44th Parl. 1st Sess.

June 7, 2024 10:00AM

Jun/7/24 10:46:46 a.m.
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Re: Bill C-63

Mr. Speaker, third, the government must actually enforce laws that are already on the books but have not been recently enforced due to a extreme lack of political will and disingenuous politics and leadership, particularly as they relate to hate speech. This is particularly in light of the rise of dangers currently faced by vulnerable Canadian religious communities such as, as the minister mentioned, Canada's Jewish community. This could be done via actions such as ensuring the RCMP, including specialized integrated national security enforcement teams and national security enforcement sections, is providing resources and working directly with appropriate provincial and municipal police forces to share appropriate information intelligence to provide protection to these communities, as well as making sure the secure security infrastructure program funding is accessible in an expedited manner so community institutions and centres can enhance security measures at their gathering places. Fourth, for areas where modernization of existing regulations and the Criminal Code need immediate updating to reflect the digital age, and where there could be cross-partisan consensus, the government should undertake these changes in a manner that would allow for swift and non-partisan passage through Parliament. These items could include some of the provisions discussed in Bill C-63. These include the duty of making content that sexually victimizes a child or revictimizes a survivor, or of intimate content communicated without consent, inaccessible to persons in Canada in certain circumstances; imposing certain duties to keep all records related to sexual victimization to online providers; making provisions for persons in Canada to make a complaint to existing enforcement bodies, such as the CRTC or the police, not a new bureaucracy that would take years to potentially materialize and be costly and/or ineffective; ensuring that content on a social media service that sexually victimizes a child or revictimizes a survivor, or is intimate content communicated without consent, by authorization of a court making orders to the operators of those services, is inaccessible to persons in Canada; and enforcing the proposed amendment to an act respecting the mandatory reporting of internet child pornography by persons who provide an Internet service. Other provisions the government has chosen not to include in Bill C-63, but that should have been and that Parliament should be considering in the context of harms that are being conducted online, must include updating Canada's existing laws on the non-consensual distribution of intimate images to ensure the distribution of intimate deepfakes is also criminalized, likely through a simple update to the Criminal Code. We could have done this by unanimous consent today had the government taken the initiative to do so. This is already a major problem in Canada with girls in high schools in Winnipeg seeing intimate images of themselves, sometimes, as reports are saying, being sexually violated without any ability for the law to intervene. The government also needs to create a new criminal offence of online criminal harassment that would update the existing crime of criminal harassment to address the ease and anonymity of online criminal harassment. Specifically, this would apply to those who repeatedly send threatening and/or explicit messages or content to people across the Internet and social media when they know, or should know, it is not welcome. This could include aggravating factors for repeatedly sending such material anonymously and be accompanied by a so-called digital restraining order that would allow victims of online criminal harassment to apply to a judge, under strict circumstances, to identify the harassment and end the harassment. This would protect privacy, remove the onus on social media platforms from guessing when they should be giving identity to the police and prevent the escalation of online harassment into physical violence. This would give police and victims clear and easy-to-understand tools to prevent online harassment and associated escalation. This would address a major issue of intimate partner violence and make it easier to stop coercive control. As well, I will note to the minister that members of the governing Liberal Party agreed to the need for these exact measures at a recent meeting of PROC related to online harassment of elected officials this past week. Fifth, the government should consider a more effective and better way to regulate online platforms, likely under the authority of the CRTC and the Minister of Industry, to better protect children online while protecting charter rights. This path could include improved measures to do this. This could include, through legislation, not backroom regulation, but precisely through law, defining the duty of care required by online platforms. Some of these duties of care have already been mentioned in questions to the ministers today. This is what Parliament should be seized with, not allowing some unnamed future regulatory body to decide this for us while we have big tech companies and their lobbying arms defining that behind closed doors. That is our job, not theirs. We could provide parents with safeguards, controls and transparency to prevent harm to their kids when they are online, which could be part of the duty of care. We could also require that online platforms put the interests of children first with appropriate safeguards, again, in a legislative duty of care. There could also be measures to prevent and mitigate self-harm, mental health disorders, addictive behaviours, bullying and harassment, sexual violence and exploitation, and the promotion of marketing and products that are unlawful for minors. All of these things are instances of duty of care. We could improve measures to implement privacy-preserving and trustworthy age verification methods, which many platforms always have the capacity to do, while prohibiting the use of a digital ID in any of these mechanisms. This path could also include measure to ensure that the enforcement of these mechanisms, including a system of administrative penalties and consequences, is done through agencies that already exist. Additionally, we could ensure that there are perhaps other remedies, such as the ability to seek remedy for civil injury, when that duty of care is violated. This is a non-comprehensive list of online harms, but the point is, we could come to consensus in this place on simple modernization issues that would update the laws now. I hope that the government will accept this plan. A send out a shout-out to Sean Phelan and David Murray, two strong and mighty workers. We did not have an army of bureaucrats, but we came up with this. I hope that Parliament considers this alternative plan, instead of Bill C-63, because the safety of Canadians is at risk.

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