Jim Maloway

[Child Protection Act (Online Sexual Exploitation), November 26th, 2009]

Madam Speaker, I would draw back to the original speech by the minister in the House when she said that $41.1 million over five years would be provided to law enforcement to give more resources. Properly resourcing the police force is something that we on this side of the House are particularly interested in because the police are the ones who will be dealing with the problem.

I think the bill was hastily drawn together. The government basically lurches back and forth like a ship in a sea. One day it is doing one thing and another day it is doing something else. The bill starts to be reported on CTV News on Monday morning. Every half hour it is being reported on and Parliament does not have a copy of it. We have no notes to go on. When the minister does make the statement and I ask her about the $41 million of resourcing for the police, she has no idea whether that is new money, old money, enough money or what it will do. Surely members who are going to speak on the issue would be well briefed, would have notes and would have answers to possible questions.

Even today, when I asked the member for Leeds—Grenville, who made a very well informed speech, for best practices, he could not tell me whether they had even looked at any other best practices.

I worked on bill 31 in Manitoba, which, at the time, was the electronic commerce legislation, the most comprehensive of its kind in Canada about 10 years ago. We used a uniform law template to put that legislation together. We cannot just make things up as we go along. There is always some sort of basis upon which we start when drafting legislation.

We know the Conservatives must have looked at other jurisdictions. I would be shocked if they had not. I just want to know who they looked at and why they rejected, for example, Germany. If they did look at the rules in Germany, I want to know why they decided not to follow the German example. If they looked at Brazil, I want to know why they decided its system was not what they liked. If they looked at the Swedish example, I want to know why they decided its system was not what they wanted.

The member talked about organized crime. We tend to think that people involved in child pornography are average people. I am sure thousands of them are, but given the amount of money that is involved in this business there has to be the long tail of organized crime. If we do not know that, we had better start looking. If we talk to police forces that deal with organized crime they will tell us that, certainly those in my home city of Winnipeg,

I want the focus of the criminal justice system to be on chasing the Mr. Bigs. We keep chasing the little guy at the bottom of the totem pole who gets nailed for a little bit of cocaine or distribution, but the reality is that it is the guys at the top who are making the big money. Those are the guys wearing the suits. As a matter of fact, most of them do not even own motorcycles in Winnipeg and they live in fancy houses in the suburbs. That is the kind of criminal that I want to see us focus on. I think we will see that some of them are involved in this area as well.

[Child Protection Act (Online Sexual Exploitation), November 26th, 2009]

Madam Speaker, from what I have been able to glean from the comments of pretty much all of the speakers on this side, no one is super critical of this bill. We are all saying that we will support it, but we just do not think it is tough enough to deal with the problem.

This probably would have been the measure to take five or six years ago when the problem was not as big as it is now. I think the member for Mississauga South was right. We should be looking at the best practices we can find. There may be others. We mentioned that Sweden simply blocks the porn sites and that Brazil has set up ethical rules.

If we do not want to follow Sweden's example and block the sites, then maybe we should look at Brazil where the ISPs have ethical rules set up that somehow must restrict access to them. We are told that Germany has the best system where it blocks access to the sites completely. To me, that would grind it to a halt, at least as far as our jurisdiction is concerned.

I was not born yesterday. I know the criminal elements will try to find a way around it. Maybe they will move their servers to some other country and then at a certain point we would need to chase down the perpetrators somewhere else. However, the bill covers the whole range. It covers production and possession.

Once again, I am saying that we need this bill because it is important. The provinces want it and they agreed to it. It is all part of a package.

I know the member for Mississauga South thinks we should have a complete package and add even more things into it, even beyond the scope of the bill. I do not think we need to look at that right now, but in terms of this bill, I think the government should seriously look at other possible alternatives that it can throw into this as a package and move along together with this bill.

[Child Protection Act (Online Sexual Exploitation), November 26th, 2009]

Madam Speaker, I am very pleased to speak to this bill today, Bill C-58.

It is our second day of debate and I would expect that we will be moving this bill to committee in very short order because it seems to me that all of the parties are onside.

There are certainly some criticisms as to the government's role, how it promulgated the legislation, and how it presented the legislation in the House, because as the member for Mississauga South has just said, there has been no legislative summary, no briefing notes, no nothing. As a matter of fact, the first we heard of it was from CTV's 24-hour news coverage from Monday morning on and we never got a copy of the bill until yesterday.

Nevertheless, it is a bill that is going to be supported and hopefully will be improved in committee. Certainly, when the minister announced it yesterday, she said that $42.1 million would be provided over five years to provide law enforcement more resources, so I asked her about that because it seemed to me that that had to be the focus.

We have a very effective law enforcement system in this country. As a matter of fact, the police tend to be the ones who do catch the guilty people, up to this point anyway. Our concern is that they do have proper resources, so I really wanted to know whether this was another $42 million on top of what they are already getting or simply previously announced money that they were dealing with, and she was not aware.

As the member for Mississauga South said, one would think that on a basic information piece like this, the government would have that answer available.

Best practices is another area that we should always look at when looking at legislation. I have made the argument that while the Conservatives claim to be tough on crime, we on this side of the House want to be smart on crime. We are prepared and we have examples where jurisdictions have used best practices, have looked around the world and picked examples of where a certain action worked, and simply adopted that, as opposed to the Conservatives who simply rely upon old, outmoded crime initiatives from Ronald Reagan's days in California, which have proven not to work.

They seem to be very still in their ideological approach to government. I know that it is dissipating over time. They are moving slowly but surely to the middle, and I think we are going to see more of that in the future.

I want to give a brief history of this problem, how it developed in regard to dealing with the web.

It was not until 1995 that email became prevalent. It had been used in universities for a few years before that, but email became prevalent right around 1995 and the web started after that, but at that point, most people still had monochrome screens. The frame rate was very low. It started at 15 frames a second and then they got it up to 30 frames a second.

I recall the Rolling Stones, just about the time they were appearing in Winnipeg a number of years ago, claiming to be the very first rock band to put one of their songs on the web. I looked at it and it was very slow. People here will remember when the first webcams came out. People were trying to talk to their relatives in other parts of the world and the voice did not match with the picture, and the picture was very choppy.

There was a period there where this really was not a problem. In fact, bandwidth became a problem around the mid-nineties.

Once again, to make this system work successfully they had to get faster speeds and they had to have better bandwidth. The ISPs had to do that in order to be able to transfer the material that we are talking about right now.

As other members have alluded to, we have had a virtual explosion of child pornography on the web just in the last five years. Once again, clearly the horse is out of the barn. As usual, the government is in a reactive position. Governments rarely lead. They usually are found to be following. In Canada, over the last few years, we have had a lot of instability with a change of government and an election every two years, starting back from scratch again on legislation and a fairly substantial slowdown.

The development of peer-to-peer computing was mentioned yesterday. That was a very big development that basically exploded overnight. We have all heard of Napster. It is out of business right now, but that was basically the beginning of peer-to-peer computing and making file sharing easy.

Therefore, logically when the technology developed the way it did and as fast as it did over time, it was just common sense that organized crime would be getting involved in the system. The police forces are aware that it is not only child pornography but it is also organized gambling rings who set up their servers outside of U.S. jurisdiction because they did not want to be prosecuted and put in jail by United States laws. Clearly, laws have had some effect.

There was a Bloc member yesterday who pointed to the bill and was touting the fact that these offences are going to slow these people down. However, as mentioned by the member for Mississauga South today and others, the fact of the matter is the penalities are not that large at all considering the money that is involved.

When we are dealing with organized crime and drug dealers, fines of $100,000 are probably just part of the cost of doing business for these people. These are not particularly strong fines in any sense.

We have the organized crime syndicates involved, so a system of penalties, fines and imprisonment and so on will deter some people for sure, but I think at the end of the day, if we pass this legislation and we find after a couple of years, and hopefully we will monitor its results, that the legislation is not working and the fines are not high enough, we will have to increase them. If we find that child pornography is still be produced at an increasing rate, then we are going to have to look at something more drastic.

I asked one of the government members of the government today whether the government had looked at best practices in other jurisdictions and the member said no, that he was not aware that the government had looked at other jurisdictions at all. Yet, yesterday the member for Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe was very clear in his presentation on the bill when he pointed out that there are other jurisdictions that have taken action and have dealt with the problem. These are his words and his claims. I would assume that he is correct in making these assessments and it should be easy to check. For example, the member drew our attention to Brazil where he said that the ISPs in Brazil have to follow a set of ethical rules that govern what they accept on their sites

He mentioned Sweden. It had a policy of blocking child porn. He mentioned Germany and the European Union as the best examples. Once again, he said that Germany was blocking access to the sites.

So, who are we trying kid here? If the answer is to simply block the sites, and if it works in Germany, then why are we getting ourselves tied up in knots here, spending huge amounts of money on police forces, $42 million over five years? That is probably on top of what we are already spending. Police forces are doing great work, and there is no doubt about it, to basically play a hide-and-seek game with these perpetrators over the Internet.

To me, a far more decisive, a far more effective, certainly cost effective, way of dealing with this would be to simply block the sites completely, and it is being done. I do not know what the rules are in Cuba, but I believe there is no Internet porn there either. It is certainly technically possible.

I know members may not agree with that and that is fine. The fact of the matter is, when the United States set up its penalties, people simply went offshore. To get around the American penalties, they simply took the path of least resistance and moved to a country that does not have penalties, that does not have these laws.

Another member, yesterday, pointed out that Canada is very high up in terms of not only sales of child pornography but also the production of it. This country is either number two or number three in not only the production but the distribution, the selling and the possession of child porn. So, it is certainly a major problem in this country and it is certainly growing.

Another fact to mention is that local computer repair depots have been reporting child pornography on laptops and computers brought in for repair. Recently, the customs people have been finding it on laptops. They have been checking laptops routinely for the last three or four years now at airports and customs sites, especially when people come from Thailand and places whether there is a lot of sex tourism. This is just basically, I think, making a small dent in the problem. As a matter of fact, the statistic I picked up on in the conversations over the last couple of days is that Canada is second in the world for hosting these sites.

In September 2008, the federal, provincial and territorial ministers responsible for justice agreed that Canada's response to child pornography could be enhanced by federal legislation requiring any agency whose services could be used to facilitate the commission of online pornography offences to report suspected material.

I know this was an initiative of the provinces, and I do give the provinces top marks. Yesterday we had a couple of Liberal speakers pontificating about how it was their party who started the ball rolling in this whole area and how the irresponsible Conservatives in government did not do anything for four years, and here we are today. That is fine for parties to pick their own little victories here and there, and try to embarrass the other side.

However, there has been activity at both the federal level and the provincial level over the years. My home province of Manitoba is one of three provinces that has rules stating that all people must report child pornography. I believe Nova Scotia and Ontario also have laws in place right now. Manitoba was an early mover in this area.

The Government of Canada's proposed legislation would enhance Canada's capacity to better protect children against sexual exploitation by making it mandatory for those who supply an Internet service to the public to report online child pornography. This legislation would help safeguard children by improving law enforcement's ability to detect offences and reduce the availability of child pornography on the Internet. This is a requirement in the bill but providers would not be obligated to search for it. If they happen to notice it, then they are obligated to report it.

There also is a 21 day rule in the bill but I do not know if that is a long enough timeframe. I am looking at a lawyer here in the House who could probably tell me whether that would be long enough or not. However, when the bill goes to committee it might look at making that a longer period of time because 21 days might be too short.

Under the proposed legislation, suppliers of Internet services to the public would be required to report to a designated agency tips that they might receive regarding websites where child pornography may be available to the public. They are required to notify police and safeguard evidence if they believe that a child pornography offence has been committed using their Internet service.

I am told that the well-known large ISPs are fairly cooperative in this area and that it is the smaller ISPs that are evidently less inclined to want to report, so they are the ones that will need to be given a bit of extra attention.

The legislation was carefully tailored to achieve its objectives while minimizing the impact on privacy. We will want to deal with that issue at committee because members of our caucus are concerned about that aspect.

Suppliers of Internet services would not be required to send personal subscriber information under this bill and that would be helpful as well.

Failure to comply with the duties under the bill would constitute an offence punishable by graduated fines of up to $1,000 for the first offence. The member for Mississauga South, among others, has taken exception to that as being too low. We might be looking at making an improvement there in committee, maybe a higher limit.

The bill also indicates that for a second offence the penalty would be $5,000 and for subsequent offences the possibility of a fine up to $10,000 or six months imprisonment, or both for sole proprietorships.

If it is a corporation, I would suspect there may be some sort of organized crime involved in it, but I may be wrong in that. However, if a corporation fails to comply with its duties under this act, the graduated fine fee would be $10,000, $50,000 and $100,000. Once again, I do not have a comment about whether that is a high amount or a low amount but it seems to be awfully low. If a criminal organization is producing child pornography and making a huge amount of money, although I have no idea how much money it would make on something like this, but $10,000 might be nothing more than the cost of doing business.

Again I find that I am short of time and once again only about halfway through my comments. I am used to those 40 minute speech slots that we had in Manitoba for many years. It is a hard habit to break. As a matter of fact, in the House of Commons just 30 years ago members had longer periods for their speeches. However, I do like the current time allotment as well.

[Child Protection Act (Online Sexual Exploitation), November 26th, 2009]

Madam Speaker, I want to thank the member for his comments. Yesterday when the minister was introducing the bill, she said that $42.1 million over five years was being provided to law enforcement as more resources to deal with the problem.

When I asked her whether that was new money or not, she said that she did not know and she was going to get back to me. I guess that just points to what the member for Mississauga South has said, that the bill has been rushed, the notes are not available, and the government has not done the research it should have.

For example, earlier on today I asked one of the members from the government side whether or not they had done any research as to best practices in other jurisdictions. That is a logical thing to do. Clearly, the government has not been doing that in some other cases, for instance when it followed the California prison system, which has been a total failure for 20 years. The government does not really have a history of checking around the world for best practices.

Yesterday the member for the Liberal Party very clearly pointed out that in Sweden they block child porn. In Germany they block access to the sites. That takes care of the problems.

This bill is only going to take us partway. It is a bill that we are going to support and it should be supported. The horse is out of the barn here, and the way to deal with the problem is to look at what works in other countries.

[Child Protection Act (Online Sexual Exploitation), November 26th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, the member for Mississauga South talked about prevention being the answer. I think he is totally right. It seems that this bill, while it is well-intentioned and one that we can all support, in fact, would perhaps just slow the problem down a bit because it would depend upon how many people reported.

The fact of the matter is we had a member in the House report yesterday that there are better practices in other jurisdictions, such as Germany, Sweden and Brazil. I asked a government member earlier today whether the government had even looked into those cases and he could not answer the question as to whether it had or had not.

In the case of Germany, for example, it simply blocked access to the sites. To me, that makes sense because that provides a solution to the problem rather than simply tinkering with the problem. We already know we are not going to get very solid results, or at least not as good results as we would get if we simply blocked the site in the first place.

[Child Protection Act (Online Sexual Exploitation), November 26th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, the member for Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe outlined in his speech that in Sweden child porn is blocked. Germany and the EU also block access to child porn sites. Brazil has set up ethics rules which the ISPs have signed on to.

I wonder if the member might see these options as being more effective or maybe additions to the effects of this bill.

[Child Protection Act (Online Sexual Exploitation), November 26th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I ask the member who has just spoken whether the government has done some best practice searches across the world to see whether there are other jurisdictions that maybe have dealt with the matter more effectively? Has the government looked at Sweden, Brazil, Germany or other countries in the EU as examples of places where more effective options may be found?

[Petitions, November 26th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, my petition is a call to stop the Canada-Colombia trade deal. Violence against workers by paramilitaries in Colombia has been ongoing, with more than 2,200 trade unionists murdered since 1991. Much violence has been committed against the indigenous peoples, Afro-Colombians, human rights activists, workers, farmers and journalists. The agreement is similar to NAFTA which has benefited mainly large multinationals rather than providing real benefits to working families. Mexico has lost over one million agricultural jobs since the beginning of NAFTA. The murder of labour and human rights activists increased in 2008 in Colombia and continues unabated to this day. All trade agreements must be built upon the principles of fair trade which fundamentally respect social justice, human rights, labour rights and environmental stewardship as prerequisites to trade.

The petitioners call on Parliament to reject the Canada-Colombia trade deal until an independent human rights impact assessment is carried out, the resulting concerns are addressed, and the agreement is renegotiated along the principles of fair trade which would fully take into account environmental and social impacts while genuinely respecting and enhancing labour rights of all affected parties.

[Canadian Northwest Passage, November 25th, 2009]

Madam Speaker, I am very pleased to speak today to Motion No. 387. I will take a moment to read the motion into the record. It states:

That, in the opinion of the House, as the various waterways known as the “Northwest Passage” are historic internal waters of Canada, the government should endeavour to refer to these waterways as the “Canadian Northwest Passage”.

This is now the second hour of debate on this motion and I have had occasion to review some of the speeches of the members who have preceded me in this debate. As the Speaker knows, this particular motion is being supported by all parties in the House. In many ways, it is similar to Motion No. 465, the motion dealing with the air passenger bill of rights where all the parties managed to come to agreement that such an action should be taken and such a bill should be brought in, but when action has been taken we find a fracturing of the previously agreeable people.

It is the same principle involved in this motion. The motion is broad enough and certainly finds acceptance with all four parties in the House but when we start talking about specifics that is when we start coming up with differences of opinion.

The fact is that we are also being faced with a threat from outside here. We have, increasingly, the United States and Europe claiming that the Northwest Passage is an international waterway, while Canada's position is that it is an internal passage. We know that with global warming, with the temperature rising up north and with the ice receding, it is potentially possible that within a few years the route may become navigable on a more sustainable basis than it is right now and we will have the incursion of foreign countries, particularly the United States, wishing to consider it international waters, not only for the purposes of shipping but also for the exploration of minerals, oil and so on.

We do have that sort of international issue being dealt with more or less on a worldwide basis.

The north is a beautiful area of the country. I was up in Yukon. The member for Yukon is here tonight and I have read his comments.

At the beginning of September, I was in Yukon meeting with Air North and had the occasion to tour Yukon. It is certainly a beautiful part of the country but it is not unlike my own province of Manitoba where we have a northern port known as Churchill. Both of those areas are very susceptible to even minor amounts of climate change. The tundra is not that stable and in fact is very unstable.

We have a railway that runs up to Churchill and I have been up there many times on the railway. The members will likely know and agree with me that that particular railway requires huge amounts of money for its roadbed. It requires huge maintenance because of where it is running to. It has slow orders on it constantly. I do not think the train is even operating at 30 or 40 miles an hour. I think it is more like 15, if that. I think we could run as fast as the train in some cases. This is as a result of the instability of the tundra in those areas.

We have a railway, which needs a lot of maintenance, and we have the Port of Churchill, which we have been trying to promote as an inland port in order to draw some of the grain trade away from Thunder Bay and from British Columbia to allow our farmers to send their products up through Churchill. We have had occasions of ships, particularly from Russia, coming through and, depending on the year, we have had as many as half a dozen ships show up at the Port of Churchill for loading grain and other commodities and taking them away.

We have the pro development people very interested in the economic possibilities. The people in Haliburton and other companies that rummage around the globe looking for economic opportunities will see the area warming up and the ice melting as very positive and an opportunity to make money and, therefore, more potential for commerce, trade and oil exploration.

However, what people need to recognize is that when we have that warming, when we have a destabilization of the environment and the tundra becomes destabilized, how will people be able to navigate around that area? What we essentially will be doing is destroying the livelihood of the people who are there right now, the people who have been there for thousands of years and who make their livelihood in trapping and fishing enterprises. They have enough stresses on their lifestyle right now. As their environment continues to whittle away, they will not be able to continue their own activities.

In Churchill over the last few years, the polar bears have not been able to get back on the ice and their weights are reducing. This is changing the whole sort of ecology, in some ways, upside down. For those who think this will somehow be a big plus, I guess their plan would be to try to challenge the sovereignty of Canada through the Northwest Passage and try to be available when and if opportunities should arise as far as the resources are concerned.

The four parties in this House have taken the correct action here. I realize that the member for Yukon did introduce a motion in the previous Parliament, which proves the point that nothing is new around this place. When elections happen, the House must start from scratch and all the bills and motions need to be reintroduced. Sometimes it is not the same people who introduced them the first time who end up introducing them the second time. However, the member for Yukon has endorsed this motion and pointed out some of the advantages that will happen because of the warming.

However, the member for the Bloc has pointed out a lot of the disadvantages that we will see as a result of the warming and, in many respects, I think he is right. He talks about the whole process of global warming and about how the ice melting in the north will cause huge instabilities. It will not be an economic opportunity but actually a cost item for Canada.

We need to look at things like oil spills. We think that we will somehow develop, for example, oil exploration. If we are going to develop oil reserves in a certain area and build pipelines across the tundra and take the oil to market, at a certain point, whether we are doing it through the pipeline process or doing it through the shipping process, eventually, statistically, we will have a—

[Child Protection Act (Online Sexual Exploitation), November 25th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, we have heard reports of exponential growth in child pornography over the last four years. We have a government that sat around for four years and did not really do anything about this issue and now introduces a bill that some would question whether it should be part of the Criminal Code.

If this problem is increasing in exponential fashion, would the Bloc member not think that perhaps some of the solutions that some other countries are using might be relevant? The Liberal member for Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe mentioned that Sweden has a blocking of child pornography and that Brazil has set up ethical rules. However, in the European Union, he said that Germany had the best set of rules and that it blocked access to the sites. Perhaps that may be the answer here if this problem is really becoming out of control.

I would ask the member what he thinks about those ideas raised by the member for the Liberal Party?