Thank you, Madam Chair.
I want to thank the committee for indulging me today as well.
This amendment goes to something that I have been working on since I've been elected, essentially trying to bring to light the situation of a company in Canada called MindGeek, which claims to be one of the largest Internet companies in the world. They have 4.5 trillion individual hits on their website every month. That's more than Google. That's more than Facebook combined.
If this bill is attempting to hold the web giants accountable, this kind of amendment is precisely what a bill that's seeking to hold web giants accountable ought to be doing.
This company, MindGeek, and its subsidiary, Pornhub, have recently been in the news as being extremely exploitative of both youth and women. This has been something that has been brought to the attention of the government. We have had an entire ethics committee study on this as well. Fourteen recommendations have come out of that ethics committee study. The report, I would point out, was unanimously adopted by the ethics committee.
One of those things would be to ensure that sexually explicit content isn't falling into the hands of children. That is what my amendment seeks to pursue, to get the CRTC to prevent that from happening.
The other thing that comes up often when dealing with the company MindGeek is just how racist and misogynist this company is, given the fact that they have entire genres dedicated to sexually explicit material that is specifically violent, specifically racist, specifically sexist, specifically degrading and specifically torture. These aren't things that are side issues. The content is explicitly for that very reason. These are genre topics that are pursued by this particular company. They are exploiting women and children in order to gain commercial interest in this and make money off of it.
I would suggest that these amendments would be a small step in the right direction. I look forward to having the support of this committee to get these amendments passed.