Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Paul Gillespie. I'm the president of the Kids' Internet Safety Alliance, KINSA. I'd like to speak for a moment or two on part 2, regarding amendments to the Criminal Code and issues in relation to children and the child exploitation that occurs on the Internet.
KINSA helps to protect, rescue, and heal child victims of abuse whose images are shared on the Internet. We accomplish this by helping to train police officers from developing nations on how to be better cyber cops, basically.
We have to understand and get our heads around the fact that this is basically community policing. We have one global community of offenders and we have one global community of law enforcement officers. Unfortunately, there are many more bad guys than there are good guys out there.
It is extremely expensive to hire a police officer in Canada and ask him to be a cyber cop in Canada, because that's just not possible. So we help to train officers who are already cyber cops in places such as Poland, Romania, Brazil, Indonesia, and Africa. We give them the final tools to add to their arsenal so that they know exactly how to investigate these specific offences and thus make a difference in the lives of children. One of our trainees from Brazil was involved in the identification and rescue of ten children down in Tracyville, New Brunswick, and the arrest of a fellow by the name of Michael Gary Gilbert.
We need to understand this global community. The reason I bring this up is that the new offences involving offenders who communicate with each other for the purpose of abusing a child or who conspire to abuse or teach each other.... This is a very common occurrence on the Internet. As these global networks of criminals are now more exposed as we have more law enforcement officers working together cooperatively with Interpol, the FBI, and the RCMP, this is a very important piece of legislation that will allow us, as more intelligence comes in, to have a greater effect on keeping children safe and identifying the offenders and learning more about their methods.
Overall, on behalf of KINSA, Kim Chisholm and I would like to say that we absolutely support this legislation and the direction the government is moving in. Anything that can be done to help keep children safe is simply a good thing.
That's all I have to say. Thank you.