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Results: 1 - 15 of 140
View Ginette Petitpas Taylor Profile
Lib. (NB)
I call this meeting to order.
Good afternoon, everyone. It is 2:44 Atlantic Time.
Welcome to the third meeting of the Subcommittee on Private Members' Business. Pursuant to Standing Order 91.1(1), we are meeting to consider the items placed in the order of precedence of May 31, 2021, to determine whether they should be considered non-votable.
Since I believe we are all online, I don't have to read the instructions that would apply if anyone were in the room.
During this meeting, should you wish to get my attention, please signal me with your hand gesture or, at an appropriate time, call out my name.
Madame Normandin, before the meeting officially started, I asked all the members if there were any items they had any issues with, and I am going to ask the same question to you. Is there any item you would like to discuss?
View Shannon Stubbs Profile
CPC (AB)
View Shannon Stubbs Profile
2021-06-07 11:08
Thank you, Chair.
Minister, thanks for being here.
Just to start, do you think Bill C-10 is adequate to combat child sexual abuse material and rape and non-consensual material online?
View Shannon Stubbs Profile
CPC (AB)
View Shannon Stubbs Profile
2021-06-07 11:08
I'll take that as a “no” for Bill C-10.
Witnesses said previously that Canada's Criminal Code “child pornography” definition is among the world's broadest. It bans images, audio and written forms. Platforms are already liable for circulating illegal user-generated content. There are circumstances in which a company becomes liable for something that somebody else said or did if the company knew about it in advance and published it anyway, or if the company was notified about it after the fact and failed to take action. These situations are very well documented with MindGeek and Pornhub. It seems the real and disturbing issue is a lack of application of the law and its enforcement.
In January, you said that within a few weeks you were going to create a regulator to stop child sexual abuse material and sharing of non-consensual images online. I'm just wondering why there hasn't been any serious progress on that. I have a couple of questions about that for you from survivors. What's the delay?
View Jacques Gourde Profile
CPC (QC)
Well, then, let's talk about something else, Minister. We're not talking about culture, we're talking about protecting our children.
When will your next bill be introduced?
View Jacques Gourde Profile
CPC (QC)
That is speculation, Minister.
We want to protect our children. Table your bill as soon as possible, before an election is called. If there is an election this fall, absolutely nothing will happen for the next two years.
There are children in Canada who are thinking about suicide. They are not being protected right now, Minister. Why is this coming back into your court? It should have been the responsibility of the Department of Justice. You may not be in the best position to help our children right now.
View Jacques Gourde Profile
CPC (QC)
Your arguments are being made from an electoral perspective, Minister. You don't want to help children. Right now they need help and we want to help them. You are not helping us.
You are already in an election campaign. You are making election-minded comments and it's really sad. I'm really disappointed in your attitude, because we are all elected to improve the lives of Canadians. Please stop your electioneering and tell us how you are going to help our children.
View Jacques Gourde Profile
CPC (QC)
Rest assured, Minister Guilbeault, that we'll be there to help you. Don't speculate. This bill hasn't been tabled.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
View Charlie Angus Profile
NDP (ON)
Thank you so much to the witnesses. It's wonderful to have Madam Lukings back.
This committee does not have a mandate to look into sex work. We are the privacy committee. There's the women's committee, the justice committee. There are many, many important issues. We've heard many important issues here.
Our focus started out from that article that Madam Shanahan called “sensationalist”. It was a New York Times article with Serena Fleites.
She came to our committee, and she stated that she tried time and time again, as a 13-year-old, to take it down. Pornhub's executives told us they had no record and they weren't sure of when she contacted them.
Mr. DeBarber, in your experience, is that a credible answer, that Pornhub wouldn't have known about this video or known about efforts to have it taken down? Is it the dark net inside corporate headquarters?
Charles DeBarber
View Charles DeBarber Profile
Charles DeBarber
2021-06-07 12:53
Well, I'll put it this way. That is a lot of data to track, in fairness, if I'm looking at it from the cybersecurity point of view. I can't tell you if they had the data or not; it all depends on how much they archive.
To be plain, I fully believe your victim. This is a company that I strongly believe has some heavy liability out there and should face consequences for it.
View Charlie Angus Profile
NDP (ON)
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'm speaking to my motion today to invite Mr. Steven Guilbeault, the Minister of Heritage, to come to the ethics and privacy committee to testify on the plans that are being led through the heritage department to deal with the allegations of non-consensual sexual assault videos that exist on PornHub.
At the April 12 ethics meeting, we were informed by security minister Bill Blair that the government of Mr. Trudeau will “introduce legislation to create a new regulator that will ensure online platforms remove harmful content, including depictions of child sexual exploitation and intimate images that are shared without consent” and that “Public Safety Canada and other departments are working on this proposed legislation with Canadian Heritage, which leads this effort.”
We have had no indication of what this new regulator is and I think we need clarity.
I would just step back a minute and say that this all stems from the December 2020 reports that came out of the United States on horrific abuse of children and sexual assault victims on PornHub, a company that is based in Canada. We began our study at that time to see if our laws were insufficient or if there was a problem. We asked the RCMP to come. The RCMP have made it clear that they are not moving forward with allegations against PornHub. They've talked about their being a partner. They've talked about voluntary compliance.
I received the RCMP's internal briefing documents in response to the December 2020 article, and in that document, it talks about what next steps have to be done and it mentions the leadership of the heritage department. My office asked the RCMP to send us the blacked-out information to explain why the RCMP is deferring to Mr. Guilbeault's office. My staff was told that this would breach cabinet confidence.
What that tells me is that after the December 2020 article came out in The New York Times on PornHub, this issue was discussed at the cabinet of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and a decision was made then to have Mr. Steven Guilbeault and the heritage department handle this file, rather than transferring it over to police, to the Attorney General or to public security.
I think this is really important. We cannot finish our PornHub study without knowing what exactly the government's plan is, because we have Bill C-10 right now that Mr. Guilbeault is in charge of, and I think the government shocked everybody when they decided to put user-generated content under Bill C-10. I've talked to many arts organizations that were shocked that Bill C-10 includes user-generated content. It is nothing that the artists' community wanted. They want Facebook and Google to pay their share. Where is this user-generated content coming from? Is this to address the allegations the survivors brought to us on PornHub?
If that is the case, Mr. Guilbeault needs to explain that, because I don't think you could disrespect survivors in any more of an egregious fashion than to suggest that sexual assault videos or videos of the torture of children that were brought forward to our committee are somehow considered user-generated content in Canada. What does that say to survivors? What does that say to the women of the global south who I have been meeting with, who are speaking from Nigeria, Colombia, Spain and France, talking about the sexual assault videos from their countries that are being posted on a Canadian site?
Are the Liberals telling us that they consider sexual assault and criminal acts mere content that can be handled by a regulator? Are they going to hand it off to the CRTC under Bill C-10, or are they going to create a new pornography regulator? I would like to know what that pornography regulator would be, because, again, I had excellent meetings following the debacle of our meetings with the sex workers, and Ms. Lukings provided really interesting analysis of how what we want to do is to make sure we hold corporations accountable for what's online, but we don't want to push stuff to the dark net.
If the Liberals have this idea that Mr. Guilbeault could set up some kind of regulator to tell us—I don't know—Canadian content in porn, good porn, bad porn.... Do we need a regulator or do we simply need the Liberal government to apply the laws?
We can look at the laws we have in Canada. In section 162 of the Criminal Code, it is a crime to film the private acts of individuals or people without their consent. It is a crime to circulate, to sell, to advertise or to make available the recording. We have a law. In section 163, sexual videos of crime, cruelty and violence are classified as criminal in behaviour. We heard from the survivors of non-consensual sexual assault videos that their videos were videos of crime, cruelty and violence. Section 164 gives the authorities, which would be the RCMP, the power to issue warrants to seize the recordings of voyeuristic videos of crimes as well as child pornography.
We have mandatory reporting laws. We have learned that Pornhub has not followed through on them. Pornhub has not respected the laws we have in this country.
The Attorney General doesn't seem to even think it applies, because he's not sure if this Montreal-based company is a Canadian company. If the Attorney General, who lives in Montreal, isn't sure that Pornhub is a Canadian company, even though their address is on Décarie Boulevard and everybody in Montreal who goes to work passes their office in the morning, then how are we expected to believe that the CRTC or some kind of regulator will handle this?
I think Mr. Guilbeault needs to come and explain this to us. What is the government's plan for dealing with the issues of sexual violence on Pornhub that have come to our committee? Are we going to ignore Canadian law or are we going to establish the CRTC to do this? Is this going to be Bill C-10 or...? Mr. Blair suggested that they're going to create a new regulator.
I think Mr. Guilbeault needs to come and inform us so that we can actually finish a report on what Parliament needs to do to address these disturbing allegations of brutality and non-consensual sexual assault of women, not just from Canada but from around the world. We need to be able to respond to those survivors and to the Canadian people that we've done our job. We cannot do that job without Mr. Guilbeault coming and explaining why he is the lead person appointed by the Trudeau government to address these very serious allegations.
I'd like to bring that motion forward for a vote.
View Chris Warkentin Profile
CPC (AB)
We'll move to a vote on the amendment.
Madam Clerk, I'm wondering if you'll run through the roll call for the purposes of the vote on the amendment. This is Mr. Dong's amendment. Then we'll vote on the main motion.
(Amendment agreed to: yeas 10; nays 0 [See Minutes of Proceedings])
(Motion as amended agreed to: yeas 10; nays 0 [See Minutes of Proceedings])
The Chair: Members, that's very helpful. I'm glad we can do that.
Of course, next week our meetings are scheduled to be the review of the report on pandemic spending. I think Mrs. Shanahan may have some suggestions for meetings in the week that follows.
Mrs. Shanahan.
View Arnold Viersen Profile
CPC (AB)
All right.
Over 200,000 people had watched the video of her being assaulted while she lay drugged and unconscious. On that day in August, mortified, dizzied by her discovery of the betrayal, Legarde prepared to tie a noose.
“I was standing in my garage, under a beam, holding onto a rope”, she recalled, but finally, she changed her mind. She said, “I said to myself, 'If this is your situation, he'll do it to someone else tomorrow.'” Legarde resolved her own story and fought back, so now it doesn't have to happen to other girls.
We've heard several stories like this from people who have come to this committee.
Nicholas Kristof points out that this isn't about pornography. This is about rape and sexual abuse. He's also heard from a Canadian student who said, “I have no problem with consensual adults making porn.” Her concern is that many people in the pornographic videos weren't consenting adults, like her. Kristof writes that after she turned 14, a man enticed her to engage in sexual play over Skype. He secretly recorded her. A clip, along with her full name, ended up on XVideos, the world's most-visited pornography site. Google searches helped direct people to this illegal footage of child sexual abuse. This Canadian student shared with Kristof how she begged XVideos to remove the clip. Instead, XVideos hosted two more copies so that hundreds of thousands of people could leer at her at the most mortifying moment in her life.
I also want to highlight another study that came out at the beginning of the month and that may be important to this committee's work. The study, published in The British Journal of Criminology, looked at the ways in which mainstream pornography positions sexual assault violence as normative sexual script. By analyzing videos and titles found in the landing sites of these three most popular pornography sites in the United Kingdom—XVideos, Pornhub and XHamster—the study drew the largest research sample on online pornographic content to date, over 130,000. It is unique in its focus on the content immediately advertised to the new user. The academics found that one in eight titles shown to a first-time user on the main page of the porn sites depicted sexual violence or non-consensual content.
Mr. Chair, we have heard from people from across the spectrum about how they have been targeted and exploited by companies such as Pornhub, and that is what this study is all about.
Kate was 15 years old. Her ex was 20. He was into making homemade videos and stuff, and he videotaped her. One day he said, “Let me show you something.” She tried to get the content taken off Pornhub. It took her years to get rid of that content.
Rosa was 16. She was drunk at a friend's party. She woke up and there were naked pictures of her on Pornhub, with her name and her phone number. She had endless calls and texts. She had to change her number.
Nicole was 14. She made a decision that changed her life. She was having a sexual FaceTime with someone she didn't know. “I didn't know anything about him, his name or his age or anything”, she said, “but I showed him areas of my body that were private. I didn't know it at the time but he was recording it and uploaded it to Pornhub. The name of the video was even 'Young Teen', but that wasn't enough for Pornhub to analyze it and take it down. No, years later, classmates of mine found out about me and the pornography that was shot of me as a child. I've had the police involved on multiple occasions and cannot get the videos taken down.”
This is a video of Rosella, who was raped when she was 14, yet the video is still up on Pornhub.
Kyra, at the age of 15, was coerced into making a film of a sexual act. The video had been uploaded, without her consent, to Pornhub. The uploader was also underage. No one confirmed anyone's age or consent. “I've been dealing with image issues, PTSD, sexual discomfort since the incident and into adulthood. This is my personal account, and I have heard similar stories from other women. I will never forgive Pornhub for allowing my abuse to be shared publicly. It caused me to relive my pain, year over year over year.”
View Patricia Lattanzio Profile
Lib. (QC)
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you, everyone, for being present this morning, both the ministers and Ms. Lucki. Thank you for partaking and helping this committee move along and undertake this very important study.
My first question will be for Mr. Blair.
Mr. Blair, just last month, Public Safety Canada launched a national awareness campaign targeting children, parents and caregivers in order to raise awareness of online child sexual exploitation and abuse and, more specifically, raising awareness of this heinous crime, how to report it and how to reduce the stigma associated with the reporting. Why are the awareness and stigma reduction practices so important?
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