Bill C-32 (Historical)

Copyright Modernization Act

An Act to amend the Copyright Act

This enactment amends the Copyright Act to
(a) update the rights and protections of copyright owners to better address the challenges and opportunities of the Internet, so as to be in line with international standards;
(b) clarify Internet service providers’ liability and make the enabling of online copyright infringement itself an infringement of copyright;
(c) permit businesses, educators and libraries to make greater use of copyright material in digital form;
(d) allow educators and students to make greater use of copyright material;
(e) permit certain uses of copyright material by consumers;
(f) give photographers the same rights as other creators;
(g) ensure that it remains technologically neutral; and
(h) mandate its review by Parliament every five years.

[Pablo Rodriguez, Liberal, Honoré-Mercier, QC]

Thank you, Mr. McTeague.

Good afternoon. Thank you for being here.

I am going to read you an excerpt:

Extending this provision to education will reduce administrative and financial costs for users of copyrighted materials....

That's on the fact sheets on C-32 that come from the government. If the costs are reduced, some people will get less money, right?

If you pay less, and if schools pay less, someone will be getting less money. So who are we talking about here? Are we talking about creators?

[Victoria Owen]

CLA applauds the Government of Canada for the significant improvements to Canada's copyright regime in Bill C-32. The addition of education, parody, and satire in the fair dealing section of the act are important additions to our national information policy. Education, parody, and satire stand beside other fair dealing uses, which are limited and specified and, above all, fair.

The Supreme Court identified the fairness test, and librarians have interpreted this carefully and cautiously. The fair dealing exception for education must recognize libraries of all types as well-respected cultural and educational institutions and recognize that they are integral to the provision of collections for research and private study for all Canadians. Education and lifelong learning are conducted in earnest in public libraries across the country. Educational institutions, by definition, must include libraries of all types.

CLA is seeking further improvements to the bill, which will benefit all Canadians. Of concern to CLA are the unnecessarily prescriptive protections for digital locks, particularly as they dramatically limit and reduce the impact of the important exceptions for fair dealing, access for people with perceptual disabilities, and preservation of library materials. We join our colleagues at other Canadian cultural and educational organizations in this concern.

CLA supports the fundamental principle of fair dealing in Canada's copyright bill. We do not want to hamper Canadians' ability to fully utilize their statutory rights--for a very limited number of exceptions--by the imposition of technological protection measures. Any copyright legislation must include the right to bypass digital locks for non-infringing purposes. Without this right, the legislation is fundamentally flawed.

Digital locks can prevent people from copying for the purposes of fair dealing, thwart library preservation of materials, and interfere with access to content. Each and every section of the bill that affects access for people with perceptual disabilities must be reviewed in order to ensure that we do not make equitable access more difficult or in fact impossible.

CLA members acknowledge the complexity of copyright in the 21st century. Libraries annually purchase content worth millions of dollars, librarians serve Canadian creators and users, and we see the balance between copyright and users' rights every day.

The library community plays a vital role in providing Canadians access to all forms of knowledge. Access to information is essential to ensure that Canadians are contributors to the economic, social, and cultural well-being of their communities.

We appreciate the Government of Canada's attempt to define the balance among the concerns of creators, content providers, and users as a key goal of continuing copyright reform. The bill has succeeded with fair dealing in adding preservation and in limiting liability, but digital locks on the statutory rights of Canadians undermine so much of the bill's progress in the digital environment.

We would like to thank you again for this opportunity to speak to you.

[Kelly Moore, Executive Director, Canadian Library Association]

CLA is Canada's largest national library association. We represent the interests of approximately 57,000 library staff and thousands of libraries of all kinds across Canada, as well as the interests of all those concerned about enhancing the quality of life of Canadians through access to knowledge and literacy.

Our role is to represent the interests of these organizations and individuals on a range of public policy issues. None is more critical at this time than copyright.

Library users are the Canadian public. There are millions of students, educators, scholars, researchers, lifelong learners, special library users, and recreational readers--from children to seniors. When it comes to copyright, our users are not members of a special interest group. The public interest is the core of our work.

A copy of CLA's brief on Bill C-32, “Protecting the Public Interest in the Digital World”, has been submitted to the committee members and fully discusses CLA's views on the bill. Today we will highlight the key issues as they relate to the library community.

[Victoria Owen, Chair, Copyright Committee, Canadian Library Association]

Good afternoon, and thank you, Mr. Chair.

My name is Victoria Owen, and I'm the chair of the Canadian Library Association's Copyright Committee. With me here today is Kelly Moore, who is CLA's executive director.

We greatly appreciate this opportunity to meet with you today in the context of your study of Bill C-32. I'm currently the head librarian at the University of Toronto's Scarborough Library, and I have been the director of a public library and the director of library services at a library for the print disabled. In all of these environments copyright legislation has had a direct impact.

[Jay Rahn, Chair, Copyright Committee, Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for inviting the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences to participate in your study of Bill C-32 to amend the Copyright Act.

I am Jay Rahn, chair of the federation's task force on copyright. The federation represents more than 50,000 members who work in Canada's libraries and museums and who teach and undertake research and creative work in Canada's universities. On their behalf, I commend your initiative to modernize copyright legislation. Forward-looking copyright policies will help researchers and creators leverage opportunities that digital technologies present while ensuring copyright owners are fairly compensated. I assure you that our community commends several of Bill C-32's proposed amendments, in particular the addition of education to the list of fair dealing exceptions and the expansion of fair dealing to include parody and satire. We also appreciate the challenge of shaping legislation that incorporates feedback from multiple parties and serves the public good. However, we believe some areas of the bill would greatly benefit from minor adjustments. We did not aim these adjustments at avoiding certain costs in producing teaching materials. Indeed, educators believe that creators, a group that includes many teachers, should be fairly compensated for their work. This is intrinsic to copyright. Recent figures show that Canadian university libraries, for example, spend over $300 million annually, as the committee is already familiar with, to buy and license new content for research and learning.

Our written submission identifies several changes to areas that may create unintended barriers to access or result in avoidable problems of compliance. But for the purposes of this presentation I will review the two most important aspects of the bill for our community.

First, the phrase, “such as“ or “ including, but not limited to”, should be added in the list of fair dealing exceptions to make it suggestive rather than exhaustive. In this regard, we support the inclusion of the fair dealing exception for education. The Supreme Court of Canada has set out factors to help determine if copyrighted materials have been used fairly. These factors were in fact applied in a recent Federal Court of Appeal case that upheld a decision that prescribing multiple copies of a work to a class of students would be unfair. Adding education to fair dealing does not spell the end of publishing. Instead, it could further facilitate the use of Canadian material in classrooms across the country. For example, a professor could podcast a lecture that includes a copyright-protected image without unduly worrying about copyright infringement. We need to ensure that copyright law punishes pirates, not educators trying to teach new content in new ways.

Second, we feel that the language concerning technological protection measures, TPMs, should be amended so it is not an offence to circumvent a TPM for actions that are otherwise non-infringing. This revision, we believe, is consistent with the 1996 World Intellectual Property Organization Internet treaties that Canada has signed. If the digital lock provisions remain unchanged, Bill C-32 would make it an infringing act for anyone, teachers, consumers, and even creators, to break a digital lock for all but a few purposes. For example, those who simply want to shift scholarly articles between devices and formats would be in contravention of the bill. It would also punish creators who increasingly use copyrighted works as a basis for their novel expressions in follow-on works. We believe these changes would result in an act that would better help Canada meet future digital challenges and seize opportunities both domestically and internationally.

Thank you for the opportunity to discuss our views. I welcome your questions.

[Arash Mohtashami-Maali, Head, Writing and Publishing, Arts Disciplines Division, Canada Council for the Arts]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

My name is Arash Mohtashami-Maali, and I am the Head of the Writing and Publishing Section at the Canada Council for the Arts. As an introduction to this presentation, I would like to give the members of the committee a brief description of the Canada Council and its mandate.

The Canada Council is a Crown corporation that was created by an act of Parliament in 1957 to “foster and promote the study, enjoyment and production of works in the arts”.

Our mandate is to help Canadian artists and arts organizations play a leadership role in Canadian society. Our role is to help our society to access its arts and culture and to engage with these leaders in building a better society based on such fundamental values as freedom of expression, the right to difference, and the right to a unique identity within a plural society.

This is the spirit and vision that we are bringing to our presentation to the committee, in order to share with you our ideas on Bill C-32. We understand perfectly the need for a reform of the Copyright Act. It is obvious that defining a legal framework for this subject within the larger conversation on intellectual property reinforces the commitment to focusing particular attention on the needs of artists and the arts in Canada. We applaud this effort, all the more so since new technologies and globalization, together with the influence of the Internet and new media, have not only contributed to the disappearance of physical borders, but have also made possible the universalization of ideas and literary and artistic creation, and the introduction of new working media for creators.

We have seen the effects of piracy in the arts, especially in the fields of music, film and literature, and it is time to equip the Canadian justice system with the necessary legal tools to protect the interests of authors and artists in Canada.

We all agree that the act must take to heart the protection of the arts and literature in Canada and must ensure the right to an identity that is both distinctive and diverse. This act has to support the best efforts of our artists, writers and intellectuals and their desire to maintain close ties and open dialogues with today's world, building a place of choice for Canadian culture and guaranteeing its survival.

We also wish to thank the committee for listening attentively to the different stakeholders representing the many artistic and cultural communities concerned. It is heartening to see that the bill is being given special attention thanks to this consultation.

Our unique perspective on Canadian creation and our profound understanding of this community mean that we have a privileged contact and first-line responsiveness for hearing the needs and the reaction of the arts communities regarding Bill C-32. We believe that this act, inextricably bound as it is to the fundamental values of our society, must play a unifying role. While it must reinforce in an ethical manner the role of the artist by recognizing his rights, it must also ensure the continuity and fair treatment of independent agencies, corporations and institutions.

As we mentioned earlier, the artistic and literary communities want an inclusive act with legal tools that not only respond to the current changes, but also includes those measures which, over the years, have protected intellectual property in the arts. While new realities have transformed the arts world, the traditional means continue to make up the bulk of the market.

The Canada Council is not a legal expert, but we understand the concerns of the different arts communities. We understand that the introduction into the act of such ideas as 'fair use' is a source of discord and disagreement within the arts community. Every day we witness the preoccupations within these communities, as they express their reservations about the application of these new ideas. We believe that the introduction of a more precise definition would help them come to a better understanding of the position of the act with regard to the rights of individuals and organizations.

We appreciate the declaration in the preamble to the act (paragraph 1) stating that this act is “an important marketplace framework law and cultural policy instrument that, through clear, predictable and fair rules, supports creativity and innovation and affects many sectors of the knowledge economy”. We are confident that the present efforts of the government and Parliament will ensure that Canadians benefit from an act that is progressive and far-sighted, an act that is open but also solid, and that will protect Canadians and their interests. We agree that clarity is the key element of an act that is vital to the cultural survival of our country. We support the effort to establish an act that unifies our citizens around the basic principles of our constitution, and we support the idea that this act must give artists, writers and thinkers “the ability to assert their rights...”

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gord Brown]

I will call this 19th meeting of the Legislative Committee on Bill C-32 back to order.

In the second hour we will hear from Arash Mohtashami-Maali, from the Canada Council for the Arts; from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, we have Jay Rahn; and from the Canadian Library Association, we have Victoria Owen and Kelly Moore.

Each organization will have five minutes. I'll go in the order of the sheet.

We'll start with the Canada Council for the Arts for five minutes.

[Dean Del Mastro, Conservative, Peterborough, ON]

Thank you very much.

And thank you to the witnesses today.

I appreciate that all three of you have indicated your support for the passage of Bill C-32 in a timely manner. I think that's important.

I think all of you provide necessary service to businesses and to households across the country. As such, your voice before this committee is very important. I have a number of questions, which I'll get to.

Ms. Dinsmore, one thing in your presentation was network PVRs specifically. I'm interested in that because the bill is written intentionally to be technology neutral. I support network PVRs. I think it's a great idea, to reduce waste and also to provide consumers more choice. It also opens up opportunities for television networks to get more revenues. As I understand it, they can switch out advertisements and so forth—revenues from advertisers.

Why have you specifically highlighted them? Is there something in the bill that you think may not provide for their use?

[Carole Lavallée, Bloc, Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Ladies, do you have anything else to add? No.

Let me go back to the notice-and-notice system.

Mrs. Morin, if I am not mistaken, you said earlier that you received one million notices last year and that you were not able to handle them all. Under Bill C-32 in its current form, you will have even more notices.

Have you thought of a solution to hire enough people in order to handle the one million notices, which will most likely go up exponentially in the coming years?

[Carole Lavallée, Bloc, Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC]

The same goes for Mr. McTaggart.

In line with this topic, a number of people are saying that, when we pass a bill—I don't think it is going to be Bill C-32—that fights piracy and piracy websites, the pirates, the owners of those sites, are going to set up their sites in foreign countries.

Do you think that Canadian courts will be issuing injunctions? Is it possible that legislation on copyright can provide for injunctions requiring that network providers block foreign pirate sites? Is that possible and realistic?

[Carole Lavallée, Bloc, Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC]

I am going to read you paragraph 18(2.3) of Bill C-32. This is what it says:

(2.3) It is an infringement of copyright for a person to provide, by means of the Internet or another digital network, a service that the person knows or should have known is designed primarily to enable acts of copyright infringement...

Do you think the wording “should have known is designed primarily” is sufficient?

[Pam Dinsmore, Vice-President, Regulatory, Cable, Rogers Communications Inc.]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee. My name is Pam Dinsmore and I am vice-president, regulatory, at Rogers Communications Inc. I appreciate the opportunity to present our views on Bill C-32.

Rogers is a diversified Canadian communications and media company. We are in a variety of businesses, including wireless, cable TV, high-speed Internet access, radio and television broadcasting, and program production. We also publish some of the most recognized magazines in the country, such as Chatelaine and Châteleine, L'actualité, and Maclean's, and we have extended these traditional brands online using digital media. As such, we support a copyright act that takes a balanced approach to the interests of rights holders and users, thereby optimizing the growth of digital services and investment in innovation.

We believe that Bill C-32 goes a long way towards striking this balance, and we support its passage in a timely manner. However, we think the bill would benefit from some changes to provide greater clarity and certainty for both users and rights holders, particularly with respect to the provisions regarding the time-shifting and hosting exceptions and the notice and notice regime.

First, we are pleased that the bill legalizes the time shifting of television programs and legitimizes the use of personal video recorders. A PVR is a set-top box that our customers rent or own. It is connected by wiring to one of their television sets. PVRs allow our customers to time shift programming from that television set and watch it at a time of their choice. It is a service that has proven to be popular with customers who watch a lot of television programs but want to watch them at the time of their choosing.

We are also pleased that the bill removes obstacles to the implementation of innovative technologies such as network personal video recorder service, or network PVRs. This service will operate in the same way as a PVR but allow for the remote storage of our customers' time-shifted content in servers located in our headends rather than storage within the set-top box. Given that a network PVR service can store programs from any television in a customer's house, it removes the need for them to rent or own a PVR for any of their television sets. It will also allow us to make seamless upgrades to our customers' network PVR service without their having to rent or purchase new equipment. It goes without saying that moving from PVR set-top boxes to a network PVR service will allow our customers to enjoy the benefits of time-shifted programming in a greener and more technically efficient way.

Network PVR is not just a concept. It was launched by Cablevision in the U.S. at the end of last year, following the ruling of a U.S. appeals court that the concept was lawful under U.S. copyright law. This means that Cablevision's customers are already able to time shift programs on any one of their home televisions sets without the need to purchase or rent a PVR. As a result of rolling out its network PVR service, Cablevision has announced that it will stop purchasing PVR set-top boxes to rent to its customers.

Rogers is eager to provide our customers with the same benefits of a network PVR service that are being experienced by Cablevision's customers. We therefore fully support the technology-neutral approach to the time-shifting and hosting exceptions in the bill. The government made this approach clear when it introduced the bill, as did Industry Minister Tony Clement when he appeared before this committee. There are, however, technical improvements that could be made to the drafting to ensure that the government's policy intent to remove barriers to the development of cloud computing and other remote storage services like network PVR are removed. In this regard, we support the BCBC's proposed amendments to the time-shifting and hosting exceptions.

Second, we support the notice and notice provisions in the bill. These provisions will make it mandatory for all ISPs to implement a notice and notice regime. This is a practice that has existed at Rogers on a voluntary basis for over a decade to combat Internet piracy. With the increase in our customer base and increased awareness of the regime on the part of rights holders, the number of notices we process has risen year over year. In fact, in 2010, we processed over 207,000 notices. In our view, notice and notice is the best and fairest way to make individuals aware that they are accused of illegal peer-to-peer file sharing while recognizing that ISPs should not unduly interfere with our customers' online activities. While we recognize that the regime is not perfect, we believe it does result in discouraging repeat offenders. The fact that some European countries are beginning to consider notice and notice as a valid response to illegal file sharing and that some ISPs in the U.S. have notice and notice agreements with rights owners serves to underscore that Canadian ISPs have been ahead of the curve for years in our approach to combatting Internet piracy.

The BCBC has proposed amendments to ensure that the obligations to deliver notices and retain data, and the possibility of cost recovery for doing so, come into effect at the same time. This is to ensure that ISPs have adequate time to design and implement the systems required to comply with these requirements—

[Craig McTaggart, Director, Broadband policy, Regulatory and Government Affairs, TELUS Communications]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Good morning, committee members. My name is Craig McTaggart and I am director of broadband policy at TELUS Communications Company.

Thank you for the opportunity to present TELUS’ views on BillC-32. TELUS considers Bill C-32 to be a strong and balanced attempt to update Canada’s copyright legislation for the digital age.

In my brief prepared remarks, I want to focus on the Supreme Court of Canada’s 2004 decision in the case of SOCAN v. CAIP, or the Tariff 22 case, because it established the legal principles for intermediary liability that Bill C-32 would at long last codify into statute. I do so because the decision and the principles it embodies highlight a crucial distinction between neutral, passive intermediaries, which are not legally responsible for what their users do online, and what have come to be known as the wealth destroyers, those who actively enable mass copyright infringement online.

Let me be clear right off the bat. TELUS recognizes that online piracy is a problem and encourages Parliament to arm rights holders with effective tools to directly pursue those who actively enable it. I emphasize “directly” to distinguish that approach from proposals by some rights holders to offload that responsibility onto third parties, such as ISPs. BillC-32 wisely limits the role of ISPs to assisting rights holders in the enforcement of their rights by putting Internet users on notice that a rights holder alleges that they have infringed copyright online and to retaining evidence to support subsequent legal action.

To understand why this regime is the wise choice, one has to go back at least to 2004 to see how the Supreme Court defined the scope of ISP liability for what happens on the Internet. The Tariff 22 decision established the principle that ISPs neither communicate nor authorize their customers to communicate copyright works on the Internet. The court interpreted paragraph 2.4(1)(b) of the Copyright Act, which says that persons who only provide the means of telecommunication necessary for another person to so communicate a work do not themselves communicate the work, nor are they parties to a communication. Rather, it is those who actually post copyright materials to the Internet who do the communicating.

The court described this regime in the following terms: “So long as an Internet intermediary does not itself engage in acts that relate to the content of the communication,”--that is, whose participation is content neutral--“but confines itself to providing 'a conduit' for information communicated by others, then it will fall within s. 2.4(1)(b)”, the general safe harbour for communications carriers.

The Supreme Court held that in the normal course, Internet access and hosting providers are not users of copyright rights, nor are they liable for the uses made by their customers. Like telephone companies, the court said, ISPs neither know what our customers do on the Internet, nor are we in a position to control it, nor, incidentally, does anyone want us to.

The Supreme Court went on to say that the attributes of mere conduits such as ISPs “include a lack of actual knowledge of the infringing contents, and the impracticality (both technical and economic) of monitoring the vast amount of material moving through the Internet, which is prodigious”. That was in 2004.

Internet traffic continues to grow at a compounded annual growth rate of about 45%. The court recognized the public policy rationale for immunizing content-neutral intermediaries from copyright liability as follows:

Nevertheless, by enacting s. 2.4(1)(b) of the Copyright Act, Parliament made a policy distinction between those who abuse the Internet to obtain “cheap music” and those who are part of the infrastructure of the Internet itself. It is clear that Parliament did not want copyright disputes between creators and users to be visited on the heads of the Internet intermediaries, whose continued expansion and development is considered vital to national economic growth.

These are the principles that underlie the ISP-specific provisions in Bill C-32, like its predecessors, and they remain the right principles today.

What has changed since 2004, of course, is an awareness of the need to equip rights holders with additional tools to make it easier for them to enforce their rights against, in the Supreme Court’s words, “those who abuse the Internet.”

TELUS would support amendments that would give rights holders more powerful tools to go after those who actively enable infringement, and also amendments that would prevent the bad guys from taking advantage of the legal safe harbours intended to protect only the good guys.

Like Canada's other major ISPs, TELUS has voluntarily performed notice and notice service for approximately nine years. The decision to formalize the notice and notice regime recognizes the legal reality that ISPs cannot be put in the position of having to decide whether content should be taken down, in the case of hosted content, or whether to discipline their customers based only on an allegation from a rights holder in the case of file sharing. Under Canadian legal values, only a court can determine whether a law has been broken.

I'll end it there.

[The Chair (Mr. Gordon Brown (Leeds—Grenville, CPC)), Conservative, Gord Brown]

Good morning, everyone. We'll call this 19th meeting of the special Legislative Committee on Bill C-32 to order.

I'd like to thank members of the committee who sent notes of condolence on the passing of my mother. I'm sorry I wasn't able to be here for the last couple of meetings, but we're back in action now.

Today, in the first hour, we have with us from TELUS Communications, Craig McTaggart; from Rogers Communications, Pam Dinsmore; and from Bell Canada, Suzanne Morin.

We will start with Mr. McTaggart for five minutes. You have the floor.

Protecting Children from Sexual Predators Act

[Rob Nicholson, Conservative, Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada]

moved that the Bill be concurred in.

(Motion agreed to)

Hon. Rob Nicholson moved that the Bill be read the third time and passed.

He said: Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to begin the third reading debate on Bill C-54, Protecting Children from Sexual Predators Act.

The bill recognizes that sexual exploitation of children causes irreparable harm to the youngest and most vulnerable members of our society. The bill recognizes that we as legislators not only have the opportunity but also the responsibility to do all that we can to protect children from this harm. No less important, the bill reflects the view held by most, if not all, Canadians that sexual exploitation of children is reprehensible and that the criminal law must treat all forms of child sexual exploitation as such, including by imposing penalties that fit the severity of this crime.

Bill C-54 therefore proposes Criminal Code amendments to ensure that all child sexual abuse penalties consistently reflect the serious nature of this crime as well as to prevent the commission of a sexual offence against a child.

The bill proposes to add seven new mandatory sentences to existing child sexual offences that do not currently impose minimum sentences. It proposes to increase the minimum sentences for seven child specific sexual offences that already have mandatory sentences and to impose two new sentences in the two new offences proposed by this bill. In this way, Bill C-54 would ensure that all sexual offences involving child victims are treated the same by requiring all convicted child sex offenders to serve a term of imprisonment. This would eliminate a distinction that currently exists between the 12 child specific sexual offences that already impose mandatory penalties and the seven additional sexual offences that still do not.

This existing distinction sends out the wrong message. In effect, it says to the majority of child sexual assault victims whose offenders are charged under the general sexual assault offence in section 271 that does not impose a minimum sentence that their victimization is less serious than that of the 19% of child victims whose offenders are charged under child specific sexual offences that do carry minimum penalties. This is just wrong and Bill C-54 would change this.

The bill would also increase seven existing mandatory minimum penalties in the child specific sexual offences to ensure that the minimums are commensurate not only with the offence in question, but are also coherent with those for other offences. For example, offences that carry a maximum penalty of 10 years imprisonment on indictment would have the same minimum penalty of one year.

Accordingly, the existing minimum for the offence of sexual interference in section 151 would be increased from 45 days to one year, which in turn would be consistent with the new minimum proposed in section 271, the general sexual assault offence that also carries a maximum penalty of 10 years on indictment.

During its review of Bill C-54 the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights heard from a range of witnesses, including victims' groups, police, academics, psychologists and criminal lawyers' associations. Some disagreed on Bill C-54's approach with minimum penalties. Some argued against minimum penalties. Some advocated for higher minimum penalties and some supported the reforms as proposed by this bill. But without exception they all agreed that child sexual abuse and the exploitation of children is a serious crime and must be treated as such. That is what this bill would do.

This bill proposes reforms to prevent the commission of sexual offences against children. It does so in two ways.

First, it proposes to create two new offences that target conduct that is preparatory to the commission of a contact sexual offence against a child.

The first offence would prohibit a person from making sexually explicit material available to a young person for the purpose of facilitating the commission of a sexual or abduction offence against that child. This offence recognizes that child sex offenders often give this type of material to their victims, often with a view to lowering their sexual inhibitions and making it easier to sexually assault them. If the material is child pornography, irrespective of the reason for which it may be given, this conduct is already prohibited. This bill would now prohibit providing other sexually explicit material for this specific purpose.

Our bill defines “sexually explicit material” in a manner that is consistent with its use and interpretation in the child pornography and voyeurism offences.

The proposed offence would apply to transmitting, making available, distributing or selling such material to a young person for this purpose and would apply whether it is provided directly in a face-to-face encounter or over the Internet.

The second new offence proposed is a prohibition against using telecommunications, such as the Internet, to agree or make arrangements with another person to commit one of the enumerated child sexual or abduction offences.

The existing prohibition in section 172.1 against using a computer system to communicate directly with a child for the purpose of facilitating the commission of one of the enumerated child sex and abduction offences only applies where the communication is between the perpetrator and the child. It does not apply to a situation where, for example, one adult uses the Internet to communicate with another adult to agree with or arrange to commit a sexual offence against a third person, the child. Thankfully, this bill would close that gap.

There was much discussion at the justice committee about this new offence as to what the term “telecommunications” includes. How would the offence work? Does its formulation deny an accused legitimate defences and even legitimize police entrapment? The answer to that of course is no.

The term “telecommunications” is defined in the federal Interpretation Act as “the emission, transmission or reception of signs, signals, writing, images, sounds or intelligence of any nature by any wire, cable, radio, optical or other electromagnetic system, or by any similar technical system”.

Using such a broad but clearly defined term would ensure that this new offence would apply to the same prohibited use of new technology that may be created after this offence is enacted.

The new offence would operate in a similar manner to the existing luring a child offence that is found in section 172.1 of the Criminal Code. It includes the same provisions about presumed or reasonable but mistaken belief in the age of the child.

Like the existing luring a child offence, the common law defence of entrapment would still be available to an accused in the appropriate circumstances.

Bill C-54 also proposes to require a court to consider prohibiting a child sex offender and a suspected child sex offender under section 810.1 from having both access and opportunity to sexually molest a child. It proposes to expand the list of sexual offences for which such prohibitions could be included to include four prostitution offences where the victim is a child.

Courts would also be specifically directed to consider imposing two new conditions prohibiting the offender from having any unsupervised access to a young person or from having any unsupervised use of the Internet.

These conditions would help prevent the offender from being placed in a situation where he or she has access and opportunity to sexually assault a child, and from having unfettered use of the Internet or other similar technologies that are instrumental in the commission of child pornography and other child sexual exploitative offences today.

Witnesses before the justice committee were generally quite supportive of these proposed preventive measures.

There was some discussion of what is meant by these provisions' use of the term “the Internet or other digital network”. Bill C-54's use of “the Internet or other digital network” is consistent with its commonly understood meaning. It is also used in Bill C-32, the Copyright Modernization Act, which is currently before Parliament.

Clearly, the intention here is to direct the court to consider imposing such a prohibition where it is appropriate in the circumstances of the accused and the safety needs of the community and, as specifically directed by this bill, to impose the prohibition subject to any appropriate conditions as determined by the court.

I am confident that this proposal strikes the right balance in providing sufficient clarity and needed flexibility to enable the courts to craft a clear and understandable prohibition with any applicable conditions warranted by the circumstances of each case.

This is an important step forward in the protection of children in this country, and I am asking the House to pass this bill as rapidly as possible.