Charlie Angus

[Business of Supply, March 25th, 2021]

Madam Speaker, on a point of order, just on issues of personal space, I am very worried about the coronavirus, so could the member move down about eight rows? I am worried about him intervening in my personal space.

[Business of Supply, March 25th, 2021]

Madam Speaker, on a point of order, do we have a member here who can only participate in an intelligent conversation by using his Wikipedia notes to—

[Business of Supply, March 25th, 2021]

Madam Speaker, on behalf of the New Democratic Party and all the people I know, I offer my sincere sympathy to the member for Winnipeg North. I have never seen a man suffer more from, or be more beleaguered by, the very notion of democracy. How it vexes him, how angry and frustrated it makes him, that the majority of the House of Commons could actually make a decision that disagrees with the Liberals, as if it is such a terrible thing. I wonder if we could have boxes of tissue sent across the nation to comfort him as he whines, because I would like to say this.

Here we are in a discussion about House procedures, and the Liberals are shutting it down. With respect to foreign affairs, they are shutting down an investigation into how the Liberals took the COVAX vaccine from the third world. They shut down discussion on a Uighur genocide motion. They have been using their position to stop an investigation into sexual assault allegations in the military. Of course, they have interrupted the ethics committee time and again.

I would like to ask my hon. colleague this question: Why do the Liberals not stop playing games and let the majority of the House actually do the work for the Canadian people?

[Business of Supply, March 25th, 2021]

Madam Speaker, I think the Liberals should stop their filibustering on vaccines and stop filibustering what is happening at the defence committee. I think the Liberals and the Conservatives need to work with us and get the ethics committee back on track so we can get to the Pornhub study.

[Business of Supply, March 25th, 2021]

Madam Speaker, if the member wants to talk about clogging up committee, I had to sit through 40 hours of the Liberals talking about the kind of underwear they bought while we needed to get to the issue of parliamentary business.

The Liberals are telling us these poor staffers come in to make the world a better place, but we are talking about political staffers here. When the Liberals were in opposition, I remember when they brought a Conservative staffer before committee in 2006. They were more than willing to bring a Conservative staffer to committee. However, now that it concerns the Prime Minister's Office, the Liberals are saying that they have to protect them, that this is terrible behaviour by the majority somehow. Yes, it is a majority. That is what the committee is.

Whenever the Liberals do not get their way, they do not try to compromise or work out a solution. They just figure that they will talk about ridiculous things like the kind of underwear they bought. That is literally what they were talking about at our committee. They will talk for hours and hours. They wasted the equivalent of 20 straight meetings and then blamed us for all of the work that never got done. I would say to my colleague to just look in the mirror once in a while.

[Business of Supply, March 25th, 2021]

Madam Speaker, what concerns me at committee, and it is not separate from ethics, is what happened with the investigation after the military ombudsman brought forward an allegation of sexual misconduct by Gen. Vance.

The military ombudsman attempted to meet with the minister. The minister would not hear him. The next day, the PCO demanded to know the name of the woman complainant. Of course, in any case like this, it is the job of the ombudsman to protect a complainant. What concerns me is that Mr. Walbourne says that he was then forced out of his job, in what he said became an increasingly toxic environment.

We have to assure the women of our nation who serve our country and put their lives on the line that this nation will have their back against men who try to use their power to undermine them. I believe we could get to the bottom of what is going on in the military if the Liberals would stop obstructing that part and actually bring forward the witnesses we need so we can get a report for all the women in the military.

[Business of Supply, March 25th, 2021]

Madam Speaker, this is typical. The Liberals believe that if they act like sock puppets for the Prime Minister's Office, they will get advancement instead of actually acting like parliamentarians. It is a typical example that they insult and shout, but then nobody is a victim like a Liberal is a victim. That is certainly something I have seen.

I will say that there is one thing Conservatives and Liberals agree on at committee. As the one member of the New Democratic Party, whenever I try to find a compromise, the Liberals and Conservatives absolutely agree that there is going to be no compromise. It is going to be a fight to the finish.

I have tried to work with the Liberals. I want to get this thing solved. The reason I want to get this solved is because these procedural games are interfering with some very serious work we need to do, so I would say a pox on both their houses. One of the things that we actually need to deal with is the study into Pornhub/MindGeek, which I am very concerned is not going to get finished. There are very serious issues here, and I do not see any interest in compromise from the Liberals or the Conservatives at this point so that we can get that study done.

We have received some extraordinary messages from people around the world who are looking to our committee to do something that has never been done before, and to shine a light into some very dark corners. However, there are powerful statements that might never see the light of day because of the filibustering.

I was astounded the other day that we actually got a message from Rose Kalemba. I had mentioned her, and she was the first one to come forward. She was raped and tortured as a child, and her abuse was posted on Pornhub, which is owned by MindGeek. The abuse that young child suffered was horrific, and she could not get it taken down. She wrote to us, saying she thought that it would be a monumental moment if we actually got the study done. She said that:

I was the first Pornhub survivor to speak out with my face and real name [that was] initially on social media... and then... [on] BBC World.

I learned of her story from BBC World, but I did not know that she is Canadian.

Her letter continues with:

...I was 14, I was raped, and my attackers videoed the assault and posted it. After my rape, I tried to commit suicide, and after I survived [I] struggled greatly to manage my life.... I was revictimized by the posting of the video on Pornhub where an unknown number of others could watch, download and distribute my assault.... Six videos of my rape at age 14, uploaded by...my attackers, stayed on Pornhub while they refused to remove them for over half a year. My cries to them where I begged them to take it down, stating that I was a minor and it was non-consensual, both of which were glaringly obvious, went unheard...while ads appeared [alongside] the rape video.

She has reached out to our committee and asked us to do the job that needs to be done in getting answers.

Here is another letter I want to read into the record. In case the filibustering goes on forever and we never get this done, it should be on the record. This is from a person who had worked in management at Pornhub/MindGeek. It says:

I fear for my safety and so I prefer not to give more details...[but] please investigate all the cam-girl sites that MindGeek runs. I am certain many of the “models” are being held captive in trafficking situations all over the world. For example, women trying to escape North Korea will be held captive and forced into the cam studios in China by their trafficker, who they just thought would help them get out.... This story repeats globally. MindGeek denies responsibility by separating themselves from the cam-girl studios. Instead, these companies are managed as affiliate relationships, marketing relationships, but MindGeek is making a lot of money off these women held against their will.

The letter continues with:

Ask MindGeek to provide all the financial records for all incoming and outgoing transactions in their affiliate networks for all business units. All pay sites. All Tube sites. All cam sites. All advertising networks like TrafficJunky. It will be very clear that the scope of the problem is much larger than anyone on the ethics committee or reporting in any mainstream media currently realizes. This problem is so much bigger than Pornhub.

This former manager also mentioned that he was:

...discouraged from contacting Interpol when I stumbled on child content by my superiors. I was not allowed to report this kind of content when it crossed my desk.

The issue that is before us is that we have a law in Canada, passed in 2011, that says if an online site has an allegation of child pornography, it has to refer it to the police.

Little Rose Kalemba, who was 14, was held and raped again and again and was physically tortured. When she went forward, she could have contacted Pornhub. It had a legal obligation to contact the RCMP and we would have a record of it.

Serena Fleites, who spoke to us, was sexually abused at age 14, and she begged Pornhub to take the video down. There should be a record. Pornhub said it could not find any record of Ms. Fleites. It was going to check its files. However, there is a law in Canada that says there is a duty to report.

The RCMP came to us, and told us it was difficult, that it needed more funding. We asked if it had ever dealt with Pornhub and asked it about compliance with the law. My understanding is that the RCMP said no. Then we read in La Presse that the RCMP went to Pornhub and asked about the duty to report, and Pornhub had said that it was not a Canadian company, that Pornhub, based in Montreal, is not a Canadian company, and the RCMP left.

We are now being told by the director of public prosecutions that it is really a provincial matter, that even though we have federal laws to deal with child pornography, somehow it is the provincial government's responsibility to do this.

These are the questions that we need to get to. We need to have the Minister of Justice come to explain whether or not we are going to have child pornography laws in this country that will be enforced or not enforced. We need to get to the study.

I am encouraging, asking, begging my colleagues in the Liberal and Conservatives parties to stop beating each other with these plastic sticks for the cameras and to get down to the work that we need to do at committee. I would like to move that we amend the motion, if my colleagues would agree, to replace “10:00 a.m.” in paragraph (b) with “11:00 a.m.”

[Business of Supply, March 25th, 2021]

Madam Speaker, it is always a great honour to rise in the House representing the people of Timmins—James Bay. We are dealing today with another day of immature fighting between the Conservatives and the Liberals.

When the Conservatives were in power, their schtick was conducting everything in camera. Everything had to go in camera. The idea that we could have a public committee was outrageous. Everything had to go in camera.

On the other hand, if the Liberals do not like a question, they filibuster. We have a government actually obstructing its own committees, then the Liberals act like the whiniest picked-upon people. They have a new thing now: there is somehow a tyranny of the majority picking on the minority. The minority here is the Government of Canada.

The Liberals have been filibustering about the fact that the Liberal government is trying to stop accessing vaccines in the third world. They have been filibustering on that. They have been filibustering the very serious issue of sexual misconduct and the failure of the defence department to defend women in the military. Rather than get answers, they are filibustering.

Of course, they have filibustered in the ethics committee day in and day out for so long that, in terms of what is happening at the ethics committee, I think we know pretty much all that we are going to know about the WE group. We know that after eight months, we can honestly and confidently say we do not have a clue how this financial operation runs. This is such an obscure, massive system of all their real estate holdings, their private companies, their supposed public entities, their charities and their holding companies that we still have not been able, after eight months, to get answers. That is very serious. In fact, we just had a letter from their lawyer who is outraged that we are asking how many schools they actually built. Apparently it will take months to get an answer to that.

On the issue of what is before—

[Business of Supply, March 25th, 2021]

Mr. Speaker, I received an extraordinary letter on Twitter last night from the lawyer representing WE's financial people, attacking us on Twitter for the fact that they have not answered a number of key questions about how the organization works, about financial connections and about how many schools were actually built. I would say for any member of the House that after eight months, Parliament has no clue as to how the financial operations of WE work.

However, I would like to raise a question that was in the letter. The lawyer stated that answering the question about how many schools they actually built would require months of work and an analysis of thousands of pages of documents. This is a group that told children to give them $10,000 and they would build a school, and that for every $10,000 they would build a school.

I ask my hon. colleague if he does not think that a multi-million-dollar charity would simply have a list of how many schools it has actually built, and that it would be fairly straightforward to say that it was given this money and built these schools? Instead, we are getting these letters from lawyers on Twitter.

[Petitions, March 25th, 2021]

Mr. Speaker, I rise with a petition from a group called Moms Stop the Harm, a group of mothers from across the country who have lost loved ones to the opioid crisis, a crisis that is causing devastation in all our communities across Canada.

The petitioners point out that the opioid crisis is one of the most deadly public health emergencies of our lifetime, with a death taking place every two hours and a death toll of over 15,400 in the past four years alone. As the overdose crisis rages, they call on the government to declare the overdose crisis a national public health emergency; to take steps to end those overdose deaths and overdose injuries; to immediately collaborate with provinces and territories to develop a comprehensive, pan-Canadian overdose action plan; to ensure that any plan considers reforms that other countries have used, such as legalization, decriminalization and changes to flawed drug policies; and to ensure this emergency is taken seriously, with adequate funding and program supports.