Hon. Paula Simons: Would the senator take a question?

Senator Simons: Thank you very much. It’s so difficult to talk about issues of child pornography because it is such a grotesque and exploitative crime. Online child sexual abuse is a scourge in Canada. There is no one in this chamber who is in favour of it.

What I am concerned about is a question of balance and volume. Every day in this country, thousands of pieces of child pornography are bought and sold and traded online. The amount of it available online is practically infinite.

Yet over the last five years, from May 5, 2017, to May 5, 2022, Canada Border Services Agency seized 392 examples of child pornography at the border that came in on digital media, some on cellular phones and computers but others on hard drives, USB sticks, CDs and DVDs, that kind of thing. That’s 392 seizures in five years, not all of which are on phones and computers. Probably the minority are on phones and computers. I’m not sure.

It seems to me that we are potentially breaching the civil liberties of every international traveller for the sake of stopping a very small hole in the dike, while over here millions of pieces of child pornography are coming over the internet. I want you to tell me whether you think the abridgement of our civil liberties is sufficiently balanced given the minute amount of child pornography that is actually being detected in this way.