Hon. Yonah Martin (Deputy Leader of the Opposition): Honourable senators, I’m pleased to rise to speak to Bill S-210 at third reading. It has been a long road for this legislation, and I want to commend Senator Miville-Dechêne for her tenacity in working with international experts to develop solutions to this growing problem, for continuing to push forward through the legislative hurdles and for her openness to improvements along the way.

The individual and societal consequences of children viewing sexually explicit content, particularly violent material, are becoming more and more apparent as studies continue to surface. We also know that children are accessing more of this content at younger ages — as young as six years old. The overall number of children who regularly view online pornography is on the rise.

As you may know, Bill S-210 is a carefully finessed and improved version of the previous iteration, Bill S-203. Both bills were studied at the Standing Senate Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs and received thoughtful study with expert testimony about the profound harms done to developing brains when accessing the sexually explicit, violent and misogynistic content that is all too common on pornography websites.

In their brief to the Senate Legal Committee, the Canadian Centre for Child Protection stated:

Research has highlighted multiple negative impacts on children from viewing pornography, which include:

- Difficulty forming healthy relationships

- Harmful sexual beliefs and behaviours. . . . A distorted belief that women and girls are always sexually available, and . . . harmful attitudes and beliefs regarding sexual consent.

- A normalization of sexual harm. . . .

By now, we have heard the statistics. Most are hard to hear, and many are truly hard to believe. Dr. Gail Dines, professor emerita of sociology and founder and president of Culture Reframed, a non-profit that develops research-driven programs for parents and professionals on how to build resilience and resistance in young people to pornography, testified at the Senate Legal Committee in support of the legislation.

Dr. Dines has done groundbreaking work in this field, and the latest data and research she has compiled paints a heartbreaking picture. Her work centres around what she calls “the crisis,” which she outlines as follows:

In the absence of comprehensive, competent sex education, porn serves as the major form of sex ed for millions of kids. And what are kids learning? That degradation, humiliation, and violence are central to relationships, intimacy, and sex.

Culture Reframed has highlighted some staggering facts which illustrate the magnitude of the problem. Porn sites get more visitors each month than Netflix, Amazon and Twitter combined. About one third of all web downloads in the U.S. are porn-related. Pornhub, self-described as “the world’s leading free porn site,” received 42 billion visits in 2019.

In a content analysis of best-selling and most-rented porn films, researchers found that 88% of analyzed scenes contained violent physical aggression, and 50% of parents underestimate how much porn their teens have seen. A meta-analysis of 22 studies between 1978 and 2014 from seven different countries concluded that pornography consumption is associated with an increased likelihood of committing acts of verbal or physical sexual aggression, regardless of age.

Another meta-analysis found “an overall significant positive association between pornography use and attitudes supporting violence against women.” In a study of U.S. college men, researchers found that 83% reported seeing mainstream pornography and that those who did were more likely to say they would commit rape or sexual assault if they knew they wouldn’t be caught than men who hadn’t seen porn in the last 12 months.

Lastly, 30 peer-reviewed studies since 2011 revealed that pornography use has negative and detrimental impacts on the brain. Our laws in Canada reflect the severity of the impact on the young brain when it comes to accessing pornography in the real world. However, there is a large disconnect when it comes to regulating the online world with respect to the protection of children. When one considers how difficult it would be for a child to get an R-rated film, get into an R-rated film or purchase an adult magazine, it is unfathomable that the same child can access violent, hard-core pornography in a single click. As Senator Miville-Dechêne has said, in the real world, access to strip clubs and pornographic cinema is restricted to those 18 and over. Bill S-210 essentially seeks to apply the same rule in the virtual world.

Bill S-210, if passed, would require porn sites to perform effective age verification of their users. The bill makes it an offence for organizations, not individuals, to make available sexually explicit material on the internet to a young person for commercial purposes. To avoid sanctions, pornographic websites must implement an age-verification mechanism prescribed by regulation. The law provides for maximum fines of $250,000 for a first offence. However, as witnesses pointed out, these fines are unlikely to be imposed because most porn sites are based internationally, making it difficult to enforce by Canadian law.

Bill S-210 accounts for this, providing an administrative enforcement process in which a designated agency can apply to a Federal Court to order the blocking of contravening websites. The process would apply after a detailed notice was sent and after the expiry of a 20-day period. In practice, this would mean that porn sites not abiding by the law could be blocked even if they are not based in Canada. It is important to note that the provisions apply only to organizations and not to individuals to avoid capturing sex workers and to directly target commercial distributors.

Most of the concerns raised in the previous version of this bill have been rectified in this version. However, a few witnesses who testified before the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee remained concerned about the issue of privacy, and, therefore, the constitutionality of the bill. There were specific concerns raised with respect to the type of age-verification technology that may be utilized and how it may impact the privacy and security of adults who choose to legally access online pornography. Questions were raised, for example, about how personal data would be collected and stored.

The Canadian Bar Association called for a strengthening of privacy protections in the bill. Similarly, Keith Jansa, the executive director of the CIO Strategy Council, called for enhanced privacy protections, while making specific recommendations as to the language that should be added to the bill for clarification. He specified that the words “effective,” “trustworthy,” “privacy preserving” and “age-verification” method be included in the legislation.

Senator Miville-Dechêne moved an amendment to this effect during clause-by-clause consideration in committee.

The amendment specifies that the Governor-in-Council must consider, before prescribing an age-verification method, whether the method is reliable; maintains user privacy and protects user personal information; collects and uses personal information solely for age-verification purposes, except to the extent required by law; destroys any personal information collected for age-verification purposes once the verification is completed; and generally complies with best practices in the fields of age verification and privacy protection.

While this amendment may not satisfy everyone who remains concerned about the constitutionality of this proposal, it is relevant that our esteemed colleagues on the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee vetted both versions of this legislation. After careful, thoughtful consideration, the committee ultimately decided to proceed with the bill as amended.

The committee recognized the harms associated with this growing problem and our role as policy-makers in offering the best possible solution. If a constitutional challenge were to arise, the courts, as always, would be best placed to handle that discussion.

Honourable senators, while young persons’ access to harmful, sexually explicit material is on the rise, so is the level of awareness and openness to call out the harms of the porn industry.

Last year, Billie Eilish, an internationally known singer-songwriter with hundreds of millions of social media followers made headlines when she appeared on the “Howard Stern Show.” She spoke out about a very deep, personal struggle she had endured following repeated exposure to pornography beginning at the age of 11. She spoke about the devastating impact this has had on her ability to develop relationships with others. In a poignant moment, she said, “I think it really destroyed my brain and I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much porn.”

The words “destroyed my brain” may sound hyperbolic, but there is a multitude of conclusive research on the harmful impact of pornography on an adolescent and pre-adolescent brain. Girls who view porn have higher rates of self-harm and are more vulnerable to sexual exploitation and trafficking.

For boys, as you may expect, the harm tends to manifest as sexual aggression toward women, dating violence in high school and a difficulty in forging intimate relationships with women in real life.

And, regardless of gender, young people who view pornography have higher rates of anxiety and depression.

The severity of this issue cannot be overstated.

While this legislation will not solve the problem in its entirety, it is a critical step toward reducing the number of children impacted and the level of exposure.

We recently had the opportunity to have a version of this proposal enacted expeditiously through Bill C-11. Senator Miville-Dechêne introduced this as an amendment during clause-by-clause consideration at the committee’s study. The amendment passed in committee and again at third reading. This could have been a major step forward for this movement, yet, sadly, the Trudeau government struck this provision from the bill.

This makes the swift passage of Bill S-210 all the more important.

As a former educator and mother of a daughter, I know how impressionable young minds are, and how critical the early years are in shaping their development. For our children, and for future generations, let us use the powerful and privileged role we have in this chamber to treat this matter with the urgency it requires and make this necessary change in our law.

I will leave you with some thoughtful words from Dr. Gail Dines’ testimony before the Senate Legal Committee:

When I first started this work over 30 years ago, to buy any pornography material, you had to prove that you were over 18. As pornography moved online around 2000, not only did it become more hardcore, cruel, violent and abusive to women, but it became universally accessible. It is now just a click away.

How have we reached this point where kids as young as 7 are accessing pornographic materials that show women being sexually abused for commercial purposes? Where are the policy-makers and professionals tasked with safeguarding children? Indeed, where are all those adults with a vested interest in the well-being of the next generation?

The good news is that a lot of them seem to be here in Canada, taking a bold and courageous stand to support a bill to stop kids from being pulled into the world of hardcore porn.

Honourable senators, let us take this bold and courageous stance and make Canada a leader in protecting youth from the destructive, violent, misogynistic content that is perpetuating irreparable harm. Bill S-210 is only a step — but an important one — in the right direction, and it has the potential to have a profound impact on our children and future generations.

Thank you.

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