Mr. Speaker, increasingly Canadian and international issue action groups use full and partial nudity of female employees, models and former celebrities as part of their fundraising and publicity campaigns. This is indeed a very disturbing trend.
Lush Cosmetics recently used an employee of the company to pose nude in a public area of downtown Toronto to promote one of the company's product lines. While the employee herself was nude save for makeup, the company attempted to wrap itself in a cloak of virtue with a thinly veiled association with marine mammal populations.
Other activist organizations such as PETA, competing with other groups for donations, regularly use attention-grabbing female nudity to draw attention to themselves. Former B movie celebrities are contracted as prime spokespersons. They are often people whose only achievements have been simply to surrender themselves to public female objectification.
I would like to remind the House and all Canadians that treating women as objects is wrong, and exploiting women by presenting them as nude objects of attention purely for commercial purposes and without any overarching artistic merit is wrong. It is vile.