Justice Committee on Dec. 5th, 2024

[The Chair, Liberal, Lena Metlege Diab]

I call the meeting to order.

Welcome to meeting number 125 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2) and the motion adopted on December 2, 2024, the committee is meeting in public to begin its study of the subject matter of Bill C-63, an act to enact the online harms act, to amend the Criminal Code, the Canadian Human Rights Act and an act respecting the mandatory reporting of Internet child pornography by persons who provide an Internet service and to make consequential and related amendments to other acts.

Before welcoming our witnesses this morning, I wish to call your attention to the presence in the room of Ms. Sokmony Kong, Secretary of the Cambodian division of the Assemblée parlementaire de la Francophonie. This parliamentary official was chosen by the Association des secrétaires généraux des parlements francophones, or ASGPF, in recognition of her very highly esteemed work within her organization. Ms. Kong chose the Parliament of Canada for her two-week professional development placement.

We wish you an excellent stay with us, Ms. Kong. As a former member-at-large representing America for the APF, I’m very pleased you chose Canada. I therefore wish you a good stay with us.

I would like to welcome our witnesses for the first hour. They are all appearing by video conference.

Before I say their names, I have a few reminders.

I'm going to ask colleagues in the room or by video conference to please wait until I recognize you by name before speaking, and to ensure you address your questions through the chair. Please do not take the floor until after you are recognized.

For witnesses participating by video conference, please ensure you have selected, on the bottom of your screen, the language of your choice.

I also want to say that all of the equipment belonging to the witnesses here with us this morning was tested and everything is working well.

As the chair, I want to make note of the fact that it is my responsibility, with the help of the clerk, to keep time as best we can in order to allow fairness for the witnesses, and for the members in the room asking questions, and also to suspend for a minute to allow one hour for the second group of panellists to be brought in.

I will now introduce them to you and ask each of them to give their opening remarks for up to five minutes.

With us this morning, from the Amanda Todd Legacy Society, is Madam Carol Todd, founder and mother.

We also welcome Ms. Lianna McDonald, executive director of the Canadian Centre for Child Protection.

We also have Carl Burke and Madam Barbie Lavers, who are participating together as individuals.

Now I will ask Madam Todd to please begin with her opening comments.

[Carol Todd, Founder and Mother, Amanda Todd Legacy Society]

Good morning.

I'm speaking to you from Vancouver, British Columbia. I thank you for this invitation to participate in this prestudy session on Bill C-63.

To start, the majority of what I'm going to say in the next five minutes and in answer to the questions are my thoughts and my thoughts only.

Today I must stress the importance of Bill C-63, the online harms act. This bill is a comprehensive approach to addressing the growing concerns of harmful content on the Internet. Online safety, I feel, is a shared responsibility, and everyone—users, parents, educators and platforms—plays a role in creating a safer online world by ensuring protection, accountability and support.

My name is Carol Todd. I'm widely known as the mother of Amanda Todd. I am a teacher-educator in British Columbia with my work primarily centred on education on digital literacy, online safety and child abuse prevention, namely exploitation and sextortion. Providing children, teachers and families with the knowledge and skills to navigate the digital world is essential and is one of the reasons I created a legacy, a non-profit, in Amanda's memory.

My daughter, Amanda Todd, was a Canadian teenager whose tragic story brought international attention to the severe impacts of cyberbullying, online harassment and exploitation. She was born in November 1996 and faced relentless harassment both online and off-line as a young teenager. She ultimately took her life in October 2012. Knowingly, parents shouldn't outlive their children in preventable situations.

Amanda's ordeal began when she was 12 years old. She was persuaded by an online stranger to expose her breasts on a webcam. This individual saved the image and later used it to blackmail her, threatening to share the photos with her friends and family if she didn't perform more explicit acts. Despite changing schools multiple times, Amanda couldn't escape the harassment, and the blackmailer continued to follow her for two and a half years, creating fake profiles to spread the image and further humiliate her.

In September 2012, five weeks before Amanda took her own life, Amanda posted a YouTube video entitled “My story: Struggling, bullying, suicide, self-harm”, in which she showed flash cards to share her painful experiences. She detailed the bullying, physical assaults and severe emotional distress that she endured both online and off-line. The video went viral after her death, and currently it's been viewed about 50 million times across the world.

Amanda's death prompted significant public and governmental responses. In 2022, Aydin Coban, a Dutch man, was convicted of harassing and extorting Amanda in a Canadian court and sentenced to 13 years in prison. He is currently serving his Canadian time in the Netherlands.

Amanda's story continues to resonate, highlighting the urgent need for stronger protections against online harassment and better supports for victims of bullying, cyber-bullying and exploitation.

There are so many voices that remain unheard due to fear, judgment or shame, or because they can no longer speak. It is vital to let these silent voices be heard and to create a more compassionate and understanding world, where we help and not hurt.

Over the past decade, we have observed rapid changes in technology. We have watched devices that were a useful tool for communication turn into fun devices that can exploit and hurt others. Since its inception, the Internet has taken on darker tones. The word “algorithms” is now in our vocabulary, where it once never was.

Research has highlighted some of the harmful effects related to screen time. These effects include reduced well-being, mood disorders, depression and anxiety. These effects impact children and adults alike in a world filled with online media.

With increased access to the Internet comes easier access to violent and explicit online content that can impact sexual attitudes and behaviours, harm to children through the creation, sharing and viewing of sexual abuse material, and increased violence against women and girls, as well as sex trafficking.

Governments must take action to enact new laws and modify existing ones.

To make the online world safer, we must increase education and awareness. We must have stronger regulations and laws, like Bill C-63. We have to improve the behaviours of the online platforms. We need parental controls and monitoring, and we need to encourage reporting like Cybertip.ca.

Bill C-63—

[The Chair, Liberal, Lena Metlege Diab]

Ms. Todd, we will come back to you with questions, because I think our members will probably want to flesh those out as well.

[Carol Todd]

Okay.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lena Metlege Diab]

I neglected to ask.... I know that when people are on the screen they're not paying attention, but I'll do my best to show that there are 30 seconds before time is up, so as not to interrupt.

I will now move on to Madam McDonald, please, for up to five minutes.

[Lianna McDonald, Executive Director, Canadian Centre for Child Protection]

Good morning, everyone.

Thank you very much to the committee for this opportunity.

My name is Lianna McDonald, and I am the executive director of the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, a registered charity that has been operating for nearly 40 years to protect Canadian children.

For the past 22 years, we have been operating Cybertip.ca, Canada's national tip line to report online crimes against children. In 2017, we launched Project Arachnid, an innovative online platform that targets the removal of child sexual abuse material at scale. It is through this critical work that we have witnessed first-hand and all too often the colossal injury and harm that happen every single day to children online. The unregulated Internet has basically destroyed childhood as we have historically known it, while children and families are paying a devastating price for the ongoing failure of government to regulate online spaces.

There has been a steady increase in the number and seriousness of online crimes against children since the rise of social media, which created a perfect storm of injury and harm to children. We saw another huge and significant jump after 2020 with COVID. These are key events that have exacerbated and intensified harm to our children.

We've handed children technology that has been weaponized against them by predators and technology services, and I'll underscore what I'm talking about. Every month, through Cybertip.ca, the tip line, we process over 2,500 reports, and these are reports by Canadians who know to come in to us. We've seen a 760% increase in luring reports since the start of COVID in 2020. We've managed more than 4,300 requests from youth and their caregivers in the last year alone. We receive approximately seven sextortion reports every single day at the tip line, and we've processed close to 4,000 sexually explicit deepfake images and videos of children. Finally, since 2017, we've issued over 40 million takedown notices to companies, to get them to take down child sexual abuse material.

There is no other entity in Canada that is doing the work we are doing. Regrettably and in a very difficult way, we are witnessing first-hand the scale of harm that is happening to our children and how it has evolved over the years. We are dealing with young people who are terrified about what an offender will force them to do next, youth who are frantically trying to get their child sexual material down, families who are dealing with situations that have escalated well beyond anything—anything—that they ever could have imagined.

We are supporting survivors of child sexual abuse material from all over the world. Abusive imagery of them is endlessly uploaded and re-uploaded on platforms available to anyone with an Internet connection. These victims and children have been stripped of their privacy and their dignity, and, in fact, they have no recourse. Their rights are repeatedly violated while the predators who obsess over them, the ones who stalk, harass and target them, are shielded by the cloak of anonymity that technology affords them.

To try to deal with this mess through Project Arachnid, we are issuing between 10,000 and 20,000 notices to companies every single day. These notices are overwhelmingly for known child sexual abuse material. By that, I mean imagery that has been circulating for years, tormenting survivors, yet still these platforms get to choose whether or not they take it down. They get to regulate themselves. They get to decide all on their own what is okay and what is not okay. It's outrageous, and it must change.

To put this all into perspective for you quickly as I close, I'll give you a sampling of the actual interventions that our organization deals with every day. Imagine—and this is happening—a young girl between the ages of 11 and 12 who is being tortured daily by a group of anonymous men. Every day, she is ordered to go into the school bathroom and is instructed to self-abuse and harm while recording the material. She is paralyzed by fear. She does as she's told. The requests get worse, more degrading, more harmful. Eventually, she reaches out for help.

Imagine that a teenage boy is tricked into sending a sexual image to a person he thought was a peer, but that person turns on him and threatens to send the image to all his friends and family. He is shocked. He is terrified. He believes with every bone in his body that they will do what they've said. He pays them. It's not enough. The threats keep coming. He is desperate to make it stop.

These are just a few of the examples that we hear. They are not hypotheticals—

[The Chair, Liberal, Lena Metlege Diab]

Thank you, Ms. McDonald.

We'll get back to you with questions. Thank you.

[Lianna McDonald]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lena Metlege Diab]

I'm now going to ask you, Madam Lavers, to please commence your five minutes.

Thank you.

[Barbie Lavers, As an Individual]

Good morning. Thank you for inviting my husband and me to speak today.

We want to introduce our son to you today. Harry was a very outgoing and inclusive young man. He was intelligent and handsome. He was an athlete and a brother, and he was loved by his friends and his community.

Harry was a patriot. He loved his country. He joined the cadets at age 14. Then in grade 11, in fall 2022, Harry joined the Prince Edward Island Regiment. He was 16. He was doing his basic training in Summerside, Prince Edward Island, on the weekends, while going to Souris Regional School full time. He only had one weekend left to complete his basic training for the RCAC. He was so proud of Canada, and he planned to dedicate his life to serving his country.

I'm Barbie Lavers. My husband is Carl Burke. We are Harry's parents. Harry was 17 years old when we lost him to sextortion. As a family, we had many conversations with Harry and his sister Ella about safe online use and about the dangers of sharing images online. Unfortunately, our family was not aware of the word “sextortion”. We had never heard of it.

On April 24, Harry came to his dad and told him that he had screwed up. He had shared intimate pictures with a girl, supposedly his own age, from Nova Scotia. This individual was now demanding money, or they would share Harry's images with all of his contacts, and in particular with his commanding officer in the RCAC. Sadly, this individual did share some of the images with his friends in cadets, and Harry knew this. I was also contacted on Instagram by apparently the same individual, who told me they would ruin his life.

When Harry came to us that evening and told us what had happened, all four of us sat at the table, talked about it and made a plan to contact the local RCMP in the morning. We thought Harry was comfortable with this plan, but sadly, he wasn't.

On the morning of April 25, we were getting ready for our day. My husband went down to check on Harry. The sheets in his bed had been pulled back, but the bed was not slept in. He yelled to me, “Where is Harry?” I came running down the stairs. By this time, Carl was in the garage. He found Harry face down on the floor. He shot himself.

What I'm telling you here does not define or demonstrate, in any way, what we found, what we felt or how our family felt, or how our lives have been changed forever.

Just two weeks ago, two teen boys and a young man in P.E.I. were targeted for the under-reported global crime of sextortion. The boys were targeted on social media platforms, where the strangers posed as age-appropriate girls for sex photo swaps. This has to be stopped.

We as a family support Bill C-63 to protect our children. As advancements continue with technology and as access to devices continues, the risks to our children increase. We must work together as communities, as families and as governments, through user regulations and accountability, to reduce the online abuse of our children and to provide support to all of us.

Social media platforms must be held accountable. They must incorporate regulations to keep our children safe. Children like our Harry are dying. The evidence of harm to our children is abundantly apparent.

Our 17-year-old daughter Ella has a Facebook account. She is unable to access Marketplace on Facebook because she is under 18. If you or I were on Marketplace, occasionally you might get a pop-up that says a seller might not be from your country. Obviously, Facebook has the ability to review IP addresses from incoming messages to their system. Can we not use this for our children's safety?

Now is not the time to enact or to dramatize politics. Colours need not matter in this discussion. Our children are the most important issue here, not colours. This bill provides an opportunity to protect our children and to show political coalition. Our children are in crisis. Some could even say they're at war. It is not time for our children to be used as political pawns to show that one party is more correct than the other. A temporary alliance must be, and is, required to save our children.

The longer Bill C-63 remains a political issue, the more children we will lose. We beg you to please stop wasting time and do something to help save our children.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lena Metlege Diab]

Thank you.

[Barbie Lavers]

Our children are—

[The Chair, Liberal, Lena Metlege Diab]

Thank you, Mrs. Lavers.

What we do now is a first round with four parliamentarians. I give them six minutes each for questions and responses from each of you.

We will commence with Ms. Rempel Garner.

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you to all of the witnesses for their courage and advocacy.

I'll start by saying that this issue is one that has been near and dear to my heart for many years. I've had people very close to me have their lives completely upended and upset by a lack of action on, and tools for preventing, online harassment.

My first question is this: Do you share the sentiment with me that we shouldn't be waiting two or three years to have action to protect Canadians online, particularly children?

I'll start with Ms. Todd. It's just a yes or no.

[Carol Todd]

No, we shouldn't be waiting.

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

We shouldn't be waiting.

Do you also share with me a concern that online platforms have been able to dictate the terms of this discussion and to wiggle through very tough regulatory restrictions that could have prevented a lot of what we heard here today? Do you get the sentiment that, sometimes, these platforms have the upper hand?

Ms. Todd.

[Carol Todd]

Yes. These platforms are money-making businesses, and they haven't thought about the online safety of children and adults. We know that because, in the 12 years since I've been focusing on this, we've seen changes. Just recently, six months ago, Meta changed the algorithms for safety.

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Thank you.

[Carol Todd]

They could have done this before.

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

I'm with you on that.

Based on your two answers to that, would you recommend that we say responsibility for setting out rules for these platforms should be punted down the road two years and put into a regulatory body that has the ability...? These platforms would have the ability, behind closed doors and without public scrutiny, to set what those rules are. That doesn't sound like a good approach to me.

What do you think, Ms. Todd?

[Carol Todd]

I read up on what Australia has done with an e-safety commissioner. I believe having a regulatory board like an e-safety commission would be a good idea. Unfortunately, it takes a long time to develop. However, down the road—

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

What if we could have our cake and eat it, too? What if Parliament, today, legislated a duty of care for online platforms and said, “You have to do this. This is illegal,” and then sent that to a regulator? Starting today, what if there was a legislated duty of care for online operators to do everything that every other witness talked about here today? Do you think this is a better approach?

[Carol Todd]

If you could describe to me what that duty of care is and who the regulator might be, it's a possibility. Everything has to be laid out, and it has to—

[The Chair, Liberal, Lena Metlege Diab]

I'm sorry, folks. I need to interrupt for a moment.

I'm told by members that the bells are ringing. I'm going to have to ask whether we can have unanimous consent to continue. I'm assuming that, if the bells are ringing, we have 30 minutes, but I could be wrong.

Can somebody please check?

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

Is it a quorum call, or is it—