SoVote

Apr/9/24 3:15:30 p.m.
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I would like to take a moment to make a statement concerning the question of privilege raised by the member for Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola. Yesterday, on April 8, 2024, the member raised concerns on the government responses to Order Paper questions. As indicated by the member is his comments, I signed these responses when I was the parliamentary secretary to the Prime Minister. So that no conflict of interest may be perceived, I will recuse myself from this matter and I will not comment further on this. I have requested that the Deputy Speaker rule on the question of privilege. He will therefore return with a ruling in a timely manner.

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Context: House Hansard - 296 - Apr/9/24

Mrs. Rachael Thomas (Lethbridge, CPC)

Apr/9/24 3:17:08 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I rise on the question of privilege raised by the member for Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola. The question of privilege concerns a clear and potentially intentional omission of facts from a recently answered Order Paper question known as Question No. 1445. It would appear the government has acted irresponsibly and violated parliamentary procedure, therefore breaching trust. In a question I sent to the government, I asked the Prime Minister's Office to outline when the government asked social media to take down content. This is commonly referred to as censorship. The government sent me an answer on the many times it had done this, but apparently this was only partially true, because there were omissions made. On Friday, April 5, Allen Sutherland, an assistant secretary to the cabinet in the Privy Council Office, testified at the public inquiry on foreign interference. During his testimony, Mr. Sutherland revealed that in 2019 the Privy Council Office had asked Facebook to take down a post about the Prime Minister from the Buffalo Chronicle. He also mentioned that Facebook had honoured the request, leading to the removal of the content from the platform. This is why I add to the question of privilege. This request for a takedown was not reported in the answer to the question I sent to the government, which means that there was clearly an omission made. I asked the government to report on its content takedown requests from 2016 onward, and I listed Facebook as one of the platforms I wanted to know about. There was a clear omission from my Order Paper question and the answer I received, which has failed to satisfy its purpose in providing the truth based on what I had asked. This is a major concern, and it undermines trust in the institution in which electors place their confidence. How can we operate as a parliamentary democracy if the government cannot be trusted to answer questions from the official opposition, especially on matters of censorship? Mr. Speaker, it is awfully loud in here. I have put up with it for quite some time, but perhaps you could bring that down.

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Context: House Hansard - 296 - Apr/9/24

The Speaker

Apr/9/24 3:21:07 p.m.
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I thank the member for Lethbridge for her comments on this matter. Her question of privilege is very similar to the question of privilege raised by the member for Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola. As I said in my statement, since I was the parliamentary secretary who signed that answer to the Order Paper questions, I will let the Deputy Speaker make the ruling. I am recusing myself from the discussion on this subject.

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Context: House Hansard - 296 - Apr/9/24

Hon. Michelle Rempel Garner (Calgary Nose Hill, CPC)

Apr/9/24 6:19:50 p.m.
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Re: Bill C-63

Madam Speaker, I have a lot to say about the bill. I will just start with a brief personal anecdote. I want to be very clear when I say this: I do not do this as victim porn or looking for sympathy. It is an example of how if somebody like myself, in a position of privilege, has a hard time accessing the justice system, what about others? When I was a minister of the Crown, over 10 years ago, I received very explicit sexualized online threats, very graphic descriptions of how somebody was going to rape me, with what instruments, and how they were going to kill me. I was alone in a hotel room. My schedule had been published the day before, and I was terrified. The response at that time from law enforcement, and the process I had to go through as a minister of the Crown, to attempt to get justice in a situation that did not involve intimate images, sticks with me to this day. If I had to go through that at that time, what hope is there for somebody who does not have my position of privilege? What the bill would do is recognize that the forms of discrimination and harassment that, as my colleague from Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke says, disproportionately impact women, sexual minorities and other persons, have outpaced Parliament's ability to change the law. Here we are today. Briefly, I want to respond to some of the points of debate. First of all, my colleague from the Liberals suggested that we expedite Bill C-63. That bill has been so widely panned by such a variety of disparate stakeholders that the government has not even scheduled it for debate in the House yet. Second, and this is particularly for my colleagues who are looking to support this, to send the bill through to second reading, Bill C-63 would not provide criminal provisions either for any of the activities that are in the bill or for some of the other instances that have been brought up in the House for debate tonight, particularly the non-consensual distribution of deepnudes and deepfake pornography. I raised the issue in the House over seven months ago. The intimate image distribution laws that are currently in the Criminal Code were only put in place in 2014, about a decade after social media came into play, and after Rehtaeh Parsons and Amanda Todd tragically died due to an absence in the law. Seven months have passed, and the government could have dealt with updating the Criminal Code with a very narrow provision that the Canadian Bar Association and multiple victims' rights groups have asked for, yet it has chosen not to. There are so many articles that have been written about what is wrong with what is in Bill C-63 that we now need to start paying attention to what is wrong with it because of what is not in there. There is no update to Canada's Criminal Code provisions on the distribution of intimate images produced by artificial intelligence that are known as deepnudes. I want to be very clear about this. There are websites right now where anyone in this place can download an app to their phone, upload any image of any person, including any person in here, and imagine what that looks like during an election campaign, erase people's clothes, and make it look like legitimate pornography. Imagine, then, that being distributed on social media without consent. Our Criminal Code, the Canadian Bar Association, as well as law professors, and I could read case after case, say that our laws do not update that. At the beginning of February, there was a Canadian Press article that said that the government would update the law in Bill C-63, but it did not. Instead, what it chose to do was put in place a three-headed bureaucracy, an entirely extrajudicial process that amounts to a victim of these crimes being told to go to a bureaucratic complaints department instead of being able to get restitution under the law. Do we know what that says to a perpetrator? It says, “Go ahead; do it. There is no justice for you.” It boggles my mind that the government has spent all of this time while countless women and vulnerable Canadians are being harassed right now. I also want to highlight something my colleague from Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke said, which is that there is a lack of resources for law enforcement across the country. While everybody had a nice couple of years talking about defunding the police, how many thousands of women across this country, tens of thousands or maybe even millions, experienced online harassment and were told, when they finally got the courage to go to the police, that it was in their head? One of those women was killed in Calgary recently. Another of those women is Mercedes Stephenson, who talked about her story about trying to get justice for online harassment. If women like Mercedes Stephenson and I have a hard time getting justice, how is a teenager in Winnipeg in a high school supposed to get any sort of justice without clarity in the Criminal Code if there are deepnudes spread about her? I will tell members how it goes, because it happened in a high school in Winnipeg after I raised this in the House of Commons. I said it was going to happen and it happened. Kids were posting artificial intelligence-generated deepnudes and deepfakes. They were harassing peers, harassing young women. Do members know what happened? No charges were laid. Why were no charges laid? According to the article, it was because of ambiguity in the Criminal Code around artificial intelligence-created deepnudes. Imagine that. Seven months have passed. It is not in Bill C-63. At least the bill before us is looking at both sides of the coin on the Criminal Code provisions that we need to start looking at. I want to ensure that the government is immediately updating the Criminal Code to say that if it is illegal to distribute intimate images of a person that have been taken with a camera, it should be the exact same thing if it has been generated by a deepnude artificial intelligence. This should have been done a long time ago. Before Bill C-63 came out, Peter Menzies, the former head of the CRTC, talked about the need to have non-partisan consensus and narrowly scoped bills so it could pass the House, but what the government has chosen to do with Bill C-63 is put in place a broad regulatory system with even more nebulousness on Criminal Code provisions. A lot of people have raised concerns about what the regulatory system would do and whether or not it would actually be able to address these things, and the government has not even allowed the House to debate that yet. What we have in front of us, from my perspective, is a clear call to action to update the Criminal Code where we can, in narrow provisions, so law enforcement has the tools it needs to ensure that victims of these types of crimes can receive justice. What is happening is that technology is rapidly outpacing our ability to keep up with the law, and women are dying. I am very pleased to hear the multipartisan nature of debate on these types of issues, and that there is at least a willingness to bring forward these types of initiatives to committee to have the discussions, but it does concern me that the government has eschewed any sort of update of the Criminal Code on a life-versus-life basis for regulators. Essentially what I am worried about is that it is telling victims to go to the complaints department, an extrajudicial process, as opposed to giving law enforcement the tools it needs. I am sure there will be much more debate on this, but at the end of the day, seven months have passed since I asked the government to update the Criminal Code to ensure that deepnudes and deepfakes are in the Criminal Code under the non-consensual intimate image distribution laws. Certainly what we are talking about here is ensuring that law enforcement has every tool it needs to ensure that women and, as some of my colleagues have raised here, other sexual minorities are not victimized online through these types of technologies.

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