Thank you.
Let me take the opportunity to point out once again that we could have witnesses here today. Whether or not Mr. Viersen appears, we could have witnesses here today. There are a lot of important witnesses we could hear from who would give valuable testimony that would help inform our report back to the House of Commons. Again, today we are failing to take that opportunity.
The sense that I have is that the Liberals do not like Bill C-270. At second reading, they voted in favour of sending it to committee, but with “serious reservations”. What are some of those reservations? I'm just going to continue here with some more of Mr. Maloney's comments. I just want to underline, Mr. Maloney, that it was a good speech. It was well-researched and useful information. We might just disagree on the direction that we should be going.
He said:
Individuals who informally make or distribute pornographic material of themselves and of people they know are unlikely to verify age by examining legal documentation.... They are also unlikely to secure formal written consent. It concerns me that such people would be criminalized by the bill's proposed offences, where they knew that everyone implicated was consenting and of age, merely because they did not comply with the...regulatory regime....
We're getting to the heart of their objection. They think that it is a regulatory scheme and that it's not going to work. They also prefer the government bill, Bill C-63, the online harms act, which picks up on some of the direction that the private member's bill that is before us today is taking, but it, too, creates a regulatory scheme. So they are saying, “We don't like your regulatory scheme; we prefer our regulatory scheme.” Is that what it's coming down to?
I think this is a good point to talk about what a couple of the witnesses who appeared at the ethics committee for its study in 2021 said, which goes right to the point that I'm making here. This is witness 1, unidentified, and she had this to say:
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.
It's going to go on for just a couple of paragraphs, but I think this is really important to get on the record to set the context.
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.
Here I want to make a point, Madam Chair. She was of age and she gave consent, but not for what he did with it later, so he would have had a defence against the bill that the Liberals are suggesting would be better than Bill C-270.
She goes on:
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.
I don't want to get into the details. It was quite distasteful, but she was drugged. In any event, she was asleep. She had no recollection of it, and she was filmed in—I'm trying to find a polite way to say it—a compromised position. This is what was on the Internet. It was all over the Internet. It was taken by her husband. She was of age. She had consented to some form of photos, but not to that and not to the uploading on Pornhub.
She goes on:
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.
Then she made a comment about Pornhub and sites like that:
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....
Thanks to Pornhub, today is day 1,292 that I have been naked on these porn sites.
This is what we are trying to fight. This is what the private member's bill, Bill C-270, is all about. We think it is worth fighting for.
Now, another objection from the Liberals is that the private member's bill is apparently “not consistent with the basic principles of criminal law”, in that it does not require mens rea. Most of us are lawyers here, but for those who aren't, mens rea is the Latin term for the mental element of a crime. Not only must the Crown prove that an event happened, but the Crown also has to prove that the person who caused the criminal event to happen had a guilty mind about it and knew that what they were doing was wrong. Then they go on: “for example, that the accused knew or was reckless as to whether those depicted in the pornographic material did not consent or were not of age.”
Well, in response to that, I'm going to just read something from another person who appeared before the same ethics committee. This is someone who was known only as “Witness 2”. This is what she had to say. It's just a few paragraphs:
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.
“They” means the porn sites.
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.
Why she did that.... It was probably not very wise, but she did it.
Then, two years later.... She said:
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.