Bill C-22 (Historical)

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

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

Protecting Children from Online Sexual Exploitation Act

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

Mr. Speaker, the minister has announced that she will be putting $42 million more toward police efforts to essentially play cat and mouse with a bunch of criminals who will simply move to a different jurisdiction.

The question has been raised as to whether or not the government has looked at best practices in other jurisdictions. For example, Sweden evidently just simply blocks pornography sites, as does Germany. Other countries have other types of rules.

If we have that as an option, if we can simply block it, why do we not just stop torturing ourselves and spending all sorts of taxpayers' money chasing these people, when the odds are against our catching them in the first place because they move between sites and between countries. Why would we not simply block the sites if that option is available?

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

Mr. Speaker, it is a very good question. I cannot say that it came up much in the discussion on this bill. On a prior bill, again dealing with child luring over the Internet, in particular, there was discussion of that.

The only answer that I have had of any merit, and I do not want to sound as if I am defending the government's position, was again the problem of identifying the sites. We obviously cannot block them unless we know where they are. So, this bill would move forward on that. I would hope, based on all of the indications we have and what is happening in countries like Sweden, that we would move to that.

In that regard, I would like to just take another minute. I did a lot of work on public safety for a period of time. Within our CSE agency, we have some very advanced technology. If this were shared with our police forces, we would be able to do this blocking as effectively as any government that I have been able to identify, including the United States. We have technology, sort of in our spy agencies, that is as effective as any. The Chinese may be ahead of us on this because they are doing a great deal of blocking in China right now. However, we have the technology in Canada and we can do the blocking.

As I said, though, we would have to make that available, from our spy agencies and those services, to our regular police forces.

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

Mr. Speaker, my second question deals with the issue of offences.

For example, in the case of individuals, we are talking about $1,000 for a first offence, $5,000 for a second offence and a maximum of $10,000 or six months for a third offence. For corporations, we are talking about $10,000 for the first offence, $50,000 for the second offence and $100,000 for the third offence.

I would expect that at the end of the day, if we strip away the veils, we would find that these pornographic sites are largely owned and run by criminal enterprises. I wonder whether or not these fines would be high enough, because they could be seen by criminal organizations as nothing more than the cost of doing business. They do not seem high enough to stop people who are making millions of dollars on these types of sites.

I would like to ask the member what he personally thinks about that. I recognize that we can always increase them in the future if, after a certain period of time, we find out that they are not high enough. However, it just seemed to me at the beginning that, if we are dealing with organized crime, perhaps these would not be high enough penalities here.

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

Mr. Speaker, I think we have to be careful in recognizing who those fines would be applied against, because we have other laws that can do that. They would not be applied against people who are producing the child pornography. They are obviously the ones we want to get at.

These fines would apply to individuals or companies who are service providers who have not co-operated and have not submitted, in effect, to the requirements of this legislation.

This goes back to the point I made earlier about my concern over the limit of two years. If we have a large corporation that provides a large amount of the service in this country that consistently has not complied with the legislation and we identify that, we could find ourselves only identifying it after the two-year period and not being able to prosecute.

If it is within the two-year period, but they have consistently done this and we finally identify that, it seems to me the fines would be too low, in that setting. What we would want is some relationship to the amount of revenue they have generated from those sites during that period of time before we got a chance to shut them down. That would be a more appropriate system for fining them.

However, with regard to organized crime and the other individuals or small groups who are producing this material, we have other penalties for them, most of which include fairly substantial periods of incarceration.

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

Mr. Speaker, I did pay attention to the member's concern about the two-year limit not being long enough.

I would ask the member to explain that a little further. When we looked into this whole issue, we found that Canada was a large producer and host of this type of activity, with 9% of the worldwide number of sites. As a matter of fact, the United States was the largest at 49% of the total sites. Russia had 20%, Japan had 4.3% and South Korea had 3.6%.

We recognize that when efforts are being made to stamp these sites out, they will simply move on to other jurisdictions. This is a long-term effort here that is going to have be waged by jurisdictions. It just seems to me that we should be looking at best practices. We should be looking at the Swedish situation.

I do not know whether anyone at committee dealt with that particular issue. I would ask the member to deal with the issue of two-year limits and also the question of whether or not any witnesses were brought in who could give us some inside information about how the system is working in Sweden and other countries, including China.

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

Mr. Speaker, with regard to best practices elsewhere, no witnesses were called on this bill in this regard because we see this bill as one that transits us as a society into those next steps, which hopefully will be coming. We have had some of that evidence on previous bills.

With regard to the time limit, I have looked at some other jurisdictions and no one else has placed this time limit on it. I really could not understand the position. It was almost to the point of asking the government to take it out and let the general time limits in the code apply. I have had no sense from the government that it was prepared to make any compromise and withdraw this section, or if not withdraw it, then extend the period of time when prosecution could be brought against the service providers if they breached the legislation.

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

Mr. Speaker, back in June 2008 when I was in the Manitoba legislature we dealt with whole issue of Cybertip.ca.

At that time it seemed to have been a good idea. We supported it. I think the history of Cybertip.ca has been rather positive. The member is actually fairly knowledgeable in this area, so I would ask him to give us an update on that.

It is interesting that we have gotten more answers out of this member today than we have been able to get from any government member on this issue throughout the entire debate. As a matter of fact, we rarely see any government—

[The Speaker, Peter Milliken]

Order. The hon. member for Windsor—Tecumseh has the floor for a very brief response.

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

Mr. Speaker, Cybertip.ca is an excellent agency. It is very committed to the work its doing.

Again, as I said in my speech, the director who was here and gave evidence made it very clear that it could be doing a heck of a lot more. There is public education it would like to do. That is why it needs the additional resources.

[The Speaker, Peter Milliken]

Is the House ready for the question?

[Some hon. members]

Question.

[The Speaker, Peter Milliken]

The question is on the motion. Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[The Speaker, Peter Milliken]

I declare the motion carried.

(Motion agreed to, bill read the third time and passed)