloc members want to limit the scope of the debate. Just seven months ago the members of the Bloc rose in the House to criticize the government for doing the exact same thing it is doing now with Bill C-59. The government moved a motion to block debate.

Last June, the member for Saint-Maurice—Champlain rose in the House to criticize the government for moving a motion to block debate on the Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act. The Bloc member for Hochelaga also rose to oppose a government motion to block debate on Bill C-9, the Jobs and Economic Growth Act, by imposing time allocation.

We are opposed to this time allocation motion because we believe that Bill C-59 addresses a very important issue. Furthermore, for two years now, the Liberals have been calling on the government to eliminate parole eligibility after one-sixth of the sentence is served for economic crimes like those committed by Earl Jones, Vincent Lacroix and others.

I think it is a shame that some would have people believe that the Liberals do not want to protect victims. That is simply not true. When the government introduced Bill C-21 on economic crimes and it was referred to committee, the Liberal justice critic proposed an amendment to the bill to eliminate eligibility for parole after one-sixth of the sentence in cases of economic crime. The Conservatives and the Bloc defeated the motion.

Every MP is entitled to his or her opinion on bills that we are called on to debate in the House. It is a fundamental aspect of the democratic process. The operative word here is “debate”, and the collusion between the Conservatives and the Bloc is preventing us from acting as responsible parliamentarians.

We would like to hear from experts. We want to know how this bill will truly address a gap in the law, how it will do justice to victims, how this bill will improve the chances of rehabilitation for those who once lost control of their lives.

Perhaps we should indeed eliminate parole after one-sixth of a sentence for offenders who have committed serious economic crimes and left a number of victims.

However, for non-violent criminal acts that are not fraud, we believe that evidence has shown that parole after one-sixth of a sentence has been very effective and that the rate of recidivism is much lower.

We will never know what the experts might have said since this closure motion eliminates any chance to consult experts. With this government so eager to control everything, it has become somewhat of a tradition to just pass a bill without any idea of the facts that might call it into question.

The Liberals are against this closure motion. It is not justified, and we regret that the Bloc has decided to join the Conservatives to limit the debate on this bill. As far as the substance of the bill is concerned, in the past and still today, no one could accuse the Liberals of not showing their support for eliminating parole after one-sixth of the sentence for economic crimes.

In order to illustrate the government's intellectual dishonesty, I would like to present a chronology of the Conservatives' failures in their so-called fight against crime.

I am referring here to the various bills that have died on the order paper for all sorts of reasons or that have remained in the House or at committee indefinitely.

Here they are. Bill C-15, An Act to amend the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act and to make related and consequential amendments to other Acts, died on the order paper when Parliament was prorogued; Bill C-19, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (investigative hearing and recognizance with conditions), died on the order paper before the House had a chance to vote on it; Bill C-26, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (auto theft and trafficking in property obtained by crime), also died on the order paper. It is certainly not the opposition that forced the government to prorogue Parliament.

Bill C-31, An Act to amend the Criminal Code, the Corruption of Foreign Public Officials Act and the Identification of Criminals Act and to make a consequential amendment to another Act, died on the order paper, and Bill C-36, An Act to amend the Criminal Code, on the faint hope clause, died on the order paper before being brought back this session. One committee meeting was held on Bill C-46, An Act to amend the Criminal Code, the Competition Act and the Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Act, before it died on the order paper. Bill C-52, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (sentencing for fraud), which is related to Bill C-59, the bill we are dealing with today, died on the order paper when Parliament was prorogued. Bill C-58, An Act respecting the mandatory reporting of Internet child pornography by persons who provide an Internet service, died on the order paper. The prorogation of Parliament killed many bills.

Among the bills introduced by the Minister of Public Safety was Bill C-34, the Protecting Victims From Sex Offenders Act, which also died on the order paper. The bill to deter terrorism and to amend the State Immunity Act died on the order paper. Bill C-43, An Act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act and the Criminal Code, died on the order paper. Bill C-47, An Act regulating telecommunications facilities to support investigations, died on the order paper. Bill C-53, An Act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act (accelerated parole review) and to make consequential amendments to other Acts, died on the order paper. Bill C-60, An Act to implement the Framework Agreement on Integrated Cross-Border Maritime Law Enforcement Operations between the Government of Canada and the Government of the United States of America, died on the order paper.

To date, no meetings have been held to discuss Bill C-16, An Act to amend the Criminal Code. Bill C-17, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (investigative hearing and recognizance with conditions), was given first reading 51 days after Parliament was prorogued, and the committee still has not met to discuss that bill.

Bill C-21, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (sentencing for fraud), was fast-tracked at committee in just one meeting and still has not reached second reading. Bill C-22, An Act respecting the mandatory reporting of Internet child pornography by persons who provide an Internet service, was given first reading 64 days after Parliament was prorogued, and the government delayed it for 26 days at report stage because of the debate on the short title.

Bill C-48, An Act to amend the Criminal Code and to make consequential amendments to the National Defence Act, was given first reading 89 days after Parliament was prorogued, and we are still waiting for the next step. Bill C-50, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (interception of private communications and related warrants and orders), was given first reading after 94 days, and we are still waiting. First reading of An Act to amend the Criminal Code, the Competition Act and the Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Act took place 243 days after Parliament was prorogued. Bill C-53, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (mega-trials), was given first reading and nothing more.

Bill C-54, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (sexual offences against children) only made it to first reading. Bill C-5, An Act to amend the International Transfer of Offenders Act was introduced at first reading by the Minister of Public Safety 15 days after prorogation. Two committee meetings were held and nothing has happened since. As for Bill C-23B, An Act to amend the Criminal Records Act and to make consequential amendments to other Acts, we are still waiting. After a few meetings on the subject, the minister was supposed to come back with amendments that he felt were necessary in order to make the bill more comprehensive and definitely more respectful. Bill C-39, An Act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act and to make consequential amendments to other Acts was introduced for first reading 104 days after prorogation and we still have not met in committee to discuss it. Bill C-49, An Act to amend the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, the Balanced Refugee Reform Act and the Marine Transportation Security Act was introduced for first reading 232 days after prorogation and there it remains. Bill C-52, An Act regulating telecommunications facilities to support investigations was also introduced for first reading 243 days after prorogation and we are waiting for the next step. The Senate introduced Bill S-7, An Act to deter terrorism and to amend the State Immunity Act for first reading 49 days after prorogation and we are still waiting for the next step. Bill S-10, An Act to amend the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act and to make related and consequential amendments to other Acts was introduced for first reading in the Senate 60 days after prorogation. Bill S-13, An Act to implement the Framework Agreement on Integrated Cross-Border Maritime Law Enforcement Operations between the Government of Canada and the Government of the United States of America was introduced for first reading 237 days after prorogation.

I am pointing this out to prove that it is not the opposition parties that are slowing the process down. For all sorts of unknown reasons, the government introduces these bill and then goes no further with them.

To conclude, I would like to question the justification for Bill C-59 and the fact that the Conservatives and the Bloc felt this was urgent enough to warrant this closure motion, which is an affront to parliamentary dialogue.

Protecting Canadians by Ending Sentence Discounts for Multiple Murders Act

[Paul Szabo, Liberal, Mississauga South, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for his suggestion. One of the things I have learned about this place is that people think that for every complex problem there is a simple solution, and that is wrong.

Some of the things that we deal with in this place on a criminal justice basis are very similar and probably should be dealt with in an omnibus bill. A number of bills propose changes to sentencing. Rather than having a separate bill for car theft, or another one for some other issue, et cetera, an omnibus bill tends to make the place inefficient. I would agree that if the government was serious about its crime agenda it would have brought like items together. The committee work could happen at the same time and the same witnesses could appear.

The member also raised another interesting point about the government being serious about its justice agenda.

Back in 2005, Internet service providers appeared before justice committee to say that they disagreed with being obligated to report matters related to the exploitation of children on the Internet. In 2006 the Conservatives took office and today we are still debating that bill, all because they want to have a silly, pissy short title for the bill. Rather than dealing with that directly they called an election and prorogued. The bill was Bill C-58 at one time and is now Bill C-22.

This shows that even on a straightforward issue such as dealing with the sexual exploitation of children through the Internet, the government is still spinning its wheels. Since 2006 the Conservatives have been holding up this bill. They are still holding it up just because they want a short title that says they are doing the job and getting tough on crime. This is outrageous. It is irresponsible.

Motion in amendment

[Paul Szabo, Liberal, Mississauga South, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak on the report stage motion of the bill. The subject matter of Bill C-22 was before Parliament shortly before the 2006 election when the current government took over.

It is important to note that since January 2006 when the Conservative government took over, the subject matter of the bill and the importance of a bill dealing with the sexual exploitation of children has been before Parliament, and four years later we still have not passed a bill that could have dealt with this very linear approach to a very serious problem but important enough that all the parties are supporting the substance of the bill. It speaks volumes about the commitment of the government to be honest with Canadians about what its priorities are.

I wish the media would do an analysis and look at how the various justice bills have come forward and have died due to prorogation or due to the 2008 election and what happened to them when they came back. We note first that the government has one member speak on a bill and then nobody else speaks on the government side. Government members are muzzled, handcuffed, and have no authorization to even speak in Parliament about legislation that the government has brought forward unless it is approved by the Prime Minister's office or by the Privy Council office. That is the level of participation in legislative debate that we can expect from government members. They cannot speak. They will not speak. They do not ask questions. They do not care to get involved because they cannot. They have been told not to.

We should look at the facts. For a number of bills, the Conservatives have had an election platform of getting tough on crime and they continue to repeat the theme that they are tough on crime. Then they have all these bills, instead of saying there are a number of areas they would like to deal with in terms of the Criminal Code and then put them together in an omnibus bill, which is normally the case, the four, five or six different areas in which they want to toughen up sentencing, identify new offences, or whatever. The Conservatives put them out there, they table them, but we never hear about them again. They just languish there, and then we go along on other business. What happens? As soon as there is a crisis on some other business, the Conservatives come back with crime awareness week. They get their bills back out there to see if they can distract Canadians from the problem they have somewhere else in legislation so that Canadians will say, “Yes, the government is tough on crime; we like that”. However, it never finishes.

When we had the last election and the prorogation, the options of the government were to be able to bring back a bill that would be repositioned at the stage it was left at when prorogation occurred. Did the government do that? No. As a matter of fact, the Conservatives decided the bills would all start again, or they took two or three of them and put them in one bill. That changed the mechanism with which they were working and they had to start at the beginning. Therefore, all the debate, all the work that was done, all the prep work, all the printing, and all the consultations with all the stakeholder groups was basically set aside and we started again.

Here we are, four years later. What was Bill C-58 last time is now Bill C-22, and what is hanging the bill up is the government.

I would like to read into the record what Bill C-22 would do. Every bill, on the inside cover, states in very distinct terms the purpose of the bill.

It says:

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.

It is pretty straightforward. Internet service providers, whether they be individuals or businesses, must report if they become aware, and there are some penalties. For individuals, it could be up to $10,000 in penalties. For corporations, it could be $100,000.

It is not a big deal, but why we are here today and what we are debating is a report stage motion to reinstate clause 1. Clause 1 is a short title. If the media were watching, they would say, and a lot of the members have mentioned, that the short title would be used; the courts would often refer to the short title rather than the long title.

The short title that the government put in Bill C-22 is the Protecting Children from Online Sexual Exploitation Act, compared to Bill C-58, the last iteration of this bill, which stated in clause 1:

This Act may be cited as the Child Protection Act (Online Sexual Exploitation).

As a number of hon. members have said already, this bill does not do that, in terms of being the piece of legislation that is going to deal with sexual exploitation online. It is one aspect, one small aspect of activity that one would expect in a comprehensive, serious strategy to address exploitation of children.

Why would the government do that? It goes back to probably the reason underlying virtually everything the government does. It has not been governing since 2006, it has been campaigning. To the government, everything in this place is slogans: “We are getting tough on crime”; “We are going to deal with protecting children from online sexual exploitation”. But the bill does not do it, because there are other jurisdictions. If the Conservatives were serious about it, they would not trivialize it like this. They would not make us go through another debate on this bill about a clause that supports that the bill would do something that in fact it does not.

How is it that the Minister of Justice gave the opinion to cabinet that the bill is in good form? It is not. It is misleading. It is false. It is deliberately misleading. The government has deliberately misled the House, deliberately misled Canadians. The government seems to lie so naturally. It really does. It looks so very natural. It does not even flinch anymore. It is too comfortable, because it knows it can get away with it. It is time to call the government on misleading Canadians and misleading Parliament, and to take legislation seriously.

The member for Windsor—Tecumseh has given some very eloquent speeches over the years about the need to do a comprehensive review and amendment of the Criminal Code. We did not need 10 bills to adjust the sentencing provisions related to 10 different offences. We could have had one bill dealing with everything the government wanted to do on sentencing, on house arrest, on parole, on the faint hope clause, everything. If we wanted to deal with it, it could have been in one bill.

It is going to be the same committee, and in fact, by and large, the same witnesses who would come for that omnibus bill as it would be for each and every one of those individual bills. But it does not serve the political, partisan reasons that the government is here today. It is not governing, it is campaigning, and we have to call a spade a shovel. The government is campaigning. It is sloganeering. It thinks people are stupid. It thinks Canadians are stupid. Well, Canadians are not stupid. They deserve respect and we should deal with legislation in a responsible fashion.

Maybe the hon. members would like to participate in the debate and defend the change to something that is so misleading. The government members had better start doing their job, or maybe it is time to look for another job.

[André Bellavance, Bloc, Richmond—Arthabaska, QC]

Mr. Speaker, today I will speak to Bill C-22. Most of my opposition colleagues have made very interesting remarks about the government's desire to restore the short title. If I may, I would say that this is pure propaganda to make people think that the government is especially concerned about victims. I am not saying that the bill is bad, far from it. Earlier, my colleague from Abitibi—Témiscamingue, the Bloc Québécois justice critic, presented the position of the Bloc Québécois, which is in favour of this bill. The real title, An Act respecting the mandatory reporting of Internet child pornography by persons who provide an Internet service, describes what is found in the bill. The government added a short title for publicity purposes, which is totally inappropriate in this case.

The purpose of Bill C-22 is to require Internet service providers to report child pornography activities they are aware of, which makes perfect sense. It is amazing to us that it takes a bill to require Internet service providers to do that. It seems to me that, based on the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, any good citizen has to help out anyone in danger. That could also apply here. Statistics show that Internet service providers are already doing this type of reporting when they discover they are hosting child pornography sites.

Bill C-22, An Act respecting the mandatory reporting of Internet child pornography by persons who provide an Internet service, is the successor to Bill C-58, which was introduced in November 2009 and died on the order paper. Today, I will have the opportunity to speak about another justice bill. A staggering number of justice bills died on the order paper, and now the government is in a hurry to bring them all back. Yet it is the government's fault because it prorogued Parliament and called elections. It cannot blame the opposition for that. These bills did not move forward because the government scuttled the work of parliamentarians.

Bill C-22 would require persons providing Internet services to the public to report 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 services are being used to commit a crime related to child pornography. Failing to comply with these requirements constitutes an offence.

This bill is aimed not just at Internet service providers, but also at well-known social media, such as Facebook. These media have also become tools for sexual predators who prey on children and those who wish to disseminate horrible images of sexually abused children. The bill must cover all aspects because the Internet is unfortunately one of the tools used by ill-intentioned people and low-life criminals.

The Bloc Québécois is surprised that a law is required to make Internet service providers do the obvious, that is, report people who decide to use their services and their links to disseminate that kind of filth, if I may call it that.

Some provinces have laws, and some service providers are already doing this. Did the government introduce this type of bill just to score political points? I do not know.

In any event, it is better to be safe than sorry. Even though Internet service providers are already doing what they ought to, with this bill we are assured that they will report what is happening right under their noses. They will have no choice because the bill includes fines. Increasing the likelihood of getting caught is much more of a deterrent than increasing punishments, which are often immaterial to this type of criminal.

Given the importance of improving law enforcement's ability to deal with one of the most despicable forms of organized crime, the Bloc Québécois fully supports the principle of the bill. In committee we will look at all the ins and outs of the bill and we would like to pass it as quickly as possible. We are against the amendment to change the title. Whether one title is used instead of another is not the most important point of discussion on this bill.

We urgently need to do as much as possible to protect the child victims of these acts. This bill will not protect children directly, but it will have a deterrent effect if those who host such awful images are forced to report the criminals. This will go a long way toward helping the police and will contribute to fighting perverse crimes perpetrated by bad people who use children for sexual purposes.

The current child pornography provisions in the Criminal Code prohibit all forms of making, distributing, making available and possessing child pornography, including through the use of the Internet. The Code even prohibits looking at child pornography.

In September 2008, the federal, provincial and territorial ministers responsible for justice met and agreed that Canada's response to child pornography would 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.

Children are currently protected from sexual exploitation through provincial and territorial child welfare legislation. In Manitoba, Ontario and Nova Scotia, all citizens are required to report all forms of child pornography. The new federal bill provides for a uniform mandatory reporting regime across Canada, which will complement provincial and territorial child welfare legislation. This bill is an add-on to the legislation that already exists in certain provinces.

Bill C-22 is simple enough and has only 14 clauses. 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, to be determined at a later date by regulation, any information they receive about websites that make child pornography be available to the public. They will also 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.

That change is the whole point of this bill. Companies can no longer bury their heads in the sand and say that they did not know that one of their sites was being used. As soon as they have reasonable grounds to think that their services have been used by this type of sexual predator, they need to report it or they will be fined. I believe all members of the House agree that Bill C-22 needs to be passed as quickly as possible.

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

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to participate in the debate on Bill C-22 at report stage and third reading.

I have been listening to my colleagues on both sides of the House with regard to Bill C-22 and the considerable comments that have been made about the government's attempt at third reading to bring back its original short title.

I want to discuss very briefly what the bill does because the Liberals support the bill. We think it is a positive step in the right direction. It would make reporting Internet child pornography mandatory for Internet service providers and other persons providing Internet services.

The government took too long to introduce this bill. We lost precious time when the former version of the bill—Bill C-58—died on the order paper when the Prime Minister decided to prorogue Parliament last year.

If protecting children from exploitation, as the government's original short title proclaimed and which the government is attempting to re-establish in the bill, were really a priority for the government, why did the government not only kill its own bill through prorogation but then take four months after Parliament resumed to reintroduce the bill? When it reintroduced the bill, the only change to its previous version, Bill C-58, was the short title.

The long title of the bill, which is An Act respecting the mandatory reporting of Internet child pornography by persons who provide an Internet service, is exactly what the bill does. It is the formal title and an accurate title.

However, when one looks over the landscape of government legislation, it is becoming increasingly clear that the government is now instituting a new political ploy, which is to change the names of its bills, those long, boring titles, to political sound bite titles in an attempt to oversell what the bill actually does and what the government is doing with regard to criminal justice.

The long title is precise and accurately describes what the bill does, whereas the government's short title that it put in its bill and which it is now attempting to re-establish in this bill, even though opposition members in committee voted it down, is deliberately misleading. It overstates what the bill actually does.

I want to make it perfectly clear that the Liberals believe this is a good bill, which is why we support it. However, we find it objectionable that the Conservative government is attempting to play political football with the lives of our children. This is too serious an issue for the government to politicize the issue by making a short title, which is nothing but a political sound bite and which overstates what the bill does.

The bill is the right step in the right direction in addressing this issue. We are pleased that the Conservative government has finally given this bill and this issue enough priority to no longer kill it through prorogation and no longer delay reintroducing it. When the government finally reintroduced the bill and moved second reading, it had the full co-operation of all three opposition parties to debate it quickly and comprehensively and get it to committee. In committee, we gave it priority and heard witnesses in a rapid fashion. We heard from the minister and proceeded to clause by clause because the opposition parties, particularly the Liberals, saw the importance of giving priority to this bill, something we did not originally see from the Conservative government.

The bill will not completely solve the problem, which is why the government's proposed short title is not accurate. As my colleague, the NDP justice critic, mentioned, the Liberals attempted in committee to change the short title so that it would accurately represent what the bill would do, which is child pornography reporting.

My colleague, the member for Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, proposed an amendment to the bill to change the short title of the bill to the child pornography reporting act. Unfortunately, the chair ruled the amendment out of order because we had not amended the content of the bill due to the fact that we were 100% in agreement with the content of the bill. Under the rules, in order to change a short title, even if the original short title does not accurately describe and represent the content of the bill, the chair has no choice but to rule a change to a short title out of order. Therefore, the chair did as he had to do, which was to rule the Liberal amendment out of order.

At that point, as my colleague, the NDP justice critic, mentioned, if the government had been serious about the content of the bill and the objective and aim of the bill and not interested in giving a higher priority to politicizing and attempting to use the issue for political gain on its part, it would have immediately said, “Look. You have a problem with the short tile. Let us work with it. Let us find a short title that we all agree with and we will put it through”.

The government did not do that. It did not approach me, and I am the Liberal critical for justice. I know for a fact that it did not approach my two colleagues who also sit on the committee. We just heard from the NDP justice critic that he was not approached by the government to try to come to some agreement as to the issue of the short title. Therefore, we decided to remove the short title completely.

We are content with the long title because, as I said, it actually states and describes accurately what the bill would actually do.

This is not the first time that the government has added a short title. We need only look at Bill C-21, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (sentencing for fraud), to which the government gave the so-called short title of Standing up for Victims of White Collar Crime Act. The Conservative government's short title is actually longer than the real title. That is ridiculous.

If the government truly wanted to defend victims of white collar crime, why did the government and the Minister of Justice wait 215 days after prorogation in December 2009 before starting debate at second reading of Bill C-21?

This government claims to be the government of law and order.

It says that it is the party of law and order and yet, if we look at virtually every criminal justice bill, the government has played political football. It has either delayed tabling legislation or, if it tables it, it lets it sit on the order paper without moving second reading debate. It has prorogued the House knowing that its bill will be killed and then, when the House and Parliament comes back, rather than immediately re-tabling the bill, the government lets it sit before it actually tables it. The government is not actually interested in defending Canadians and ensuring they are safe. It is more interested in trying to gain political capital with playing with the lives and the safety of Canadians. That is a shame and it is despicable.

We do not like cheap political points that the government attempts to make with victims. We call on the government to stop doing that and it will get the co-operation of the official opposition.

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

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his very interesting question and I would respond with a quote. Maybe they should call it the “protecting children from the Bloc, the Liberals and the NDP” act.

I am searching for the right words in order to respect the Speaker's decision, but that is exactly what he said. They want to appeal to the people by saying that they are fighting crime and doing everything they can. That is not true. The Bloc Québécois supported Bill C-22, formerly Bill C-58, from the very beginning. Four years ago we were saying that the police have to be given the tools to deal with 21st century crime.

The short title of the bill is “Protecting Children from Online Sexual Exploitation Act”. It does not do that, and I especially do not want our Conservative friends to use this misleading title to spread unwelcome propaganda.

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

Mr. Speaker, I hope that my colleague from Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles is listening to what I am saying to him. I would like to tell him that the comments he—the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice—made about the Bloc Québécois were unspeakable. He made these comments during an interview with GoFM RadioX in Abitibi—Témiscamingue on November 10, I believe.

The member for Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles made statements completely unworthy of his role. He is supposed to be the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice. He should have been more respectful of us but he dared to say that the Bloc Québécois does not support Bill C-22 and that the Bloc members—especially the members for Abitibi—Témiscamingue and Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou— need a swift kick in the you-know-what because they do not stand up for children.

I believe that the parliamentary secretary should be immediately relieved of his duties. And I hope this message goes all the way to the Prime Minister's Office.

I invite the public to read Vincent Marissal's blog from November 10, 2010. He writes for La Presse and he is not a federalist and definitely not a sovereignist. He said that the parliamentary secretary, the member for Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, is nothing but an overblown orator and that the follies on the Internet need to stop. On his blog, he repeated the disrespectful comments—which is the only way I can think to describe them—made about the member for Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou and me, the member for Abitibi—Témiscamingue.

I want to tell the member, the parliamentary secretary, the real story. He should listen and be more attentive at the meetings of the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, of which he is supposedly a member. He is there regularly; I see him. Maybe he is sleeping or recuperating from an illness, but we are working. And the Bloc Québécois is in favour of Bill C-22. Not only does the Bloc support Bill C-22, but it has already told the government, through its revered House leader, that this bill needs to be brought back quickly and passed because the police have been asking for this for a long time.

I have here Bill C-58, which is exactly the same as Bill C-22. Bill C-58 was introduced a year ago, in November 2009. If Parliament had not been prorogued, which is what the Conservatives do when things do not go their way, the former governor general would have long since given royal assent to Bill C-22. It is not the opposition members' fault; quite the contrary. I hope the parliamentary secretary will correct his remarks and at least apologize to the Bloc Québécois members, who are very concerned about child protection. When we look at Bill C-22, we see that the amendments do not reflect the will of the committee. That is why we will vote against this amendment, which would restore the short title. We will do so quickly.

The title of the bill is “An Act respecting the mandatory reporting of Internet child pornography by persons who provide an Internet service.” That and only that is the objective of Bill C-22. But with all due respect, Mr. Speaker, because this does not apply to you, the Conservatives do not understand anything. Unfortunately, some of your colleagues do not understand anything.

They do not understand that that is not what the short title says. The short title is the “Protecting Children from Online Sexual Exploitation Act”. But this is not the purpose of the bill. I will explain for the benefit of the parliamentary secretary, who does not understand anything either. The bill would force Internet service providers to report people who may be using the Internet to distribute all sorts of pornography, not just child pornography. That is what the bill says, and that is what our Conservative colleagues do not understand. I am sure you understand, Mr. Speaker, but they do not.

At the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, we tried to explain this to them, but they did not get it. So we will be voting against the amendment, and the short title will disappear. That is clear. We want the public to understand that the idea is to force Internet service providers to make a report if their Internet service is used to distribute any pornography, not just child pornography. Unfortunately, all the people who appeared before the committee told us that in fact there was more child pornography on these sites. So obviously there is a need for tools.

Now I would like to talk about real things. I challenge the parliamentary secretary and the member for Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, and even the anglophone parliamentary secretary, whom I cannot name, who spoke earlier. I challenge them to tell us how much money they are prepared to invest, for that will be the main issue. We asked them if they were prepared to implement this extremely important bill that police forces have been calling for for some time.

Special squads to track down these sexual predators will have to be created. This includes the Ontario Provincial Police, the Sûreté du Québec, the RCMP, the Montreal police and so on. Squads will have to be created within all police forces. People who appeared before the committee told us that is what it would take. Accordingly, the government needs to provide the necessary funding immediately. There is no doubt that the House will pass Bill C-22 very quickly and very soon, probably either today or tomorrow. It is very important.

This bill is being called for not only by police forces, but also by Internet service providers, who have indicated that they are currently under no obligation. Often when they discover something, it is too late. Indeed, we know how it works and it is extremely complicated. Some people explained that now is the time to fight this.

I am nearly out of time, for 10 minutes go by very quickly. I would simply like to tell those watching us that we will do everything we can to ensure this bill passes quickly, because we need to give police forces the means to fight the crimes that are unfortunately committed in cyberspace using 21st century tools. For that reason, and that reason alone, I urge all members here to vote in favour of this bill, so it can come into force immediately.

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

Mr. Speaker, I have a question for my colleague.

The title of Bill C-22, which is the former Bill C-58—I will get back to this later and I hope that the member for Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles will stay where he is, because we have some business to attend to—is “An Act respecting the mandatory reporting of Internet child pornography by persons who provide an Internet service.” This title seems perfect to us. But the government wants to call it by the short title, the “Protecting Children from Online Sexual Exploitation Act”. In committee, we felt that this short title did not properly describe the objective of the bill. The Liberal Party agreed, and I believe that is also the case with my colleague. I hope that is what she understood.

I would like to know if that is why the Liberal Party and the other opposition parties will vote against the proposed amendment.

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

Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to rise today to speak on Bill C-22.

In terms of background, the bill would make reporting Internet child pornography mandatory for Internet service providers and other persons providing Internet services. This is a very important concept whose time is long overdue.

The government has taken a very long time to reintroduce the bill. It has lost time in presenting the bill, due to prorogation. The bill's first iteration was Bill C-58. We all understand the issue of child pornography and we all know that children have to be protected. Children are an important asset. They need to be protected. They are vulnerable and they are easily misled.

My question to the government is, if protecting children from exploitation, as the short title says, is really a priority of the government, why then, after prorogation, did it take it four months to reintroduce this bill?

In fact, there was no change to the bill. The only thing that changed was the short title. Why? Regarding sexual exploitation, if protecting children is really a priority of the current government, then let us stick to the business of protecting children. Let us stick to the right law. The long title of the bill is, “An Act respecting the mandatory reporting of Internet child pornography by persons who provide an Internet service”. This is exactly what the bill would do. This is the formal title. It is an accurate title. The aim of legislation is to protect children from pornography and for the people who provide Internet services to report it.

So why is the government playing games?

The government has repeatedly changed the names of bills, without making any real changes to the bill itself. It has either changed titles or prorogued Parliament and reintroduced the same bills over and over again. Changing titles to political sound bites is not really protecting the kids.

The long title is precise. It describes exactly what Bill C-22 is supposed to do.

The short title is misleading. It overstates what the bill would do.

I would like to make it clear that the bill is a good bill. What we are debating here is why the government is wasting time to change the title of the bill.

The Liberals support the bill. We do not support the title. It is a step in the right direction to address the issue of child pornography and the issue of Internet predators and to make it the responsibility of the providers of Internet services to give us the information.

However, the bill would not completely solve any problems. That is why the short title really is not accurate. It does not reflect accuracy.

The Liberals attempted, at committee, to change the short title to represent what the bill would actually do. The Liberals proposed the “child pornography reporting act”, because that is exactly what this bill attempts to do. The amendment was rejected, so the Liberals decided to remove the short title completely.

Other opposition parties agreed at committee with the content of the long title, because as I said previously, it is what the bill would actually do.

This is not the first time that governments have tried changing or modifying titles. They have done it in Bill C-21, the bill to modify the Criminal Code in regard to sentencing for fraud. It was then replaced by a short title, saying it is the law to defend the victims of white-collar crime. The short title is really longer than the long title, which is the correct title.

If the government is serious about defending victims of white-collar crime, why did it take it 215 days after prorogation to commence the debate for the second time on this bill?

There was another bill, Bill C-16. It went through the same process.

It is obvious that the government is not really serious. The Conservatives claim to be the government with the law and order agenda, but we see the repeated bills, over and over again. If nothing gets passed through Parliament, the Conservatives prorogue Parliament and bring bills back to the House under different names. My question is then, why does the government not get serious about dealing with this issue? It should stop trying to score cheap political points.

In the stakeholders' view of the bill itself, the commissioner of police and the provincial police support this bill. The director of Cybertip.ca states that the bill is a step in the right direction. It is the good first step. The Canadian Centre for Child Protection states that this is a good, right step. Companies such as Bell, Rogers and Telus all agree that this is important.

Statistics Canada indicates that the illegal action of the people who rely on child pornography has increased from 55% in 1998 to 1,408% in 2008.

These images of pornography that are being accessed are horrifying. We all can probably give examples of children and young people who have been enticed on the Internet to do things that they would normally not do. Children are vulnerable. Children seek affection. Children think the person is telling the truth. When children are getting enticed by the Internet, it is important that this bill be put in place immediately.

Cybertip.ca made a presentation at committee and provided the committee with some very interesting information. What it said was very disconcerting. It said: 36% of the images analyzed by the centre depicted sexual assaults on children, and 64% depicted children in a deliberate sexual manner; 76% of web pages analyzed had at least one child abuse image where the child was less than eight years of age; and of the children abused through extreme sexual acts, including bestiality, bondage or torture and degrading acts such as defecation, 69% occurred against children under eight years of age.

What are we doing to protect our children? These are horrifying statistics.

Cybertip.ca also said 83% of the images were of female children.

Liberal members support this bill, but we do not want games being played on the backs of children. We want the law to be passed. We want the law to be effective. We want the law to be there so that, with the technologies that develop, the Internet users, the criminals who use these measures, are put to the test. We need to get them behind bars. We need to protect our children.

It was the former Liberal government in 2002 that made it illegal to deliberately access a website containing child pornography, rather than just having possession of such materials. It is important that we do it.

It was also the former Liberal government that put in place the law allowing a judge to order a service provider to supply the information to authorities when there are reasonable grounds to believe that child pornography is accessible through an Internet service provider.

It was the Liberals who put Cybertip.ca in place, an online reporting tool for child pornography.

The United States and Australia passed similar legislation in 2002 and 2005.

I urge the government to stop dragging its feet, stop playing games with short titles, and let us go forward with the bill.

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

In the same vein, Minister, when we talk about the predecessor to this bill--I think it was Bill C-58--it seems that the provinces have leap-frogged us, and leap-frogged you in fact, Minister, and the government.

It's a good bill. There is nothing very outrageous in it that we would object to, I don't think. It should be passed, there is no question. We could hear some witnesses, and so on.

But in the time it took to get back here in the fall of 2010--through prorogation and other political agendas that your government was on--the Province of Nova Scotia brought forward its Child Pornography Reporting Act, which came into force in April of 2010. Then the Province of Alberta brought forward its Mandatory Reporting of Child Pornography Act. They even have stronger language than your act, Mr. Minister. It came into force July 1, 2010.

Now that the ribbing is over, I want to get into something substantive; that is, why then do some provinces in Canada have stricter laws? And specifically I'll pick Nova Scotia. Section 3 notes, “ Every person who reasonably believes that a representation or material is child pornography shall promptly report...”. Whereas your bill--or we'll say our bill, because we're in it together here--is strictly for the service providers. It's much more narrow.

I think your statement was that you want to coordinate it with provinces that have already brought in this legislation. But I'm thinking of the federal obligation to have laws across this country that provide the same sort of protection and weed out the child pornography that exists in all provinces. Why wouldn't you consider beefing up your federal law to be more in tune, for instance, with that section I read from the Nova Scotia act? The Alberta act is similar.

I'm not sure that there would be a lot of opposition because there is a mandatory duty. Was there some reason we picked sort of a weaker version?

Protecting Children from Online Sexual Exploitation Act

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

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to be participating in the debate regarding Bill C-22.

I will say at the outset that, as my colleague also said during the debate in June, we, the Liberals, support the goal of this bill. We will support this bill so that it can be sent to the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights.

I would also like to mention that I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for Davenport.

I would like to talk a little bit about how this bill came to be.

The bill was first introduced in the House of Commons as Bill C-58 in the previous legislative session. When the Prime Minister decided to prorogue Parliament towards the end of 2009, he effectively killed the bill.

When Parliament resumed in March 2010, the government clearly did not see the bill as a high priority because it waited two months before it reintroduced Bill C-58 as what we know as Bill C-22. Then it sat on the order paper for more than a month before the government finally moved second reading. Debate in the House then could have begun in the month of June.

It is interesting that the government did not place as high a priority on the bill as it should have. This should have been the first bill reintroduced. It should have been the first bill to be moved at second reading. We could have had this bill to committee, possibly out of committee, back for report stage and third reading before we broke for the summer. All of that could have been done expeditiously.

I am happy the government has finally moved second reading on the bill and that debate is now happening. The Liberals will be supporting it.

This bill came out of the agreement reached at the meeting of federal, provincial and territorial ministers on the coming into force of reporting requirements for Internet service providers and online service providers with regard to child pornography.

Bill C-22, as I have already mentioned, is identical to the previous bill, Bill C-58. Under current Canadian law, distributing child pornography online is a criminal offence. When there are reasonable grounds to believe that child pornography is accessible through an Internet service provider, a judge can order the ISP to hand over information to the authorities. Judges can also order such content to be removed if the source can be identified.

The purpose of Bill C-22 is to fight child pornography on the Internet by requiring Internet service providers and others responsible for providing Internet related services to report incidents involving child pornography when they are advised of an address that makes such content available to the public or when they have reasonable grounds to believe that the Internet services they are managing are being used to transmit child pornography.

As the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of the Environment said, Manitoba passed similar legislation in 2008 and Ontario in December 2008. The United States and Australia passed legislation in 2002 and 2005 respectively imposing such requirements on ISPs. Accordingly, Canada has fallen behind some of its international partners and friends, but the step this government is taking to finally modernize the parts of the Criminal Code that cover the production and distribution of child pornography is a step in the right direction.

As I was saying, the parties all agree when it comes to the need to address the exponential increase of child pornography available online. Statistics Canada indicates that illegal activity related to child pornography increased in Canada from 55 cases in 1998 to 1,408 cases in 2008.

A study conducted by Cybertip.ca revealed that nearly 60 countries were hosting child pornography. Canada hosts 9% of the world's child pornography sites, which is unacceptable. This puts us in third place, after the United States, which hosts 49% of these types of sites, and Russia, which hosts 20%. As many have already said in this House, that is truly unacceptable.

I will not repeat the percentages for pornographic images that involve children. The Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of the Environment provided this information today, and my fellow member of the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights already gave them when he made his speech in June 2010. I will also not bother to speak about the fines. I think that topic will have to be studied, and we will have to hear from experts to determine whether the amounts of the fines in this bill are appropriate.

Perhaps we should consider increasing the fines that can be imposed.

The NDP member also brought up a point when he indicated that two countries, Germany and I believe Sweden, have implemented legislation to allow the government to block these sites completely. Are such measures possible here? Could the bill be amended to include such measures?

I think that the experts will be able to tell us whether this is possible in Canada, under our legal framework, because we do not have the same constitution as Germany or Sweden. We always want to ensure that our legislation is constitutional. The experts will be able to tell us whether blocking this type of site is possible under our Constitution and our legal and legislative framework.

I would like to speak about one last point before I conclude.

It is very difficult to determine where the images and websites are hosted, but they can be supported from different locations in the world. As such, oftentimes each photo and each site must be individually tracked, something highly difficult to achieve. Bill C-22 would go somewhere toward solving that, but there is more work to be done.

For one website depicting the sexual exploitation of children, Cybertip.ca tracked it for 48 hours, two days, and the site went through 212 different Internet addresses in 16 different countries. ISPs running the networks to which these computers are connected should be able to suspend service to these computers. This is another point at which the justice committee should look. I hope all members will support sending the bill to committee.

[Mark Warawa, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of the Environment]

Mr. Speaker, it is indeed a pleasure to be here today speaking on Bill C-22 and also to be here with my colleagues.

My hope is that we have support in this House from every party. I know that Conservative members of Parliament strongly support this legislation. It is the right thing to do for the protection of our children. It is a new and important piece of legislation.

I do not think there is anyone in this House who would disagree with me that the development of the Internet and the World Wide Web has been incredibly positive for Canadians. It is a wonderful tool. However, as with most things that are good for us, there is a potential for abuse, and this is also true with these new and evolving technologies.

While the Internet has provided us with new and easier ways of doing many things, it has also provided new and easier means for offenders to make, view, and distribute child pornography. This has resulted in a significant increase in the availability and volume of child pornography.

The Internet has contributed to the massive growth of the child pornography industry, which is deemed to be worth more than $1 billion worldwide. It is estimated that there are over five million different child sexual abuse images on the Internet.

According to the recent report called, “Every image, every child” released by the federal ombudsman for victims of crime, there are over 750,000 pedophiles online at any given time. Tens of thousands of new images or videos are put on the Internet every week, and hundreds of thousands of searches for child sexual abuse images are performed daily.

The continued advancement of Internet technologies makes these crimes not only easier to commit, but also harder to investigate. There is an increasing burden on law enforcement to stay abreast of the changing technologies in order to to effectively investigate the crimes.

Child pornography is a particularly serious form of child victimization. Not only are the children abused and exploited through the making of child pornography; they are further exploited each time these images are shared or viewed.

To refer again to the “Every image, every child” report, I was shocked to learn that between 2003 and 2007 the number of online images of serious child abuse increased fourfold, and that these images became more violent and featured younger and younger children. It is disgusting.

According to the federal ombudsman's special report, 39% of individuals who accessed child pornography were viewing images of children between the ages of three and five, and 19% were viewing images of infants under the age of three. These statistics are nothing short of tragic. I am confident that most Canadians are just as appalled as I am, as each of us are, at this information.

Our government is committed to ending the growing problem of sexual exploitation of children. As part of these efforts the Minister of Justice, of whom I am so proud, reintroduced Bill C-22 in this House. Today we also have the chair of the justice committee in the House, the member for Abbotsford. I want to thank him for being here.

The main goal of this legislation is to help Canadian law enforcement officials detect potential child pornography offences on the Internet. Bill C-22 proposes, in precisely the same manner as Bill C-58 did in the last session of Parliament, that the law require those who provide Internet services to the public to do two things.

First, it will require them to report any information or tips they receive regarding websites where child pornography may be available to the public. They will be required to make this report to a designated agency. Second, it will require them to notify the police and safeguard any evidence, if they believe that a child pornography offence has been committed on their Internet service.

Failure to comply with these reporting duties would, in the case of an individual, a sole proprietorship, constitute an offence punishable by graduated fines up to $1,000 for the first offence, $5,000 for the second offence, and $10,000, six months in prison, or both, for the third offence and subsequent offences. In the case of a corporation, the graduated fine would start at $10,000 maximum, increase to $50,000 on the second conviction, and to $100,000 on third and subsequent convictions.

The duties imposed by this bill, in addition to helping reduce the availability of online child pornography, would facilitate the identification and rescue of victims of child pornography and assist law enforcement in identifying the offenders who create, possess, and distribute child pornography.

I would like to make it clear that this legislation was carefully tailored so as to achieve its objectives while minimizing the impact on the privacy of Canadians. Suppliers of Internet services would not be required to send personal subscriber information under this statute. The legislation is also tailored to limit access to child pornography and avoid creating new consumers of this material. Hence, nothing in this legislation would require or authorize a person to seek out child pornography.

Before I proceed further, I would like to explain to the House who is covered by this legislation. I am sure most members are familiar with the term “Internet service provider”, or ISP. An ISP provides access to the Internet. In essence, it acts as an on-ramp to the Internet. That is the service it provides. An ISP is one example of a provider of Internet services, but the term is broader than that. A provider of Internet services refers to all those who provide an Internet service to the public, including things like electronic mail services such as webmail, Internet content hosting services, and social network sites.

This bill is an example of Canada's commitment to fighting the scourge of child pornography and protecting children from online sexual exploitation. However, the Internet is a complex instrument. We all know that. Our knowledge and understanding of the full impact of the Internet in facilitating the demand for, and distribution of, child pornography is still evolving. The Internet presents a real challenge to the prevention and policing of this material due in part to the relative anonymity of the parties and instant worldwide access by millions of people.

I would be remiss if I did not take this opportunity to recognize the great efforts already made by Canada's major ISPs to address the challenge of online child sexual exploitation. Most ISPs have adopted acceptable use policies, which outline the rules for using an Internet account, the conditions of access privileges, and the consequences of violating these rules and conditions. These polices allow the ISP to terminate accounts in the event of unacceptable online behaviour, and we thank them for that.

I would also like to mention that the Canadian Association of Internet Providers has helped to develop standards for the industry, including an ISP code of conduct, to which many Canadian ISPs adhere. We thank the association for that.

A further initiative that bears mentioning is the Canadian Coalition Against Internet Child Exploitation, which was created in 2003 by some Canadian ISPs and police agencies. The main objective of this body is to assist law enforcement officials in their efforts to address online child pornography.

I would like to speak specifically about one important initiative that has developed from this collaboration between the ISPs and the police. It is called Project Cleanfeed Canada and it aims to reduce accidental access to child sexual abuse images, as well as to discourage those trying to access or distribute child pornography.

To achieve this goal, Cybertip.ca, which is the national tip line for reporting online child sexual exploitation, creates and maintains a regularly updated list of foreign-hosted Internet service providers associated with images of child sex abuse and provides that list to the participating ISPs. The ISP's filters automatically prevent access to addresses on the list by blocking these addresses.

Most of Canada's major ISPs participate in Cleanfeed Canada, which results in 90% of Canadian Internet subscribers being protected. There are continuing efforts to reach the remaining 10% of Canadians.

I am confident that Bill C-22 will be a complement to these existing efforts, especially Cleanfeed Canada, by requiring that all providers of Internet services report child pornography websites, which can then be added to the Cleanfeed Canada list.

Bill C-22 will also ensure that all providers of Internet services to the public will be held to the same standard of reporting when it comes to online Internet child sexual exploitation. Some may criticize this initiative as having a limited impact on the business practices of providers of Internet services, who already voluntarily report cases of online child pornography, and in fact, it is true that Bill C-22 was drafted in a way that closely mirrors the current practices of Canada's ISPs. However, I would like to reiterate that this legislation applies more broadly and covers more than just the typical ISP. It applies to all providers of Internet services and its impact will be much broader.

I recognize, and I am sure our colleagues do too, that more is needed to combat this disgusting social ill than just strong criminal laws. The government is committed to a broader approach that is effected to protect our children. That is why, in 2008, our government announced a renewed commitment to work with our partners through the national strategy for the protection of children from sexual exploitation on the Internet. This is a successful initiative that has played a very big role over the last few years in helping to make sure that the growing number of young people online stay safe and that we take action to crack down on the sexual predators.

The Government of Canada is investing $71 million over five years to help ensure that the national strategy remains the success that it is today. With these great investments, our government is further strengthening our ability to combat child sexual exploitation over the Internet through the work of the National Child Exploitation Coordination Centre, which works to reduce the vulnerability of children to Internet-facilitated sexual exploitation by identifying victimized children, by investigating and assisting with the prosecution of sexual offenders, and by strengthening the capacity of municipal, territorial, provincial, federal and international police agencies.

We are also further strengthening the ability of the Canadian Centre for Child Protection to help young people stay safe online through initiatives such as Cybertip.ca, which, as I mentioned earlier, allows the public to report suspected cases of child sexual exploitation they may find online.

Currently, most reporting of child pornography across Canada is done voluntarily. The vast majority of tips come through Cybertip.ca, a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week anonymous tip line for reporting of child sexual exploitation on the Internet. Cybertip.ca provides a valuable function for law enforcement across Canada by screening, prioritizing, and analyzing each and every one of the 700 reports it receives every month. The skilled analysts collect supporting information using various Internet tools and techniques, and if the material is assessed to be potentially illegal, a report is made to the appropriate police services.

By providing this service of reports and forwarding only the most relevant information to the police agencies, Cybertip.ca saves valuable police time and resources. This allows police to devote their time and efforts to actual investigations rather than to the time-consuming tasks of analyzing all the incoming reports of child pornography.

Cybertip.ca collaborates closely with many of the Canadian ISPs and international partners and it has a memorandum of understanding with most Canadian law enforcement agencies.

As part of the mandate of Cybertip.ca, it also collects statistics regarding online child pornography in Canada. Each month, Cybertip.ca receives 800,000 hits on its website and 700 reports of suspected child abuse images. Between 2002 and 2009, Cybertip.ca had triaged over 33,000 reports, and approximately 45% of those reports were forwarded to law enforcement. It is very effective.

The material that is deemed not to be illegal is often followed up with educational information. Ninety per cent of the reports received by Cybertip.ca relate to child pornography.

As a result of these efforts, at least 30 arrests have been made, approximately 3,000 websites have been shut down, and most important, several children have been removed from abusive environments.

The work of Cybertip.ca is being bolstered by recent efforts of some provincial and territorial governments. We are thankful for that. The Province of Manitoba enacted legislation on mandatory reporting of child pornography in April 2009. Under this law, all members of the public are required to report suspected cases of child pornography to Cybertip.ca. Ontario has enacted similar legislation, but it is not yet in force. Nova Scotia's mandatory reporting legislation came into force just a few months ago, on April 13 of this year. I would like to extend my congratulations to them and to Cybertip.ca for their efforts in this regard.

This government is committed to protecting our children. I hope my fellow members in the House understand just how important this legislation is. I urge every member to support this legislation as we work together to protect our future, which is our children.

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

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to continue debate on what is now Bill C-22. I think this may be my last speech for a while, so all members can relax.

This is also a very important bill. Once again, it has been five years plus that we have been waiting for this bill, now titled Bill C-22. It was called Bill C-58 before the government prorogued the House. It is the child protection act online sexual exploitation.

There are some important points here that the members should know about this bill even though it has been knocking around now for five years and many speeches have been made about it. It is one of these bills where there really is not a lot of disagreement on the subject.

I personally am not really sure how it is going to play out. The reality is once we send it to committee, which should be fairly soon, and once the committee hearings are proceeded with, I really do not foresee many amendments to this bill and I do not foresee a lot of controversy with this bill. If anything, we may find that this bill is, in some respects, already out of date because it has been five years since we started discussing about it.

It is an act respecting the mandatory reporting of Internet child pornography by persons who provide an Internet service. Basically, an ISP is now going to be required to take action on this issue.

Bill C-58 was introduced in the House of Commons on November 24, 2009 by the Minister of Justice. Bill C-58, now Bill C-22, was intended to fight Internet child pornography by requiring ISPs, or Internet service providers, and other persons providing Internet services, for example, Facebook, Google, Hotmail, to report any incident of child pornography.

This requirement included several things, but one was that if a person providing Internet services was advised of an Internet address where child pornography may be available, the person must report that address to the organization designated by the regulations.

I know the member for Mississauga South is bound to ask me a question about the whole issue of the regulations. Once again, until the bill passes, the government sets up the regulations, and we actually will not know what the details will be of this particular part.

Also, if a person has reasonable grounds to believe that the Internet services operated by that person are being used to transmit child pornography, the person must notify the police, that is a logical thing, and also preserve the computer data.

In terms of provincial and international measures, in June 2008, my home province, the Manitoba Legislature passed a law requiring all persons to report to cybertip.ca, which seems to be a very successful longstanding website, any material that could constitute child pornography.

Ontario passed a similar law in December 2008.

Thank goodness Ontario and Manitoba moved ahead because if they waited for the federal government, they would have been waiting an awful long time to get the job done.

The United States and Australia adopted laws in 2002, eight years ago, and in 2005, Australia imposed this requirement on the ISPs.

In terms of the current legislation that affects this area, we have section 163.1 of the Criminal Code, which was passed under the Liberal government of Jean Chrétien back in 1993. This was actually a very good initiative in its day, prohibiting the production, the distribution, the sale, and the possession of child pornography.

The definition under the legislation is a visual representation of explicit sexual activity with a person who is or is depicted as being under the age of 18, the visual representation for sexual purposes of persons under the age 18, or any written material advocating or counselling sexual activity with a person under the age of 18.

Internet child pornography takes the form of images, sound recordings, videos, drawings of accounts of sexual assaults on persons under the age of 18. In 2002, Bill C-15A amended subsection 163.1 of the code, which prohibited the distribution of child pornography by introducing the term “transmits” and made available to prohibit the distribution of child pornography online. The bill also added subsections 163.1 and 163.1 (4.2) to the code making it an offence to deliberately access child pornography by visiting a website, as an example.

Bill C-15A also provided for a special warrant in relation to Internet child pornography under section 164.1 of the code. If there are reasonable grounds to believe that child pornography is accessible through an ISP computer system, the judge may order the ISP to provide the necessary information to identify and locate the person who posted it. In addition, the judge may order the ISP to remove the Internet child pornography in question.

With regard sentencing, child pornography offences are considered hybrid offences. The prosecutor may choose whether the accused should be charged with an indictable offence and be liable to a summary conviction. The offences of producing, distributing and selling of child pornography, if treated as indictable offences, are punishable by a maximum prison term of 10 years and a minimum of one year. On summary conviction, they are punishable by a maximum prison term of 18 months and a minimum term of 90 days.

The offences of possession and viewing of child pornography on the computer are punishable for indictable offences by a maximum prison term of five years and a minimum term of 45 days and on a summary conviction by a maximum term of 18 months and a minimum of 14 days.

In terms of statistics on this issue, according to Statistics Canada, which gathers all types of information on pornography and not just Internet child pornography alone, child pornography offences have increased significantly in Canada from 55 offences in 1998 to 1,600 in 2007. I have some statistics that indicate how serious the issue is in Canada, which I will get to in a couple of minutes.

It is currently estimated that there are over five million child sexual abuse images on the Internet. According to an analysis by cybertip.ca, from 2002 to 2009 54.7% of the images on Internet sites contained pornographic images of children under the age of 8, 24.7% were of children aged 8 to 12, and 83% were girls. Over 35% of the images analyzed showed severe sexual assault. Children under the age of eight most often subjected to sexual assault was at 37.2% and extreme sexual assault was at 68.5%. Older children were usually shown naked or in an obscene pose.

The fact of the matter is that this situation is just getting worse. We are seeing this whole problem snowballing and getting bigger on a day-by-day, month-by-month, year-by-year basis while we sit here and do not take action.

The cybertip.ca study showed that the Internet sites containing child pornography are hosted in close to 60 countries. We know which countries are hosting these sites. For example, in the United States 49% of the sites are hosted in the United States, in Russia 20%, in Canada 9%. When we consider that we have only 30 million people in the country and 9% of the sites are hosted in Canada, that is a very large percentage. In Japan it is 4.3% and in South Korea it is 3.6%.

These sites are very difficult to track down because all of the child pornography files hosted on a web page are not necessarily hosted in the same location. For instance, image A may be hosted in Canada while image B on the same web page may be hosted in the United States. The web page itself might be hosted in yet another country such as Japan.

Similarly, an illegal site can hide the host location through an anonymous proxy server or through server rerouting. There are a lot of technical terms here that the average individual may not be familiar with. Suffice to say that whatever laws exist, the criminal elements, and we are talking about criminal elements, try to be one step ahead. When there are tough laws in one country, they simply move to another country.

The Liberal Party critic for this area has spoken several times on this bill. He has pointed out countries that have simply blocked the sites rather than put money into fighting this problem. Maybe that is the answer.

I asked the minister at the time, who is no longer even a member of the Conservative caucus, why she was announcing that she was going to spend $42 million chasing these sites. I asked her whether this was new money or old money. That was a year ago. She was still a Conservative and a minister in those days.

In Hansard she tells me that she is going to get back to me on this issue. I have yet to hear from her or anybody else in the government as to whether the $42 million to track down these sites is actually new money or just the same old money being announced over and over again.

What I suggest is that rather than spend $42 million to chase these criminals, because that is who they are, we look at those countries that have simply blocked the sites. That is the problem solved right there, it seems to me. We would not have to keep throwing endless amounts of money at the problem.

Identical sites may also be simultaneously located on different URLs. In such cases, it can be very difficult to remove the child pornography. Even if the site is closed down, the offensive material may still be accessible on the Internet. Moreover, illegal sites regularly change location so that they can avoid being shut down.

I want to deal with the penalties under this act before I run out of time. The fact is that these penalties are not tough enough. For individuals, the penalties being proposed are perhaps accurate. However, when we start dealing with companies, and if one considers that criminal groups are running these sites, these fines are simply the cost of doing business. I think the fine for a third offence is approximately $100,000. I will get to that at the end if I have time.

As I indicated, illegal sites regularly change location to avoid being shut down. In a period of 48 hours, Cybertip.ca counted 212 IP addresses in 16 countries for a single website. A website can also change location in just a few minutes by utilizing a network of personal computers as zombies. These zombies relay the content of the website hosted on another server.

Cybertip.ca recommended that when zombies are detected, ISPs running the networks to which these computers are connected should be able to suspend service for those computers until the infected computers are restored.

Another reason this whole problem is snowballing day by day, week by week, month by month, year by year into a bigger and bigger problem is the fact that the computer hardware and software has gotten so much better.

I can recall, perhaps 10 years ago, when the Rolling Stones announced that they were going to do the very first concert on the web. Nobody had done it before. That was in the days when the cameras were operating at 15 frames per second. We all remember those images being choppy. It was certainly in its infancy. The Internet was very slow in those days. We did not have the gigabit ethernet pipes we have today.

What has happened is that today we have a much more technologically advanced system that is designed perfectly for these criminal elements to take advantage of. Taking advantage of it they are.

Governments are sitting around, basically proroguing Parliament every year. We are thrown a bill that is really non-controversial in the sense that just about everyone agrees with the bill.

We passed pardon legislation dealing with the Karla Homolka situation in June in literally a day and a half. If the government really wants to accomplish something here and get the bill through, it only has to sit down with the House leaders and make an arrangement to sit for perhaps a few hours extra in the evening, given that there is not a lot of disagreement about how important the bill is and how it should be passed and put into effect to deal with the issues.

Any person may inform an ISP or other person providing Internet services that a web page, host page, Facebook page, or e-mail appears to contain child pornography. The ISP or other person providing Internet services must then report the address of the site, page or e-mail in question as soon as possible to an organization designated by the federal government.

For example, under Manitoba law, the designated organization is the national reporting agency Cybertip.ca. I want to say that Cybertip.ca has played a very important role in this whole process so far.

After being notified by a member of the public or an agency that child pornography may appear through the Internet services it provides, the ISP or other person providing the Internet services may have reasonable grounds to believe that child pornography is being transmitted through its services. It may also reach this conclusion on its own. When this is the case, the ISP or person providing the Internet services must notify the police as soon as possible.

I am running out of time, but I want to deal with a couple of other issues. There is a provision in the bill that the police must keep the computer data related to the child pornography offence for 21 days. Several people have questioned whether 21 days is appropriate. It seems not only to me but to a number of other people that 21 days may be too short a period for that to properly happen.

I also dealt with the offences. In terms of individuals, the fine is $1,000 for the first offence, $5,000 for a second and a maximum of $10,000 or six months for a third.

For corporations, the criminals who are running these sites, it is only $10,000 for the first offence, $50,000 for a second and $100,000 for a third, which is no more than the cost of doing business.

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

Mr. Speaker, Bill C-22, An Act respecting the mandatory reporting of Internet child pornography by persons who provide an Internet service, or the protecting children from online sexual exploitation act, brings back to life a bill that was killed in the last session when the government prorogued Parliament. It may be a tired line to hear from me or from members over here but the fact is that the former bill, Bill C-58, An Act respecting the mandatory reporting of Internet child pornography by persons who provide an Internet service, received first reading on May 6.

In short, the bill would make reporting child sexual abuse images mandatory for all Canadians, including Internet service providers, or ISPs. The tragedy here, of course, is that every day that goes by, more of these offences take place. It is a scourge on our society and we probably could have done something earlier but the P word stood in front of that. There was prorogation and the bill was not passed.

As the parliamentary secretary noted yesterday, government has an obligation to protect the weak and vulnerable in society, particularly our children. Debate on this bill is long overdue and I am honoured to speak in support of legislation that seeks to defend the rights of children in Canada and around the world.

While this bill is technical in nature, its purpose is a moral and praiseworthy one that ought to have been adopted long ago. At committee, I know this bill will be examined closely before any final decisions are made, such that this House can ensure Canada no longer lags in its responsibilities to protect our children from sexual exploitation.

I have a number of statistics that I will get into at the finish of my speech but the preface for them is this. Canada does not lead in the prevention of child Internet pornography or sexual exploitation.

I would like to express, though, how troubled I am that it has taken the government so long to do something about this important topic. It has been almost four and a half years that it has been the government and legislation to update criminal laws so that they better reflect the modern technologies and modern conveyance of information, as bad as this is, has not been brought forward by the government in a timely fashion.

The victims of these crimes cannot wait and the government's tactics have deprived many children the free and happy lives they deserve. Many of us have children and many of us provide the best we can for them and think that we are providing for them a free and happy life. Sometimes I say to my children that they have too free and happy a life, but let us be clear. There are many children who are in captivity. Their freedom has been taken away and they do not live free and happy lives whatsoever. They are children who have been exploited and continue to be exploited every day.

To begin, I want to discuss the current legislation governing child pornography. There are sections in the Criminal Code that exist, particularly in 1993 when the Liberal government introduced section 163.1 of the Criminal Code which prohibited the production, distribution, sale and possession of child pornography.

Let us all think back to 1993 when we did not have Blackberrys, our portable computers were probably the size of this podium and technology was certainly not as advanced as it is today. Therefore, the act, while it was good at the time, is woefully inadequate. It described child pornography as:

the visual representation of explicit sexual activity with a person who is or who is depicted as being under the age of 18;

the visual representation, for sexual purposes, of persons under the age of 18; or

any written material advocating or counselling sexual activity with a person under the age of 18.

That was all very good to have been introduced in 1993.

Canadians have a clear understanding of the illegality that is child pornography. At present, it is a criminal offence if one makes available distribution of child pornography, as I just defined, online. This is very straightforward and Canada continues to condemn the production and accessibility of online material depicting the sexual exploitation of children.

If society stopped there, if modern technology stopped there, if it were just a matter of stopping the production of child pornography and distribution of it online, I suppose we would be doing our job. Maybe there are some members who have been here since 1993 and remember, probably with some pride, that that was adequate at the time.

Under our present laws, if there are reasonable grounds to believe that child pornography is accessible through an Internet service provider, a judge may order the provider to supply the information to aid in locating and identifying the person who posted it. Judges may also order the removal of the child pornography if its source can be identified.

These laws are both valuable and necessary, though, as I will highlight later, further action is needed on the part of the government. Right now, in cases involving the online sexual exploitation of children, a prosecutor may choose whether the accused should be charged with a serious indictable offence or be liable for the less serious summary conviction offence. Cases of this nature ending in indictable offences are punishable for up to 10 years in prison. They are very serious. Summary convictions are currently punishable up to 18 months.

Let us be clear that viewing or possessing child pornography is punishable as well. Distributing child pornography online is as illegal as viewing it and this is a punishable offence. A maximum five-year sentence exists for indictable offences, while a maximum of 18 months remains for summary convictions.

Needless to say, Canadians are well aware of the horrible continuation of child pornography around the world and they want to bring it to an end. They do not want Canada to be laggards. They do not want Canada to be behind. They want Canada to be ahead on this issue but we are not. Canada's current legislation clearly hands down harsh consequences for those who break the law regarding the online sexual exploitation of children but more must be done to prevent these awful crimes.

As I briefly mentioned, Bill C-22 would implement rules that would require Internet service providers to report images of child sexual abuse. This measure is a welcome change if Canada is to directly combat the rise in Internet pornography exploiting children. The legislation reads:

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 is calling on the public, third parties and people on the outside to notify the ISP that they have knowledge of child pornography on sites. Think of the ISP as the carriage or the distribution conduit for child Internet pornography. This is a good thing because I do not know if there is any one agency or one government in the whole world that can adequately survey, police, patrol or keep watch on everything that is happening on the Internet with respect to child Internet pornography or sexual exploitation.

Members of the public, third parties and the many interested groups across the country that are mobilized on this issue will be given the opportunity to report them to the ISPs, and now, because of this legislation, the ISP would have the duty to report.

I also want to highlight a couple of the clauses that are interesting and important in this bill. Clause 3 reads:

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 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.

Clause 4 reads:

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—

This is the addition. One would think that the notice would be given to a police officer. That is how the Criminal Code has been written for centuries. However, this act, written by the Department of Justice, continues on to read:

—for the preservation and maintenance of the public peace of that fact, as soon as feasible and in accordance with the regulations.

It widens the scope to whom the reporting can be done. In a clever way, it widens the scope of who can report and it narrows the scope of who is responsible, that is the ISP, and broadens the scope as to who should be informed.

We expect that persons employed for the preservation and maintenance of the public peace could include people under the municipalities act for bylaw enforcement. This could, under the person power of the municipalities act across this country, perhaps in an uninvaded territory and constitutional talk, give municipalities or regents the power to be firmer on issues of Internet child pornography distribution.

Clause 5 talks about a person who makes a notification under the previous clause must preserve all the data. Everybody knows that in a court of law we need to have the evidence. It is not good enough just to have a whole bunch of people watching or make the ISP basically liable to report and having the report done to a wider audience or a wider array of public police officers. The person reporting must also preserve the evidence, the electronic data, because without that there cannot be any convictions.

Clause 7 reads:

Nothing in this Act requires or authorizes a person to seek out child pornography.

In other words, the act stops in making ISPs or anybody under this act a peace officer for the purpose of investigating or going further than what is on the ISP or the URL.

Clauses 8 and 10 talk about some civil liability and some limits of liability that a civil proceeding cannot be commenced against a person for making a report in good faith, under clause 3. This goes to libel, defamation and slander.

We can see a good-natured citizen making a report of a site that is questionable. It is reported by the ISP to a peace officer but there is no conviction. However, during the course of this, maybe it leaks to the public that this is being done and it might harm someone's reputation. So, we can see a litigation chill effect that if this clause, the whole harmless clause, were not in this act maybe it would clamp down on the reporting, which would be against the purpose of the act.

In September 2008, federal and provincial ministers of justice and attorneys general, those responsible for justice in Canada, agreed that the federal legislation to establish mandatory reporting of online child pornography by Internet service providers was necessary. So, this has come from a long line of meetings with comparable justice ministers and attorneys general. It is a good step but one wonders why it was not done earlier.

We now have this legislation before the House that would apply to suppliers of the Internet to the public, those that provide electronic mail services, Internet hosting services and operators of social networking sites. There may be some concerns that the net is too wide but let us take it to committee and examine that and call in the Privacy Commissioner. Let us bring the major Internet service providers into the House of Commons committees and explain why it is not their job to report incidents of the production or the distribution of child Internet pornography. Why do we not do that? Why have we not done it sooner?

As I have demonstrated in the duties implied in Bill C-22, the legislation would require groups to report tips they receive regarding where child pornography may be available and notify police and safeguard evidence that is involved with the offence itself.

Those providers who do not comply, this is the penalty aspect, would be faced with offences of graduated fines. For individuals, the maximum first fine would be $1,000; for the second offence it would be $5,000; and for subsequent offences it would be $10,000. We must remember that these are for the reporting agencies. They are quasi-criminal, they are fines, they are structured very much like environmental offences and they are a good start.

I think at committee I might push for some criminal negligence provisions that might strengthen this act to make it even more deleterious for companies and their directors who knowingly and repeatedly fail to comply with the law, which I think is fairly reasonable.

As I stated when I first stood on this issue, child exploitation is a scourge on our community and action is long overdue. The delays because of prorogation and the delays because of other quasi-justice issues being put in the storefront first are inexcusable.

I will say, however, that all the proposed changes that I have just covered in detail, while unexamined yet by the committee, certainly appear to ensure the future safety of children and aim to eliminate the online sexual exploitation of minors. Evidence is clear that action on the part of the federal government is essential to address growing sexual exploitation of children.

The government has touted its whole law and order agenda, but it has taken four and a half years to get to this most egregious part of criminal activity, and one area of criminal activity that has seen an exponential growth and therefore an exponential increase in the harm to the community. The time to act is now.

In June 2008, waiting for federal direction and leadership, provinces took the lead. Manitoba, for instance, passed a law requiring all persons to report to Cybertip.ca any material that could constitute child pornography. Ontario has now followed Manitoba, waiting for the federal government to catch up by passing a similar law. In 2002 the United States adopted laws imposing reporting requirements on ISPs. In 2005 Australia passed laws for the same element. So, 2002, 2005, Manitoba and Ontario; we are not leading here in Parliament. The government is not leading on this issue; we are following. Taking action is evidently the right thing to do.

I would like to share some statistics with the House that convey the utter urgency with which we must protect our children from online sexual exploitation. Statistics Canada in reporting on child pornography said that clearly it is an increasing problem. There were 55 offences in 1998 and 10 years later, the number is 1,408; 55 offences as compared to 1,408.

Estimates from the federal ombudsman for the victims of crime, when we had one, would indicate there are over five million child sexual abuse images on the Internet. This is inexcusable for a country that is wealthy, inexcusable for a country that pretends to care about the rights of children, inexcusable for a government and a country that is a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

The crimes continue. Between 2002 and 2009, the aforementioned Cybertip.ca.ca analyzed that 57.4% of child pornography images were that of children eight years and under. Eighty-three per cent of the images were of girls. Thirty-five per cent of the images depicted severe sexual assault being inflicted on children.

The Internet, as I said before, is a difficult domain to govern; it is probably impossible, but we must make better efforts. Child pornography sites are hosted in roughly 60 countries, and the rankings are alarming.

We all have an idea how big Canada is in the world. We are a small country in population.

The country hosting the most child pornography sites is the United States, again a wealthy, northern, industrialized country that would seem, by all its political rhetoric, to care about its children. The United States hosts 49% of these websites. Forty-nine per cent of the world's child pornography sites are in the United States. Second is Russia with 20%. Remember that the United States is a very large country and a very wealthy country. Russia is a very large country.

Where would we expect Canada to sit in terms of its population, in the small ranking, let us pray? No. Canada hosts 9% of the child pornography sites in the world, and that is not a good statistic. That is why we have to pass this law. That is why it ought to have been passed sooner.

It is why the government has to do more about clamping down on Internet child pornography. It is a crime we all agree should be clamped down on. It is a crime about which we realize the government should do more. It is a crime that has so far been untended to by the communications industry, which is why I said all parties should be amenable to having all the ISPs, all the big names, say them, Google and others, in here. They should be defending why they have not done anything sooner, why they have not, on their own, cut back on their inherent knowledge, their implied knowledge, of the existence of child pornography Internet sites.

The figures are all from the Canadian Centre for Child Protection. Anybody who doubts the urgency of the issue should understand Canada must act immediately.

It is very difficult to determine where the images and websites are hosted, but they can be supported from different locations in the world. As such, oftentimes each photo and each site must be individually tracked, something highly difficult to achieve. Bill C-22 goes somewhere toward that, but more work must be done.

For one website depicting the sexual exploitation of children, Cybertip.ca.ca tracked it for 48 hours and the site went through 212 different Internet addresses in 16 countries. That was in two days. ISPs running the networks to which these computers are connected should be able to suspend service to those computers.

We need legislation to do that. That is not in this legislation. That is not even a justice issue. That is an issue on which the government with its various departments and ministers responsible should be concentrating.

In conclusion, it is important to note that the bill does not require anyone to seek out child pornography in an attempt to shut it down, although if an Internet service provider becomes aware and notifies the police that one exists, the provider will not be subject to civil proceedings, as I mentioned earlier.

Child sexual exploitation is one of the top three concerns regarding children and society. We must support this bill, but we must do more.

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

Speak slowly. Is that the advice? I will slow down my speech.

The Conservatives are really strong on deterrence. That for them means punishment. It means beating people into submission by incarcerating them for life. I am sure that the majority of the Conservative caucus members, if they had the ability to do it, would bring back the death penalty as well, because they think of deterrence that way.

The approach in this bill is a much more effective deterrent. It is a deterrent to organized crime. Deterrence rarely works, certainly not in crimes of passion or in crimes to our youth. Deterrence just does not work. There is no evidence to the contrary. All of the evidence we have shows that deterrence does not work in those circumstances. However, making an effective tool available to our police so that they can get to the purveyors of child pornography is a very effective deterrence tool.

I do not think that the Conservatives have the ability to comprehend this fact, but every study we have ever done, and I learned this in law school and repeatedly in my professional practice as a lawyer, shows that we deter crime by convincing those people in our society who contemplate committing a crime that they will be caught. This bill is an effective tool in sending the message that if people put this stuff on networks across the globe, we are going to catch them, and we will deal with them under the rest of the sections in the Criminal Code. This bill is an effective tool from that perspective.

We are supportive of this legislation. However, I think that the government threw it together rapidly, when it was Bill C-58.

I have asked some of these questions before, but I have not received satisfactory answers.

The bill definitely needs to go to committee so that we can take a look at it and have some people in from the industry, the Department of Justice, and the police to tell us whether in some respects it goes far enough. There may be some overreach, but in this case, as opposed to most crime bills we get from the government, it may not go far enough.

I ask people to look in particular at the penalties. A constant problem we have with the government is that it does not trust our judiciary. If convicted of not reporting, the maximum fine on the first offence, for individuals, is $1,000. I believe that the fine is $10,000 for corporations. These are very small amounts of money, given the individuals and the kind of revenue they generate from their operations. That is all the judge can impose. That is the maximum fine a judge can impose.

The situation that immediately jumped to my mind, and I am not sure why the government did not catch this, was this: What if over several months or several years there has been a whole series of reports to a company about child pornography on its system, and the company has not reported it? What is going to happen in the courts is that the company is going to be convicted for all of them all at once. The maximum fine in that situation would be $1,000. The individual who may have breached his or her responsibility under this bill one time would also be exposed to the maximum fine.

What this comes down to is that the government does not trust judges to look at that situation and say that this was one time on the part of this company, but on the part of that company, it was the 10th, 15th or 20th time people complained and pointed out that child pornography was on the network it controlled, and it had not reported it. That company would also get that $1,000 fine or that $10,000 fine.

Clearly, it is not a proper approach. If it were left to the judiciary, they could assess the situation once the convictions had been entered and could determine whether there would be a much more substantial fine for a company that continually breached its responsibility under the legislation as opposed to the individual or company that did it only once. That is one problem with the bill.

A couple of other provisions give me cause for concern. There is a provision in the bill that requires the individual or company that has the material to keep it for a maximum of 21 days. Knowing the workload we have imposed upon our police and prosecutors, that period of time seems tremendously short. The only way they can be required to keep it for more than 21 days is if the prosecutor goes to court to get a judicial order requiring them to keep it until further order. That process would require our police and prosecutors, in fewer than 21 days, to get the material together and get a court date. It is a very short period of time for them to function properly and make sure that the material or data is kept so that an effective prosecution can be pursued.

I do not know where they came up with 21 days. It seems to be totally out of keeping with the practicalities our police and prosecutors face in doing their jobs. I believe that we will have to take a look at that. As I say, they have not been flexible enough to look at this situation and say that this is just not adequate. I do not know whether they consulted with police and prosecutors. However, I think that anybody I would have talked to would have said that it is simply not a long enough period of time for the data to be held.

I just want to cover one more point, and that is the issue that in the past has caused companies and individuals not to co-operate. Some provisions in here, in several sections, deal with the right of corporations and individuals who identify this material, this child pornography, to report it without being sued. I have to say that I am questioning whether these provisions are adequate.

There are three provisions in clauses 8, 9, and 10 that in my mind raise doubts as to whether the bill goes far enough to protect them. These are individuals or corporations that are being responsible. They are reporting. However, they may step back and ask if they are going to be sued. Are they going to hesitate? It is very important that they do that reporting as soon as they possibly can so that an investigation can be carried out. The material can be saved, but taken off the Internet, and the police can be given the opportunity to chase back through that whole network system, which oftentimes includes a large number of providers.

We have heard from the police that they have had cases when they went through 25 to 50 service providers before they found the source. That is, of course, where we want to go. The sources, with very few exceptions, are international sources. They are not Canadian sources. It is very important that once they have the information, the service providers provide it. What we have to do is be very clear with them that they have absolute immunity from civil suits or prosecution under other legislation if they provide the material in a timely fashion.

We have to look at that. When it goes to committee, it will be one of the areas we look at.