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

[Steven Fletcher, Conservative, Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia, MB]

moved that Bill C-22, An Act respecting the mandatory reporting of Internet child pornography by persons who provide an Internet service, be read the third time and passed.

[Daniel Petit, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to participate in this debate at third reading on Bill C-22, An Act respecting the mandatory reporting of Internet child pornography by persons who provide an Internet service.

This is an important piece of legislation that states that persons who provide an Internet service must report any online child pornography they are aware of.

I think that on both sides of the House, we all agree that our main duty as elected representatives is to protect the most precious and vulnerable members of our society, our children.

Obliging Internet service providers to report child pornography will enhance our ability to protect Canadian children against online sexual exploitation in many ways.

First, this measure will improve our ability to detect child pornography, which is becoming increasingly prevalent. Second, the bill will allow for communication that will help block access to child pornography sites through the Cleanfeed Canada program. Third, the measures provided for in the bill will make it easier to identify, arrest and prosecute individuals who commit child pornography offences. Most importantly, these measures will help identify the victims so that we can save them from sexual predators.

Last summer, the federal ombudsman for victims of crime published a special report entitled Every Image, Every Child, which provided an overview of the problem of the online sexual exploitation of children.

According to the special report, the number of charges for the production or distribution of child pornography increased by 900% between 1998 and 2003. Furthermore, the number of images of serious child abuse has quadrupled between 2003 and 2007. This report also said that 39% of people who access child pornography look at images of children between the ages of 3 and 5, and 19% look at images of infants under 3 years old.

According to this report, commercial child pornography is estimated to be a multi-billion dollar industry worldwide. 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.

It is estimated that there are more than 750,000 pedophiles online at any given time and some of them may have collections of over a million child sexual abuse images.

I have a few comments about two amendments made to the bill by the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, of which I am a member. The definition of Internet services was slightly changed to specify that the bill applies to Internet service providers, in other words, people who provide services related to Internet access, content hosting and email.

The amendment applies only to the English version of the bill in order for the legislative text to accurately reflect the desired outcome and for the English version and the definition to better correspond to the French version.

The other amendment to Bill C-22 has to do with the provision on the possible double reporting in terms of the bill and the laws of a province or a foreign jurisdiction.

Essentially, Bill C-22 sets out two requirements for people who provide Internet services to the public. As far as the first requirement is concerned, persons who provide an Internet service to the public and who have been advised of an Internet address where child pornography may be available to the public are required to report to a designated agency such Internet addresses, otherwise known as IP or URL addresses.

In terms of the second requirement on notice and preservation, if a provider has reason to believe that its Internet services have been used in the commission of a child pornography offence, the provider is required to notify the police and preserve the evidence for 21 days.

Bill C-22 seeks to prevent double reporting to a designated agency when a service provider has already reported the incident, in compliance with an obligation under the laws of a province or a foreign jurisdiction. Nonetheless, the previous wording could have been interpreted to mean that the provider is relieved of notification and preservation duties. That was never the idea. The amendment specifies that Internet service providers who report an incident in compliance with the laws of a province or a foreign jurisdiction are released only of their reporting requirements.

The committee heard from representatives of the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, which operates cybertip.ca, Canada's national 24/7 tip line for reporting the sexual exploitation of children on the Internet. At present, most reporting of child pornography across Canada is done through cybertip.ca or, in French, cyberaide.ca.

Within 48 hours, cybertip.ca agents review, analyze, and prioritize every report they receive. The agents verify the reports by collecting supporting information using various Internet tools and techniques. They also identify the location of the material in order to determine the appropriate jurisdiction. If the material is assessed to be potentially illegal, a report is referred to the appropriate law enforcement agency for follow-up and investigation.

Cybertip.ca fulfills a valuable function for police across Canada by analyzing reports and forwarding only the most relevant information to law enforcement agencies. The material that is deemed not to be illegal is often followed up with educational information. Thus, the police do not have to use their resources to analyze reports of child pornography and can focus on investigations. Cybertip.ca has memoranda of understanding with most Canadian law enforcement agencies and collaborates closely with many of the Canadian ISPs and international partners, of course. Cybertip.ca—

[The Deputy Speaker, Andrew Scheer]

I must interrupt the hon. member. The Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice will have 10 minutes to finish his speech the next time the bill is debated in the House.

The House resumed from November 23 consideration of the motion that Bill C-22, An Act respecting the mandatory reporting of Internet child pornography by persons who provide an Internet service, be read the third time and passed.

[The Deputy Speaker, Andrew Scheer]

The hon. Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice has 10 minutes remaining. He now has the floor.

[Daniel Petit, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice]

Mr. Speaker, I will continue my speech from yesterday. When I was interrupted, I was speaking about Cybertip.ca.

This company also compiles statistics on child pornography in Canada. Every month, Cybertip.ca receives approximately 800,000 hits on its website and triages over 700 reports. Approximately 45% of these reports are then forwarded to law enforcement.

As of June 2009, Cybertip.ca had triaged over 33,000 reports since becoming Canada’s national tip line in 2002. Over this period, more than 90% of the reports received by Cybertip.ca were related to child pornography. At least 30 arrests have resulted from these reports, approximately 3,000 websites have been shut down and, most importantly, children have been removed from abusive environments.

When they appeared before committee, Cybertip.ca’s representatives mentioned that, in the first year since becoming the designated agency for receiving reports of child pornography under Manitoba’s mandatory reporting legislation, Cybertip.ca saw a 126% increase in reporting, and 17 of those reports led to the identification of children or perpetrators.

Before I conclude, I would like to talk about the penalties proposed in the bill. Pursuant to Bill C-22, which is before us today, individuals, or sole proprietors, would be liable to a fine of not more than $1,000 for a first offence; a fine of not more than $5,000 for a second offence; and a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment for a term of not more than six months, or both, for each subsequent offence.

Corporations and other entities would also be liable to a fine of not more than $10,000 for the first offence, a fine of not more than $50,000 for the second offence and a fine of not more than $100,000 for each subsequent offence. This two-level penalty system takes into account the diversity of the Internet service sector in Canada, where there are just as many sole proprietorships as there are multinational corporations.

Some might feel that these penalties are light, but we have to remember that this bill complements all of the existing measures to protect our children against sexual exploitation, including the harsh penalties provided for in the Criminal Code for child pornography offences.

This bill sends a message to those who provide Internet services to the public that they have a social and moral obligation, and now also a legal one, to report the existence of this heinous material when they become aware of it.

We believe that the penalties provided for in this bill would allow us to balance the objective of the bill with its effectiveness. In order to achieve the objective of this bill, to better protect children, the government wants to ensure that all Internet service providers in Canada abide by the law, not just the major Internet service providers who already voluntarily declare such cases and assist the police.

What those watching us now must understand is that there are individuals who provide Internet services and there are, of course, large corporations that provide the same services. So we created two types of offences and two types of progressive fines. We wanted to ensure that we identified all of the cases in which an individual or a corporation might host child pornography sites or might fail to report a child pornography site.

According to representatives of Cybertip.ca, mandatory reporting of child pornography helps prevent personal and professional dilemmas related to reporting this kind of material. It ensures compliance with the law and ensures that quick, appropriate action is taken. Taking a closer look at the current role of Cybertip.ca as a designated organization under the Manitoba legislation on mandatory reporting is helpful in understanding how to explain the provisions of Bill C-22. This is what I was saying earlier.

In closing, I would like to make a final point. I recently had the opportunity to go to Palermo, where the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe was meeting. I was representing Canada, along with other members of our delegation. We supported the same bill that we have here before us. We summarized it in a few lines and asked the entire European community to approve it. Some 54 countries were represented by their elected officials.

It was a victory for Canada: the resolution on that bill was the only one that passed unanimously. We are making progress in the fight against child pornography. Of course we had to explain our bill and urge the members of the other delegations, elected officials like me, to vote in favour of the bill. Many of the areas that produce pornographic sites were in certain Asian or Middle Eastern countries. We needed to send a clear message that we would no longer tolerate these sites, which come to Canada and the United States through major systems. We no longer want children, whether their children or our children, to be exploited on Internet sites that disseminate child pornography, nor do we want three- to five-year-old children doing such degrading things.

That was our argument and, at the risk of repeating myself, we won: our resolution was the only one that was unanimously adopted by that Parliamentary Assembly, which includes the European Community. We do not always win, but we won in that case. I want the public to know that Canada can be proud. We are at the forefront of the fight against child pornography.

[Jim Karygiannis, Liberal, Scarborough—Agincourt, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest to my hon. colleague and to what he was doing in Palermo on the 54 or 57 countries.

I wonder if he could shed some light on some of the ways that the Government of Canada is being proactive about blocking sites that can come from other countries, countries that are not signed on to this, so that when perpetrators want to go surfing to see child porn sites, we can make sure that these sites are not available in Canada.

Is there something that the Government of Canada is doing proactively to block those sites that are hosted in countries that are not signed on?

[Daniel Petit, Conservative, Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, QC]

Mr. Speaker, that is an excellent question. Numerous countries have been wondering the same thing. What is happening here can make its way there and vice versa.

Both there and here in the House, Canada tabled what we refer to as 21st century evidence. In other words, we will give Internet service providers everything they need. Not only will the government alert providers to the presence of child pornography or anything degrading that is prohibited by law on their sites, but it will also order them to have the means to store the material as evidence for approximately 21 days. That way, complaints can be brought against a provider that has not said anything or, if it has, against the people using such sites.

There is also the issue of pornographic images coming from other countries. Countries are talking to each other, especially the people who enforce the law, such as police. The convention on cybercrime, which is about a decade old and which many countries have signed, allows us to notify the countries in question when something is found. This has been in effect for some time now. They take our information and we take theirs. We then make arrests or simply shut down the server.

[Serge Ménard, Bloc, Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask the parliamentary secretary where he got his information stating that we are the first country to have a law like this. I believe that the information we received from the Library of Parliament refers to similar laws in other countries, including the United States, that are far more thorough. As far as I know, there are also laws like this in nearly every western country and as far off as India.

Is there really an indication that we are the first to have this kind of law? Are there not already laws like this in most civilized countries?

[Daniel Petit, Conservative, Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I mentioned that the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe has a Parliamentary Assembly of 54 countries. Many democratic countries have laws that are more or less similar to ours.

Nonetheless, we are the only country to have proposed joining all these laws together so that all the other democratic countries—some of which are more or less democratic—that are part of this organization as observers or such can see precisely what Canada has done.

If our proposal was nothing new, they would have told us this already exists in their country, but they did not. Our way of presenting the bill is in fact something they did not have. Everyone has laws against these servers, but we have developed something much broader, requiring ISPs to disclose what we are asking for so that we can make arrests and store evidence. We were able to justify all of these actions, and the 54 countries accepted.

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

Mr. Speaker, the fact of the matter is that the government is spending $42 million to play cat and mouse with people who are running these sites, when we have the examples of Germany and Sweden simply blocking the sites and the problem is solved.

I want to ask the member whether the government has looked into best practices in other countries. There are other countries beyond those, which I could name, that actually do not have a problem with this issue simply, once again, because they block the sites. Is that not a reasonable solution to this problem?

[Daniel Petit, Conservative, Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, QC]

Mr. Speaker, in fact, it is a matter of knowing whether to totally block them or to use reporting, with tools like Cybertip.ca, to intervene. When it comes to completely blocking them, I could mention the country that blocks them the most: China. It completely blocks everything.

Other countries block certain areas of the server. However, techniques are so advanced that people can simply go on another server and start over. We need to find a way—and that is why Cybertip.ca was created—to allow the public and parents to report things if they see their children going on any strange websites.

Instead of having one or 10 television or Internet police officers, we could have one million people all over Canada reporting what they see. Accordingly, it will be very difficult to escape this huge network of eyes watching the Internet just for child pornography.

[Jean-Claude D'Amours, Liberal, Madawaska—Restigouche, NB]

Mr. Speaker, thank you for allowing me the time to speak here today.

My question is quite simple. My Conservative colleague does not seem to want to give a clear answer. He says that people can report sites. That is one thing. But there is a difference between reporting and doing something about it.

My Liberal colleague asked a very simple question earlier. If sites are reported, which is one thing, will the government ensure that these sites are blocked? It is not enough to simply block servers. As someone very clearly pointed out, there is always a way to move the content onto another server. However, if we are talking about a specific site, that is another matter. Will the government ensure that the offending website is blocked directly? The Conservatives must stop beating about the bush and say that the entire Canadian public, some 30 million people, will become informants.

What good does it do to report a problem with certain sites if nothing is done to block them? My question is quite simple. Will the government ensure that the offending websites are blocked in order to protect Canadians of all ages?

[Daniel Petit, Conservative, Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thought I had answered that question. I apologize to my colleagues.

In the technology world, there is the server and then there is the site. The site produces the child pornography. Once it is reported, once we know that the site is hosted on a particular server and the server operators have done everything possible to determine that there was a pornographic site on the hard drive—in general terms—the police will intervene. They have 21 days to look at the evidence. The site will be shut down. It will no longer exist. That is what that means. That is a site.

A site produces pornography and uses the server to distribute its filth to all of our computers. So we must first find out how it works. Recently, a child pornography site was investigated because a number of witnesses reported it. There were about 116 IP address changes in 24 hours. Imagine that. That is what they had to track down.

We have to have a way to catch them, to find them, to bring them to justice and to shut them down. That is the goal.

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

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise on Bill C-22, which is really a child pornography reporting bill. The emphasis is on reporting.

I am a little disturbed that, from speeches inside and outside of this House, in press clippings and in hyperbole at committee, people might have been left with the impression that this is a tool that will eradicate child pornography and make great strides towards stopping child pornography. In fact, it does very little.

I know the Conservatives like to have short titles for bills, such as “saving the community from everything bad” and stuff like that. This bill should really have been called the “too little too late act” in attempting to try to curb child pornography. I will explain why.

In 2006, I remember well, the Liberals were defeated and the Conservatives were elected. That is almost five years ago now. There will be a fifth anniversary, January 23. The Conservatives should look at that fifth anniversary and suggest to themselves in the mirror, “Mirror, mirror on the wall, have we delivered the laws fairest to all?”

No, they have not delivered laws. Here we have a law that there is no substantial opposition to. There is no opposition to this bill, and we are sitting here five years later.

In the spring of 2010, because of prorogation and elections and not making these housekeeping-type bills priorities, the parliamentary secretary at that time said:

The government is committed to doing everything it can to put a stop to this growing problem. That is why we are reintroducing in the House this legislative measure to create a uniform mandatory reporting regime across Canada that would apply to all Internet service providers.

If the government is doing everything it can, it should have done it sooner. It should have followed provincial examples. It should have followed international examples. The government would not have had any opposition.

The reason the Conservative government did not do everything it could is that it was preoccupied with a political agenda. It was preoccupied with prorogation, and it let the ball drop on this matter.

This is a growing problem. The government had to reintroduce it. It is not because the government is concerned about this, but it had to reintroduce the bill because it had Parliament crash, to use computer talk. The Conservatives crashed the CPU of Parliament, which is the sitting of Parliament, by prorogation.

Why is this problem specifically for Canada's management of the issue of posting Internet sites?

It is because, as table 1 from the Library of Parliament brief suggests, we are in the top five child pornography website host countries in the whole world. Would the Conservative Party, as a custodian of government, want to be in the top five?

We would not, but we are. We are number three. The percentage of sites hosted by Canada, which in the realm of world populations is not the largest country, is 9% of child pornography websites.

It is a problem. It needed to be addressed on January 24, 2006. It was not. Following that, it needed to go through the collapses of prorogation and be put on the front burner. It was not.

What did the provinces do? What did the people of Canada do through their other elected representatives?

They filled the vacuum. In September 2008, now over two years ago, federal and provincial ministers of justice and attorneys general, responsible for justice in Canada, agreed that the federal legislation to establish mandatory reporting of online child pornography by ISPs was necessary.

This did not even come from the federal government. The federal government should have been aware that being number three in the world is not a good list to be on with respect to hosting child pornography websites. It is not a good thing. The federal government should have been more proactive. Instead, it let the provinces suggest that they needed the federal government to enact legislation.

Here we are in the fall of 2010 finally looking at this legislation, finally speaking to it, agreeing to it and getting it through. In the meantime, this legislation has been leapfrogged by others provincially and internationally. They were more successful, penetrating, effective, coercive and co-operative with respect to the public engagement of reporting child pornography sites than this bill.

We have not even passed the bill yet and it is antiquated. How do we feel about that as lawmakers?

We will talk about the bill but the message for the government is that there will be many occasions when it will find no opposition in this House to a bill that seeks to have more reporting of Internet child pornography sites.

Therefore, with some dispatch and a little more efficiency and concern for the actual laws of the country, will the government please, on other fronts, get to legislation that people care about it.

In June, I said:

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.

We are now in November. It has been almost four and a half years and the government has done nothing. 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.

Those statements and the rest of what I said in June apply now. Let us get on with it and pass this bill.

Earlier in the debate, the parliamentary secretary said that the government was committed to doing everything it could to put a stop to Internet child pornography. In a response to a question, he also said that Canada was a leader in this field by virtue of Bill C-22, which has not been passed in five years, faced with the fact that we are number three on a list of all countries hosting Internet sites and based on the fact that he appears to be either not aware of or at least not disclosing. with respect to very good questions from my friend from the Bloc and my colleague from Scarborough—Agincourt, what is going on in the rest of the world.

What is going on in the rest of the world has already gone on because, in 2002, the sexual exploitation and other abuse of children statute 18 USC chapter 110 was passed. Unlike this bill, which would only puts an obligation on the ISP, the bill in the United States makes it also a duty to have anyone providing telecommunications services to have the same duty.

Let us think of that in a country like Canada where every body that provides telecommunications services, not just ISPs, has a duty to report the existence of child pornography , if it comes to his or her knowledge, and of doing something about it. That is a broader law than the Canadian government has introduced under Bill C-22.

The question that was put to the elected officials at our committee was why we had not broadened the federal legislation to put a more serious duty on other persons other than ISPs. Why should there not be a duty on the general public to report a child pornography Internet site?

There is an obligation under the Criminal Code to report crimes when witnessed. Why is there not an obligation on persons who see these sites? Why do we not do this in Canada? At least the United States, some eight years before, was heading in that direction. Australia, in 1995, amended its code and has had a law similar to the United States law for that a period of time.

We are playing catch-up. Even this bill would not get us halfway to the leaders in the field.

We want to support the bill but we want to blast the government, as we did at committee, for not using broader powers that exist under the Constitution to put duties on average citizens, duties at least on all telecommunications service providers to report. The only way we will be able to crack down on child pornography Internet sites is to know about them and be informed about them.

Great groups like cybertip.ca, and in fact the RCMP which has divisions devoted to this type of crime, are under-lawed and understaffed, but that is another issue. They do not have the legal basis to crack down on the sites that they know about and they are not being aided in the way they would be if we had legislation similar to the American and Australian legislation in this instance.

I want to move from the international scene to talk about what happened in Canada. As I mentioned, in the fall of 2008, attorneys general came to Ottawa, at which time the government would have been two years on the rack, and suggested that we should have federal legislation covering this very egregious problem. It is now two years and two months later and it is finally here.

What did the provinces do in the meantime? What would we do if we were a premier or a minister of justice in a province? We would probably look at what the we could do as province to do something in the vacuum created by the inaction and the incessant political pandering of the federal government.

I will give a couple of examples of what the provinces did. Nova Scotia enacted the child pornography reporting act which came into effect in 2010 and was enacted in 2008. The province took some time in 2008 to act on the recommendations of the provincial and territorial governments when they came to Ottawa and acted fairly swiftly. That act now states that a reporting entity shall be responsible to further up the investigation of complaints it receives from people in general.

That is a very important section because, after reading this, the people in Nova Scotia will feel that their province has done more about the problem than their federal government. It says that there is a duty to report by every person, not just an ISP, not just a telco operator, not just someone involved in scanning the Internet to see what is involved for a police force, but “Every person who reasonably believes that a representation or material is child pornography shall promptly report to a reporting entity any information”. It is irrespective of confidentiality or privilege because it is a crime.

The crime is committed because a child has been photographed or depicted and those depictions are victimizations in a crime in itself, let alone the transmission of that image across the bandwidth in this country. This is a brave and, so far, completely legal and constitutional act on behalf of the Province of Nova Scotia.

We hear so much on this side about how fighting crime is the feather in the Conservatives' cap. It is what they are good at. They fight crime. If they were really fighting crime in this instance, they would have done a better job. They would have convinced Department of Justice officials that a federal act could at least go as far as the United States and Australia in touching telcos.

They might even say that when a crime is visited upon a child or person depicted on a pornography site, that is a crime that touches the national interest. It is not merely the interest of the child being protected and it is not merely the domain of the provincial government under the Child and Family Services Act and that power in a section of the Constitution. It is clearly a criminal justice issue.

Where were these titans of crime-fighting when they went to the Department of Justice and said that they had some issues with getting a stable government and were preoccupied with keeping power and getting the ads out on the nightly news?

What we is a powerful legislation like the one in Australia, in the U.S. or, even better, the one I mentioned in Nova Scotia. Manitoba's legislation is very similar. Those are two jurisdictions that said, “Elected persons in Manitoba and Nova Scotia, we can't wait for the federal government”.

I am not sure, because there have been so many changes, but I think I am being completely non-partisan. There is not a Liberal government in those two provinces and there has not been for a while, so we are talking about NDP and Conservative governments. They took the bull by the horns and said that they would protect the children in their provinces because they could not wait for the federal government to invoke a federal criminal justice power in the legislation before them.

What we have now in Bill C-22 is something we can all agree on. However, we need to get the message out there that this is too little and it is too late because other jurisdictions have leap-frogged us. The bill is a step in the right direction. I do not want to leave my remarks by being 100% critical of the government. Making the reporting of child sexual abuse images mandatory for ISPs is a good step. It is a good tool to put in the hands of law enforcement. As I said before, groups that came forward during the parliamentary hearings process would be very able to administer the law.

We might have one criticism. The Conservatives had five years but they could not even put the governing aspects of the bill, which is who reports to whom and what gets done, which are the guts of the bill, into the bill. The bill says that subject to regulations we will sort this all out later. My goodness, they have had five years to get this together, would we not think that they could have picked an agency like Cybertip or a division of the RCMP? Instead of regulation, which to us is uncertain and will not be effected or enacted immediately, could they not have put in this fairly short bill the details of which agency gets reported to and what is expected of that reporting agency? It does not seem to be that difficult because Nova Scotia and Manitoba already have it in their acts.

I always say that when there is an issue like this, sometimes we need to look east to the Maritimes, and Nova Scotia has a regime that is working. Nova Scotia went through the constitutional argument of whether it had the power and it does. The federal Conservative government never went through the rigours of that but it presented a bill to us. I suppose we should all fall on our swords on this side of the House and say that it was our fault because we did not propose amendments. We did not propose amendments because it would take the bill beyond the scope.

We are not the government yet but if we were the government we would have had legislation like this done much quicker. We need to keep in mind that the growth of Internet porn sites is exponential. By 2008, every first law officer in this country, the attorney generals and ministers of justice, agreed that something needed to be done and, in some cases, they did. When they expected the federal government to do it, the federal government did not deliver. It is just delivering now in November.

The bill requires Internet service providers to report child pornography to a designated reporting entity. We heard evidence that the RCMP or Cybertip.ca might be those entities. It is true that federal legislation can only provide a mandatory duty where it finds a nexus. As suggested in my speech, I do not think the nexus is just with child and family services provincial power. It is with a criminal activity or a criminal law power. Although not everyone in the House is a lawyer, I think we all recognize that taping, making a video, photographing or the image taking of a young person in a pornographic situation in itself is victimization and a crime of the first order. The transmission of that is also a crime of the first order.

It think there is a positive duty on every Canadian, at least all those involved in the telecommunications services, the Internet service provider businesses and, by and large the Internet providers, to report those crimes. That is where the government has fallen down and that is why we are urging the Conservatives, on a completely non-partisan basis but a basis that says yes, to get this bill passed. We need to get on with it. We need to do something more effective and more in stream with the rest of the world and now the rest of the country.

As the Conservatives often say, but it rings so true in this case, “let us get the job done” with respect to the reporting and the cracking down on child Internet pornography sites.