Thank you, Chair Maloney and committee members for inviting our agency to participate in this study.
My name is Monique St. Germain, and I am general counsel for the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, a national charity that works across Canada and globally to reduce the incidence of missing and sexually exploited children.
We operate Cybertip.ca, Canada's tip line for reporting the online sexual exploitation of children. As of March 31, 2025, nearly 471,000 reports have been processed through Cybertip. Reports overwhelming pertain either to child sexual abuse and exploitation material or online luring.
We also operate Project Arachnid, a platform that prioritizes the removal of harmful child sexual abuse content online. As of this month, Project Arachnid has issued over 141 million notices requesting the removal of CSAM, child sexual abuse material, from the Internet.
We support the changes in Bill C-16 that are aimed at protecting children and victims of image-based abuse, including the following.
First, the expansion of the luring offence to include luring to facilitate extortion, criminalizing threats to distribute CSAM and intimate images, and the addition of sextortion as an aggravating factor on sentencing, are all great additions to the arsenal of available tools in the Criminal Code to address sextortion. Over the past decade, sextortion offences have skyrocketed. On average, Cybertip receives six sextortion reports per day. In 2024 alone, our support services department managed nearly 2,800 requests from children and their caregivers. In our experience, boys are typically extorted for money, while girls are extorted for more images. Tactics used can be very extreme and terrifying for the young person. In some tragic instances, the young people threatened feel so helpless and trapped they have died by suicide. This is an incredibly serious crime, and we are confident these new provisions will help.
Second is increasing the age of those protected by section 161 preventions orders from 16 to 18. A section 161 order is only available to a court once a person has been convicted of certain sexual offences. By adding to the offences for which such an order is available and increasing the age of children able to be protected by such orders, we are providing courts with a powerful tool to prevent future offending. This change is one our agency has long advocated for, and we feel strongly that it will make a tangible difference in protecting children from predatory conduct.
Third, we support the changes to the mandatory reporting legislation clarifying who is bound by the law, increasing the preservation requirement, and the new requirement for transmission data to be sent to police. These are all critical improvements to the law.
Fourth, we're pleased to see the addition of a safety valve to re-establish mandatory minimum sentences into the code. It has been incredibly disheartening to witness the dismantling of these sentences on the basis of hypotheticals.
We regularly monitor Canadian case law, and it's clear that the extent of offending against children is getting much worse. Most offenders we see before the courts have inflicted grave harm on victims and society, yet the seriousness of their crimes is downplayed when the focus turns to hypothetical offences and offenders. We are cautiously optimistic Bill C-16's changes will lead to more meaningful sentences that tie directly to the offender before the court and the actual offence that the offender committed.
Fifth, while we welcome the changes to address sexual deepfakes, we also want to see the creation of this imagery addressed. Cybertip processed 9,000 sexually explicit AI-generated images and videos of children and youth in 2024. The problem is harming more and more Canadians and it has to stop. It is the creation of this imagery that first violates the victim's privacy and sexual integrity. It's the creation that starts the chain of victimization. These images are also a powerful silencer of women and girls. They are not harmless products of the imagination.
Finally, while we are pleased to see distribution of bestiality imagery criminalized, we would like to see the law go further and also criminalize the making, possession and accessing of such materials.
In closing, while we support Bill C-16, we and the survivors we support also want to see Canada enact laws that hold online companies accountable and mandate the swift removal of CSAM and intimate images and provide better more accessible remedies for victims of such crimes.
Thank you.