What I thought I'd like to do, picking up some of what I'm sure Mr. Dechert would appreciate, is that since PV-3, PV-4, and PV-5 speak to the same problem, I'll speak to it as a policy problem. You can take it from me that amendments PV-3, PV-4, and PV-5 speak to this policy problem. I will attempt not to go over a minute, and I won't try to accumulate it to three minutes. That's my intention.
What we have here again, the problem that we've referred to in the previous two attempts on PV-1, PV-2, and also NDP-1, is that the bill is overly broad. The way it's drafted, it could ensnare activities that are not within the scope of the purpose of the bill. So we don't, for instance, want to criminalize journalists if they are publishing an image that's in the public interest, if it's the kind of normal operation of journalists to publish images of, for instance, public figures, celebrities. That's not cyberbullying. We may have other public policy reasons for why we don't like that behaviour, but that's not the intent of the act.
This was identified by the Canadian Bar Association in their brief, that the way that Bill C-13 is currently drafted we could actually create a chill in media that when images are in the public interest they can't be published for fear of cyberbullying. The way in which amendments PV-3, PV-4, and PV-5 are drafted is to ensure that no person shall be convicted of an offence under this section, if they're essentially doing it as part and parcel of what we would consider normal journalism. We may not enjoy seeing those images. Goodness knows, I'd have been happy never to have seen Rob Ford smoking crack in his basement. But that kind of image, not that it was an intimate image.... But you can see the direction of the thought.
We really don't intend under this bill to criminalize journalists, and those amendments fix that.