Information & Ethics Committee on Feb. 13th, 2007

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington, ON]

Thank you.

My question is also for Mr. Sullivan. It seems to me, when discussing child pornography, we're really dealing with two distinct offences. One is the original violation, which I guess could be generally characterized as a form of rape; and the second is the continued possession and circulation of the images after the fact. Of course, both are affronts to basic human dignity, but it seems to me they are different, in the same sense that robbery, which would be the homologue to the first of the offences, is distinct from possession of stolen property after the fact of the original offence.

In trying to think how to deal at a practical level with the second of the two offences, given that the first could have occurred at some point in the past, it might be impossible to identify the person to whom the violation occurred, and they may be deceased, for that matter. There is a very high probability that the original offence occurred outside of Canada—probably likelier than not, I suppose, as a statistical matter. I don't know that for sure, but it seems likely. Given that, if the second offence is treated as a form of possession of stolen property, it seems to me there is a logical pattern for dealing with it.

I noticed, actually, following this thought along, that you had made reference to the example of pawnshops and the requirements that are placed upon pawnshops. If we use the pawnshop as the analogy to an Internet service provider, I wonder if there is some direction there as to how the law ought to be recrafted in order to ensure some sort of more effective method of enforcing efforts to remove these images and their circulation.

[Steve Sullivan]

Yes. There are jurisdictions—certainly Ontario is one, and my friend can speak to others—where pawnshops are required to track the customers and the merchandise, and law enforcement can have access to that to try to trace back to who had the stolen property and maybe where it came from, and go from there. I think there is probably some guidance there.

I would say one thing about the difference between stolen property and child pornography, even if it is just possessing the photos. From our perspective, and I think from the victim's perspective, that is not just a form of possession; it is a form of abuse that someone is using those images of those children for that person's own satisfaction. We know that some offenders use it to break down the barriers of other children, to show them that maybe this is kind of normal and then facilitate their own abuse.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington, ON]

That would seem to be a separate offence in addition to the basic possession, I would think.

[Steve Sullivan]

But I speak of that because to find out those people who possess that stuff may also prevent the abuse of other children. That heightens why it is especially important.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington, ON]

Thank you.

[Krista Gray-Donald, Director of Research, Canadian Resource Centre for Victims of Crime]

Perhaps I might speak to that.

There was an example in Gatineau this fall where police had identified someone who was distributing child pornography on the Internet, and when they were able to ascertain who it was, they did find that he was indeed abusing a child. So had they been denied the opportunity to have his information for just the possession of child pornography, they potentially would have missed the fact that this child was also being abused.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington, ON]

Presumably, one can trace backwards. Assuming that the offence or the abuse is still ongoing, as opposed to something that occurred in the past, even if it's occurring outside of Canada, if we were able to get the information in an expeditious manner, that might actually help in tracing it backwards to other jurisdictions. Would that be correct?

[Steve Sullivan]

There is, and my friend can speak to this perhaps.

I know the Toronto Police Service has been very active in trying to track back through image analysis. You may remember the case of images they released, taking out the young girl's image but showing a hotel room or amusement park where she was being abused, and it actually led back to Disney and a hotel there. It turns out she'd had a rescue, but there is a lot of work being done by law enforcement, and some groundbreaking stuff here in Canada I think to track back.

One of the goals—and one of my friends spoke to it—is protecting the public, identifying these kids and rescuing them. It is not just about putting the bad guys away; it is about finding these kids who are being abused. So there is a lot of excellent work being done in that area.

[The Chair, Liberal, Tom Wappel]

Thank you, Mr. Reid.

Welcome, Ms. Bonsant. You have five minutes.

[France Bonsant, Bloc, Compton—Stanstead, QC]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Sullivan, I am going to tell you about the child protection measures we have in the province of Quebec. I am not a lawyer, but these things are automatically protected on the Internet.

I understand that you are trying to eliminate Internet pornography. The problem does not exist solely in Canada but also at the international level. We should target all countries and tell them that they should start protecting their children. There is a lot of child pornography.

We are also hearing about soldier children who are wasting their life because they don't know anything else.

Your mandate is not limited to the Internet; it has an international scope. I wish you good luck, because we have many perverts in Canada who are going abroad to exploit children.

It is one thing to arrest those who are producing that kind of pornography on the Internet, but what do you do against the customers who download it and enjoy it? There are customers for that kind of pornography. If there is a demand, it is because there are customers. You should not only arrest the producers, but also the customers.

[Steve Sullivan]

That's absolutely the case. I agree with you on your first point about this being an international problem; we're certainly not naive about this being a Canadian problem. In cases like the one last week, when this huge child pornography ring was busted and our law enforcement was given the addresses--depending on what reports you read--of a number of Canadians, it's important that ISPs cooperate, but I do recognize that it's an international challenge. Some countries don't do very much against the abuse of children, if not actually promoting it.

I agree with you about doing more than just catching the bad guys. Certainly our interest is in law enforcement efforts to identify and rescue children. I raised the issue of the Privacy Commissioner and if there's a role for her office in doing some research into the responsibility or ways for ISPs, when we identify a particular child, to take the child's image off their site, or their network, at least. I agree there's so much more to be done than just what we're talking about here today. It's a huge problem. I don't want to pretend to be naive about the solutions; I think this is one part of it, but there's much more work to be done.

[France Bonsant, Bloc, Compton—Stanstead, QC]

I find it terrible that we have to pass laws to protect our children because they are gifts from Heaven. It is a simple message to transmit to everyone.

I was a member of the Commission on Maher Arar. I have some difficulty with personal information requests. I know that some police officers do an excellent job—I have a brother who is a policeman— but there are others that are not very competent. In the case of Maher Arar, as they could not find all the personal information they were looking for, they fabricated some. I am rather emotional about it. If we make it too easy to access personal information, there might be some exceptional cases of abuse.

Law enforcement and some other people have access to information on divorces. There was a case in Montreal where a police officer managed to find his wife and gunned her down. I must admit that this case is extreme. However, we should be very careful when we give access to personal information because victims are women most of the time. The government wants to scrap the long-gun registry, but in cases of domestic disturbance, it is very important to know if there is a rifle in the home.

We should be very careful when personal information is requested on some people. I would like to know your opinion on this.

[Clayton Pecknold]

Thank you.

I have a point of clarification on the translation. You referred to a commission. Are you talking about the Arar report?

[France Bonsant, Bloc, Compton—Stanstead, QC]

Yes.

[Clayton Pecknold]

I have a few comments. First of all, I don't suggest you intended to imply this, but I don't believe the commissioner found in that inquiry that any information was manufactured by the RCMP.

[France Bonsant, Bloc, Compton—Stanstead, QC]

You should read the book.

[Clayton Pecknold]

In any event, I will say that a number of mechanisms are in place for us to deal with breaches of our policies, breaches of our laws, and breaches of our internal ethics and standards. Yes, there are abuses on occasion, and we take them very seriously as police leaders and police managers. We have a number of mechanisms of oversight and a number of complaint routes. We will prosecute criminally; I myself have prosecuted officers for breaches of privacy. Your concern is valid, Madam, but we take that very seriously. However, there is also a legitimate need for us to investigate the law and obtain information according to law and in an appropriate manner.

[The Chair, Liberal, Tom Wappel]

Merci, Madame.

I've been fairly lenient, but I want to remind committee members that we're reviewing PIPEDA, the specific legislation, and we're talking about specific suggestions with respect to specific legislation, as opposed to other issues like private member's bills and the Maher Arar commission. I'd ask us to focus on PIPEDA if we could.

I'm going to Mr. Stanton, followed by Mr. Pearson, followed by Mr. Van Kesteren.

[Bruce Stanton, Conservative, Simcoe North, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to our panel this morning. It's been very insightful for our study of PIPEDA.

My question actually, first, is to our representatives from the Insurance Brokers Association, and I'll direct it to Mr. Kimball. The third item you talked about in the three areas, around which you had some suggestions that you touched on briefly, was the issue around the duty to notify. And of course that issue was in the news quite regularly several weeks ago as it related to CIBC, Winners, and so on. In your comments you suggested that this would be something that would be problematic to regulate, but you didn't go much further in your comments. I wonder if you could just expand on what your thoughts are about this duty to notify.

This is a topic that has come up in the course of our testimony and there have been some suggestions offered. Are you saying, or would you be able to state for the record, that you'd like things to remain status quo, as it relates to PIPEDA, on this issue of the duty to notify?

[Robert Kimball]

Thank you for the question.

Yes, we would like things to remain, but I'll back up and qualify this.

As insurance brokers, we look to try to protect our clients. If there is a breach to any of our clients, we certainly want to make sure that they are well aware of it. British Columbia currently, I believe, has something that is very workable. What they're saying there is they want to be able to assess what the breach was, find out who was affected, make sure they contact those affected people, and learn about and mitigate any possibility of these breaches continuing in the future.

We find that to be a good common sense approach. Certainly if people's information has been breached, absolutely the insurance brokers across Canada want to make sure those people are made aware of the breach and are able to handle it in the most appropriate way.

We do not feel that it may be in the best interest to worry all of your clients if, for instance, you happen to have a rock thrown through the front window of your business and it sets off your alarm and there was absolutely no breach into your office. You wouldn't notify all those clients and unduly worry them. If there was an actual possibility that information got out, insurance brokers around Canada would want to make sure that those affected clients were definitely notified. We're very pro that.

[Bruce Stanton, Conservative, Simcoe North, ON]

Would you then say that this approach taken by B.C. that leaves this really in the hands, in your case, of the broker, but let's say of the business that's so affected, and that places the onus on them to do the assessment, determine who was affected by this breach, and then implement some notification procedure would be quite acceptable and quite workable?

[Robert Kimball]

Our understanding is that it would probably be best. The business would probably have the best handle on who was affected and what the effect was.

As I said before, our business is protection of our clients. We do it in every policy we have out there. Their privacy is absolutely no different, so we would want to make sure those people were made aware. We feel that's probably the best place to leave it.

[Bruce Stanton, Conservative, Simcoe North, ON]

Just to finish up on that point, it would appear currently in PIPEDA that there isn't really a direction or a model or a suggested procedure for these kinds of situations. There is extensive verbiage around where disclosure can be provided without consent and so on, but we don't really set that out. At least, I've scanned through and I can't locate anything in terms of pointing to any specific language in PIPEDA that really talks about this duty to notify, from what I could see.

What you're suggesting here and what other witnesses have suggested would in fact be an addition either in schedule 1 or in the act itself to provide some guidance for these types of circumstances.

Would that be your summation?

[Robert Kimball]

I'll ask Mr. Masnyk if he could speak to that.

[Steve Masnyk]

I think the wording found in the B.C. model is--how can I put it?--probably the least offensive.