Justice Committee on Nov. 7th, 2024

[An hon. member]

[Inaudible—Editor]

[Larry Brock, Conservative, Brantford—Brant, ON]

I have the floor.

[Chris Bittle, Liberal, St. Catharines, ON]

Point out the point of order. How hypocritical you are. You're a hypocrite. Point out the point of order.

[Larry Brock, Conservative, Brantford—Brant, ON]

—this individual, Mr. Bittle, is to St. Catharines, with respect to victims of sexual violence.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lena Metlege Diab]

Okay.

[Chris Bittle, Liberal, St. Catharines, ON]

I have a point of order.

He's sticking his middle finger out at me. That's shocking.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lena Metlege Diab]

I think it's getting a little heated in here. I've heard some language and comments that are not, in my opinion, parliamentary.

I'm going to suspend for two minutes to give you a cooling break.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lena Metlege Diab]

Members, we can resume now.

Mr. Brock, please proceed.

Are you reading from the documents that were shared?

[Larry Brock, Conservative, Brantford—Brant, ON]

What I intend on doing is to read testimony from various victims of sexual abuse in this particular area who have testified at various committees.

I would hope, Madam Chair, and my expectation is that given the sensitive nature of what I'm about to read out, the Liberal members would show a decorum of respect, not belittle what I have to say and not interrupt what I have to say, because these are the words of lived survivors who are continually subjected to abuse by all of those individuals worldwide who look for this type of filth.

This victim was known as Witness 2. She gave testimony at the ethics committee on February 19, 2021:

I'm now 19 years old. I was 17 when videos of me on Pornhub came to my knowledge, and I was only 15 in the videos they've been profiting from.

When I was 15, I was extorted by a man who was unknown at the time into sending massive amounts of videos and images of me. He would tell me what I needed to do, for how long and even as far as what positions I had to be in. There were things he even asked me to do that were so disturbing that I cut contact with him, even though I was scared to do that.

I eventually found out that I wasn't the only one this had happened to because I was sent a link to a Tumblr account that was selling Dropbox files of me and hundreds of girls so other people could use our exploitation to make fake accounts to sell to men online who thought they were really speaking to us.

It's not something that anybody wants to hear, but I think it's important you understand the type of stuff I was subjected to that night and how depraved the man behind it was, so you can truly understand what Pornhub's been profiting from. There made me—

I'm reading her words:

—send videos of vaginal and anal masturbation, videos of me removing my clothes, videos of me spitting on myself and more. The videos that made me quit contact was when they went on to ask me to eat my own feces and drink my own urine. Although the videos that I did were embarrassing enough, I feel more sad for the girls who did the rest and got their footage uploaded to Pornhub.

I contacted the police when I found the site, but their only help for me was to delete my social media. From there a girl who I thought was my friend started circulating images of me, even going as far as to upload them on my 17th birthday and tagging me in them. I started getting so much abuse and harassment from people who lived close to me, and then in September 2018, someone from my city posted a video of me to Snapchat, which was screen recorded from Pornhub. This was the first time I had any knowledge of being on their site.

During this time, I stopped eating and leaving the house, and I was even considering suicide. I started getting hundreds of follow requests daily on my social media accounts and at least 50 messages a day sending me links of videos of me on Pornhub. That's when I realized that my name and social media had been posted alongside the videos. Some of those people were respectable and reported them when I told them I was only 15, but the majority of them enjoyed it even more.

It was a really scary time, and it seemed to just get worse and worse. A lot of the men felt entitled to me once they'd seen me on Pornhub. When I didn't want to speak to them, they would try to blackmail me or threaten me even more. Even now, I have some of the same people from 2018 still trying to contact me.

Pornhub would remove my videos once I found them, but I believe that's only because I provided a police reference code and because I mentioned suicide. I think they knew all too well that another death at their hands wouldn't look too good. Every time they took it down, they also allowed more and more videos of me to be reuploaded. The videos would get hundreds of thousands of views and contained my personal information, including my address and my family's social media.

One of the worst days was when their viewers started sending videos to my mum and dad. I barely speak to my dad, so to know he saw that video made it really hard for me to continue to visit him and feel normal.

Videos of me being on Pornhub has affected my life so much to the point that I don't leave my house anymore. I stopped being able to work because I was so scared to be out in public around other people. I feel like everyone who looks at me is looking at those videos. Because I couldn't work, I started my own business so I could stay in my bedroom where I felt safe, but even then, Pornhub's viewers started sending my customers the videos of me and making fake accounts of me.

To see Corey Urman smile and explain that he uses aliases to protect his identity, when he has the choice to post or not to post, is disgusting, because I had no choice about being uploaded to Pornhub and having my personal details exposed to the world. Hearing about Mr. Antoon buying his third property with the money he made from our exploitation but refusing to speak about how much he he earns in a year was more than frustrating, because I wake up every day in the same room where my exploitation took place. I don't have the choice of simply going to another property to escape from that.

My anxiety got so bad to the point where I couldn't eat at all, and I dropped down to only 80 pounds. I still struggle to manage to eat properly to this day, causing me to struggle with not only health issues but body dysmorphia. So many of their viewers commented on my body, discussing whether it was fake or real, messaging me to insult me or to talk how much they loved my small 15-year-old frame.

I had a lot of friendships that had to come to an end because I refused to go out and see them. I didn't want to go to parties or out in public, because being around people makes me have panic attacks. Going to the shops with my mum makes me have panic attacks, even going on public transport does. I even had someone turn up outside my house and take some pictures of my door, telling me that they'd found me on Pornhub and calling me by my name, which isn't on my social media. It's only on Pornhub. It just gave me more reasons not to go outside.

Pornhub always told me that I needed a link to get the videos removed. It was difficult because I couldn't always find the videos that were being sent to me. When I started questioning Pornhub on why they allowed anyone to just upload anything, they just told me that I needed to upload my videos to their third party site. I told them that not only was it illegal for me to do this, but it was illegal for them to ask me to do this because it's child porn and I'm not even allowed to have the content of myself. I told them there was nothing I could do, I felt suicidal and I was even considering getting legal advice if it didn't stop. They ignored me, and I never contacted them again.

They say they tried to tell me there was nothing they could do without a link, but that was a flat-out lie, given the fact that as soon as they were sent cease and desist letters, all footage of me was removed from their site straight away.

Also for them to say they've been forever “evolving” and the takedown of a million videos was just another step forward is debatable, because it's either one of two options. Option one, Pornhub honestly never thought of the idea to make verification needed to upload videos, which to me just clearly shows a lack of common sense and thought capacity to safeguard and run a business of this size. Option two was that they did think about the idea and they chose to ignore it for more money. Given that I asked them why they don't regulate this back in 2019 proves they were already suggested this idea by me, one of their victims, and they chose to just ignore it.

I feel that anyone I come into contact with has either seen the videos or will find them eventually. No one seems to believe I was a child because they tell me Pornhub is 18+ so you can't be underage.

There was a time when I tried to take my own life. Luckily, it wasn't successful. I now have people around me who are really supportive, but not all of Pornhub's victims have been so lucky and not all of Pornhub's victims have had the same support. I don't understand how many women's lives have to end or be ruined before there is accountability for what they've done.

Thank you.

That person is simply known as Witness 2. What a shame it is that this witness is not here in person to give us viva voce evidence, with the committee members able to help her through this process in order to understand how we can improve legislation so that other would-be victims do not fall into the same trap. It is shameful, and I'm very much disappointed in this committee.

I'll move to Witness 1, who also testified on February 19, 2021.

She said:

When I was 24, I met someone I thought was a really nice guy. I married him, and as soon as he thought I was stuck, he stopped being nice pretty quickly. In April 2020, I moved away from our home to be safe, and obviously, we're not together anymore.

During our relationship, I had let him take some pictures. I was uncomfortable at first, because I had never been in any picture like that, but I trusted him and I wanted to keep him happy. It wasn't until August of 2020 that I discovered those private photos had been uploaded to porn sites, including Pornhub.

I was upset about the photos, but it was about to get worse. Finding the photos led me to a video. I did not know the video existed. I found out about it by watching it on Pornhub. In the title of the video, it says I'm sleeping. The tags include “sleeping” and “sleeping pills”. Whether I was asleep or drugged is impossible to know after the fact, but what is clear in the video is that I am not conscious and there is nothing to suggest consent. The video is clearly homemade and was uploaded by an anonymous email address. This is the content that the Pornhub moderators supposedly viewed and decided belonged on their porn site. My video had been uploaded in August of 2017, so by the time I found it, it had been active on Pornhub for over three years, and I had no idea.

I didn't try to get the video down right away because I showed it to the police the next morning, and they told me to leave everything until they were done with it. However, sometime between August 16 and 19, the Pornhub video became no longer playable. It said “technical difficulties”. About that same time, I noticed that Pornhub was pulling their tags that directly indicated non-consensual content. For example, if you searched “sleeping pills” in early September, it didn't return any results. This was, of course, not the case in mid-August, so my best theory is that the video disappeared as they tried to clean up those kinds of tags.

In all that time, the video did not get flagged or removed. The viewers, rather than being turned away by sexual assault videos, were actively searching out that content. The tags made this possible, and they knew what they were watching before they clicked. It is a profound betrayal to know that thousands of men saw your assault and not only did nothing to flag it but actively sought it out and enjoyed it.

On Pornhub, there is a comment section, so the night I found my video, I also got to read a man describe in graphic physical detail just how much he enjoyed himself watching it. On another site, thousands of men watched my video and instead of flagging it, they awarded it top-rated for a certain body part. This video is not a one-off that slipped through a filter. Sexual assault is not an anomaly on the porn sites; it is a genre. This leaves little incentive for these sites to moderate such content.

To give an idea of the scope of the spread, as of early January 2021—after the December purge, and after the RCMP had removed a bunch for me—googling the name of my Pornhub video still returned over 1,900 results. One cause of the spread is, of course, users downloading it and reuploading it. There are definitely some of these floating around, but the most significant way my video was spread was through links. MindGeek did this by putting links to my Pornhub video on their other sites as a cheap way of adding content to those sites. Many of the other third party sites also use this method, so they too linked to my video on Pornhub. Of the 1,900 search results, Pornhub is the source for all of them.

The upside with linking is that when the video is removed from Pornhub, it's not playable on these other sites either. The downside is that Pornhub creates a thumbnail image file for all the videos uploaded to its site, and this image can be downloaded even if the video is only a link. There are still quite a few of these thumbnails on porn sites and in search engine caches. The thumbnail is still a picture of me naked. I don't want it on the Internet. Also, when Pornhub deleted my video, they didn't delete any of the data surrounding it like the title and the username. That is also a problem.

I contacted Pornhub in January to get them to remove the data and the thumbnails associated with their site. At first they pretended not to know what I was talking about. I sent them all the information again. They sent me a link to Google and told me to go do it myself. After a month and a half and eight emails, Pornhub has removed some of the data and thumbnails that were associated with their site, and they indexed a few things on one search engine that's still not all gone. I think they're just ignoring me now.

I also asked them for help in removing the thumbnails and the content that spread from Pornhub to these other sites. They told me that they can't remove their content from the other sites it spreads to. However, they have an entire program where they proactively do exactly that for their exclusive model content. They advertise it. They monitor the Internet for where these videos spread, they take them down for them and they even pay them a bonus. All I'm asking is that they pretend to care as much about their non-consensual content as they do about their paid, exclusive content.

Nothing will ever be able to undo what has been done. At this point, I just want to be off the Internet.

Thanks to Pornhub, today is day 1,292 that I have been naked on these porn sites.

We can certainly add another two years' worth to that particular statistic. Again, I'm disappointed that Witness 1 was denied the opportunity of testifying at this committee.

I'll move to an identifiable victim. Her name is Ms. Victoria Galy. She also testified at the ethics committee on February 19, 2021. She said:

Thank you.

First, thank you for having me and for allowing me to participate. My statement is a little lengthy. I'll try to get through it as fast as I can and not take up too much of your time.

My name is Victoria Galy. I live in Hendersonville, Tennessee. I'm a victim of sex trafficking under the legal definition in Tennessee in the United States. I've had numerous non-consensual pornographic images and videos of me posted on Pornhub.com.

Beginning in 2018, I found the videos and reported them to Pornhub. Many of the videos were labelled “teen” and were clearly of a person who was drugged and/or intoxicated, as evidenced by the occurrences in the videos. Most of these videos were made by an ex of mine on a trip we took to Las Vegas, Nevada.

Upon finding these videos in 2018, the first thing I tried to do was to flag them. This led me nowhere. The videos were not removed. The next thing I tried to do was to report the videos. I found out that you had to create an account in order to do so. I had to provide my full name and my email address. I was hesitant, as I wasn't the type of person who watched porn or subscribed to anything like that. I didn't really want my name or my email address associated with it. However, I reluctantly set up the account and began to try to report the videos.

In 2018 I reported approximately 30 videos. Only three of those videos were removed at that time. For the remaining videos, I was told that I needed to submit a DMCA takedown notice to Pornhub before they would remove them. I wasn't familiar with what that meant or even what a DMCA takedown notice was.

As a result of the initial trauma in finding these videos, I suffered great emotional distress, resulting in what my doctor has now defined as a dissociative condition wherein I basically removed the memory of these videos and events from my present recollection, as it was too painful for me to process. It's called dissociative amnesia. People who suffer from this escape reality in ways that are involuntary and unhealthy, which causes problems with functioning in everyday life. This was obvious in my behaviour and my interactions with friends, family and co-workers from 2018 to 2020. I completely lost my self-worth and was engaging in risky behaviour that was very different from my typical self prior to 2018.

It wasn't until the summer of 2020, when these flashbacks and memories began to return, that I sought treatment with a psychiatrist and a sexual abuse trauma therapist. That is when I received my diagnosis and began taking medication for depression and PTSD. I have been undergoing cognitive processing therapy and making leaps and bounds in my recovery, but this is the hardest thing I've ever had to face in my life.

At times I was suicidal. After 16 years with one law firm as a paralegal, I had to take a leave of absence as I could no longer function on a daily basis nor make it through even one day at work. I left my house. I moved in with my mother for approximately four weeks so she could help me care for my children. I have a 16-year-old son and a seven-year-old daughter with Down syndrome. I also suffered from severe anxiety and fear. I didn't feel safe. I was having intense nightmares, irritability, anger, embarrassment and such physical symptoms as pounding heart, nausea, etc. I lost at least 20 to 30 pounds. I couldn't eat. I was very sick.

In August of 2020, when my memories began to return, I began contacting Pornhub again regarding these videos. Upon visiting their website, I found that there had been many more videos made over that two- to three-year period. I reported many videos, including the ones claimed by Vicky Lust. There were approximately 60 to 65 videos. These were made by my ex, Brandon. Some of the videos were removed, but the ones that were claimed by Vicky Lust were not. I was told that they were claimed by a verified model and that they would not remove them. I sent them numerous emails explaining that the videos were of me and my ex, Brandon, but they refused to listen. I sent them photos of my birthmark, pointed out that I said Brandon's name in at least one of the videos, and even submitted photos of my various body parts to prove that it was me. They still refused to remove them.

I contacted their legal department directly through the email [email protected], providing a clear PowerPoint presentation detailing why it was me in the videos and not the couple claiming them—who I found out later was in Helsinki, Finland—named Laura and Lauri. I received no response to that email.

In addition to the clear PowerPoint presentation that was provided to them, the comments that were posted and deleted on the Vicky Lust videos evidenced their non-consensual nature. It was not until after December 2020, when I filed a civil lawsuit against them pro se, I emailed them a copy and the article came out in The New York Times titled “The Children of Pornhub”, that they have now, at least temporarily, suspended these videos. They are of course all over the Internet now, having been downloaded by who knows how many users, and on a plethora of other websites. I will never be able to remove these videos. There were over eight million views just on Pornhub alone. To think of the amount of money that Pornhub has made off my trauma, date rape and sexual exploitation makes me sick to my stomach.

On Tuesday of this week, Chantelle Pittarelli, the director of legal and business affairs, finally responded to my emails. He or she refused to admit that it was me in the videos, but noted that they had decided at this time, due to the seriousness of my allegations, to delete the Vicky Lust account and that they fingerprinted the content to prevent future uploads to their site.

This, however, does nothing to remove them from the other sites all over the Internet, nor take back any of the destruction that this has caused in my life. Had they done this back in 2018 when I first contacted them, my life would look much different now. They never cared about my well-being, and they've profited from these illegal activities. I've had Facebook friends send me messages with links stating things like “Vicky, this looks like you”. I've been stopped at my home by an unknown man on at least two occasions and even propositioned by a stranger on Facebook asking if I had considered his offer to make videos. When I asked him, “What videos?”, as I did not know this man nor to what offer he was referring, he never responded.

Not only does Pornhub make it difficult or impossible to get these non-consensual videos removed, they make it difficult to sue them, insisting that I serve them with my lawsuit in Cyprus. Having been a paralegal for over 16 years, I've familiarized myself somewhat with the Hague Convention and have initiated service of process by postal means, as allowed under the convention for Cyprus residents. However, the typical victim would not have such means or familiarity.

Pornhub has training blogs and articles for teaching models and or perpetrators at being successful on their platform. They recommend virtual private networks and the best editing apps to use and so on, which makes it more difficult for victims to prove their cases and get justice. In my particular case, my ex used a fake foreskin to appear uncircumcised in the videos, which caused the police department to not believe me and the district attorney to decline prosecution, despite me later providing clear evidence of this. Pornhub, to this day, has active videos showing this “toy” being used, which only educates perpetrators in the ways of avoiding detection by authorities.

As stated in the New York Times article that I mentioned, I too feel like Pornhub has become my human trafficker, and they have been relentless in doing so. The background profile photo for Vicky Lust prior to August 2020, when I reported it to the police, was a full-body photo of me, naked, with only a mask across my nose and part of my eyes, similar to a Mardi Gras mask. I have been recognized in public by many people who wouldn't say from where it was and tormented emotionally.

If it weren't for the help of my amazing therapist and her cognitive processing therapy, I would not be here before you today, but I refuse to be a victim any further. I will advocate for myself and for all the other victims who may not be able to or may not want to stand up, or who may have committed suicide, as we will never know. For me personally, I came very close to suicide, and I've never been so broken as I have been throughout this process.

I've been forced to stand up alone and fight Pornhub, so when I heard about your inquiry into the ethics of this company, I gladly came forward, willing to testify openly about my situation. I appreciate being allowed to participate in this process and the possibility of effecting change and/or holding this company accountable.

Thank you for hearing from me.

Again, it's too bad that Victoria Galy was denied the opportunity of testifying at this committee.

Another victim who testified at ethics identified herself as Ms. Serena Fleites. She said:

I grew up in a small town in the mountains, and I didn't have Wi-Fi or really even electricity up there. I never had an iPod or a phone or access to the Internet before I moved to the city. The school there was really small, too. There was only one school in the entire town, pre-K to grade 8. That was the school I grew up at. Then, when I moved to Bakersfield, there were 3,500 kids at one school and it was only two grades. I went from having five kids in my class all day to having 30 kids in a class, eight different classes in a day. It was all super new to me.

I never had a crush or a boyfriend or a first kiss or anything like that before, so I was picked on quite a bit for the first couple of weeks that I was attending school. They would make fun of me for not being up to date with everything. Being from the mountains, I didn't know the slang and I didn't know what was popular. And so, when a guy finally did take notice of me and was interested in me—or I thought he was interested in me—we started my first relationship.

After a while of being in a relationship with him, his friends would come up to us at school during the lunch break and ask us a bunch of questions and try to pressure me into doing different things like kissing him—when I'd never had my first kiss before—and just saying all sorts of things.

One night—this is during the last semester of my grade 7 year—the boy I was dating at the time asked me to send him a video of myself. I didn't really understand what he meant at first. He had sent me a video from Pornhub of a girl undressing herself and just basically showing herself off to the camera. He asked me to do that and I told him I wasn't really comfortable, so he continued to ask me every night after we got back from school. I had gotten my first iPod at this point and I'd gotten a messenger app on it called Kik to talk to people at school.

He would message me on that app every night after school, asking me to send the video, and I always told him no, I wasn't comfortable doing that, I didn't even know what to do. And he's like, “It's perfectly fine, you know. Everybody does it. Everybody our age is doing that. If we're really in a relationship, if you truly loved me, then you would send me something like that.” I still, for a while, told him no. I wasn't really comfortable doing that. After a couple of weeks of it, he was like, “Fine then. You know what? This isn't even a real relationship. I don't know why I continue to bother you. If you're not even willing to send me something that I'm going to send you, then it will be over, whatever, unless you're going to send it and then I'll send you one, too.”

And so I took a quick little video, like a minute long, and I sent it to him, and for the first couple of days afterwards I didn't notice any difference. But then his friend group started coming up to us during lunch and making little comments about my body and how I was a freak and about how they wish their girlfriends would do stuff like I do. And so, at that point, I was getting upset, because I had a feeling that he had shown it to them, when he had told me that he would delete it right afterwards.

After that, I started noticing even more kids at school would look at me or make little comments to me. That was about a week and a half, two weeks, after I had first sent it. That was when I found out that it had been sent around to most of the school. After that, summer break happened. I had broken up with him because I did find out he had sent it to his friends and his friends sent it to their friends, who then sent it to their friends. And so, it went around the entire school and all the neighbouring schools.

During the summer break, before grade 8, we moved, so I thought things would be better. At that point, I didn't know that other people had seen it, or that it had been posted online. When I started at the new school, after about two weeks of being there, somebody sent me a link through Kik. Somebody who made an anonymous account sent me a link through Kik. It was the video I had sent to my ex-boyfriend. It had been posted on Pornhub with the caption “13-year-old brunette shows off for the camera”.

After that, I started ditching school a lot. I started getting really depressed. I started getting into drug use. I begged my mom to transfer schools. I told her that this school was way ahead of what we had been learning up in the mountains, so I wasn't up to date. I asked her if I could just do home schooling instead, so I could get caught up. She was super busy, and she had five other kids to take care of on her own as a single parent. So obviously, she said no.

I just made it through grade 8. Before all of this, I was always a straight-A student. I was always on the honour roll or principal's list. I always got the achievement after every quarter, and at the end of the year. Toward the last quarter of grade 7, and all of grade 8, I barely passed my classes. My grades started rapidly slipping. It was mostly because I was no longer regularly attending school. I would ditch school a lot. Even on the days when I did go to school, I would hide in a bathroom stall for most of the day, or attempt to leave if I could.

After that, I messaged Pornhub to get the video taken down. I pretended to be my mother. I didn't want to tell my mom, because she was a single mother of six kids. She was raised Catholic. She had very strict views on stuff like this. I knew she would be angry. I knew it would cause problems for her. I didn't want to tell her.

I tried to deal with it on my own by typing in the “Report a problem” on the video. I flagged it. I said, “Hey, this is my daughter. She's only 14. This is child pornography. Please take this down.” They took a week or two to respond. Once they finally responded, it was like, “Yes, okay, we'll take it down”, and then proceeded to wait another two weeks before they finally did take it down.

Doing my research, I was told there was a system in place that when a video was labelled as child pornography on their site, it was flagged and tagged, and it could no longer be re-uploaded. But of course, that wasn't true, because a week after it was taken down, it was re-uploaded. All of the people my age—a couple of grades above me and even a couple of grades below me—had seen the video, even though when I transferred schools after grade 8, I transferred to a school all the way on the other side of town for high school. They had all seen the video as well. After that, I basically dropped out of public school.

Ever since, I've been.... The videos.... People find them and send them to me. They send them to me all the time, saying, “Oh my God, is this you?” People on the Internet, people I have never met in person, will find my accounts on social media and they will send it to me and say, “This is you, isn't it?” They then will try to ask me certain questions, or be really creepy toward me, or try to dox me or harass my family members. A lot of people in the grades above me, mostly guys, would try to harass me and blackmail me, saying that if I didn't do stuff with them, or if I didn't send more videos to them, they would send it to my family. They would send it to my grandma, to my mom, to all my sisters and my brother.

I just took myself off social media for a while. I stopped going to school. I got really depressed. I thought that once I stopped being in the public so much, once I stopped going to school, people would stop re-uploading it. But that didn't happen, because it had already been basically downloaded by people all across the world. It would always be uploaded, over and over and over again. No matter how many times I got it taken down, it would be right back up again.

That was the whole reason I ended up reaching out to Mike.

That's the statement of Serena Fleites. Again, Serena was denied the opportunity of testifying here at committee.

[Chris Bittle, Liberal, St. Catharines, ON]

On a point of order, Madam Chair, it's wildly inaccurate that he's saying she's been prevented from testifying. Mr. Brock is filibustering, using the testimony of victims, because he is embarrassed by Mr. Viersen—

[Larry Brock, Conservative, Brantford—Brant, ON]

I have a point of order, Madam Chair.

[Chris Bittle, Liberal, St. Catharines, ON]

—and refuses to let him come and testify, as is the proper course of action. That is what always happens in committee.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lena Metlege Diab]

Thank you, Mr. Bittle. That is a comment and not a point of order.

Mr. Brock, go ahead.

[Larry Brock, Conservative, Brantford—Brant, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I still have the floor.

What's embarrassing is that Mr. Bittle, the member for St. Catharines, continues to silence the views of victims on this very serious area—

[Chris Bittle, Liberal, St. Catharines, ON]

I have a point of order.

[Larry Brock, Conservative, Brantford—Brant, ON]

I will not be silenced, Madam Chair.

He can interrupt all he wants, like he did two weeks ago with countless numbers of points of order, which were never points of order—

[Chris Bittle, Liberal, St. Catharines, ON]

I have a point of order.

[Larry Brock, Conservative, Brantford—Brant, ON]

They were always points of debate, and I suspect this one will be a point of debate as well.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lena Metlege Diab]

Yes, I will recognize you in a minute.

Mr. Bittle, go ahead, please.

[Chris Bittle, Liberal, St. Catharines, ON]

Madam Chair, this is an issue of relevancy. Mr. Brock is engaging in personal attacks. He, on the other hand, is just filibustering, using victims' testimony. That's what's happening. He's preventing Mr. Viersen from coming to speak to his bill. Let's start the study. Let's have him come on Thursday. Let's do this.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lena Metlege Diab]

Is your comment on relevance, Mr. Bittle?

[Chris Bittle, Liberal, St. Catharines, ON]

Mr. Brock's comments definitely are irrelevant and don't speak to this motion at all. Therefore, yes, it's an issue of relevancy. He's just engaging in personal attacks.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lena Metlege Diab]

Okay. Let's take a two-minute break, because I see a lot of members who are coming in—

[Laila Goodridge, Conservative, Fort McMurray—Cold Lake, AB]

I have a point of order, Madam Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lena Metlege Diab]

—just to ensure that we have the correct members. I see people leaving and people coming. Let's suspend for two minutes, please.