Hon. Yonah Martin (Deputy Leader of the Opposition): Honourable senators, my question is also for the government leader in the Senate. Last month, the Union of Veterans’ Affairs Employees wrote to Minister MacAulay regarding the workload of case managers at the department. In 2015, the Trudeau government promised that the ratio of veterans to case managers would be 25 to 1. However, the union says that as of this fall only a handful of case managers had fewer than 30 veterans to manage. The average caseload for case managers was between 40 and 45, with some case managers reporting over 50 veterans on their list.

Leader, this situation is negatively impacting not just the veterans waiting to receive care, but also the Veterans Affairs employees themselves. When will your government live up to its promise to lower the caseload ratio at Veterans Affairs and give our veterans the service they deserve?

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Hon. Yonah Martin (Deputy Leader of the Opposition): Honourable senators, this summer, the board of trade in Burnaby, British Columbia reported that its members were experiencing challenges dealing with incredible increases in container shipping costs, which are up by 400% since January. As a result of the pandemic, congestion at the Port of Vancouver has been a problem for quite some time, but the recent catastrophic flooding and landslides in B.C. have made a bad situation much worse.

Leader, the Burnaby Board of Trade asked your government to undertake several initiatives, including ones to investigate the inflation and accessibility challenges facing shipping in Canada and to work with the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority on efficiency. What will your government do to help ease congestion at the Port of Vancouver?

Hon. Yonah Martin (Deputy Leader of the Opposition): Leader, just before Remembrance Day, Minister Lawrence MacAulay gave an interview in which he promised once again that the Trudeau government would hire more staff at Veterans Affairs to deal with the high caseload at the department. However, the minister did not say how many workers would be hired or when. Almost a month has gone by and there are still no specifics from the Trudeau government. I know you’ve acknowledged that the caseloads have increased and that hiring is one of the priorities.

Leader, has Minister MacAulay or anyone from your government responded to the letter from the Union of Veterans’ Affairs Employees? What was the response? Could you find out how many of the temporary workers who were hired to deal with the backlog are scheduled to be let go by March 2022, which is only a few months away?

Senator Martin: As you say, the disruption to the global supply chain is a growing issue. In fact, I want to draw your attention to the recent words of a small business operator in your home city of Montreal whose lighting company has been waiting for three containers of product stuck in the Port of Vancouver. They told CTV News Vancouver that their products have already cleared Customs, but they cannot get it out of the port due to supply chain issues. This small business now has to pay storage fees of about $7,000. Sadly, this is not an isolated story. It can be repeated many times over by other small businesses right across Canada.

Leader, what will the Trudeau government do to help small businesses dealing with the impact of congestion at our ports? Why haven’t you brought forward a plan to fix this situation for everyone?

Hon. Yonah Martin (Deputy Leader of the Opposition): Honourable senators, I’m pleased to speak as the critic of Bill S-210, An Act to restrict young persons’ online access to sexually explicit material. This bill, formerly Bill S-203, is one that I think we can all agree, in principle, is an important bill that will protect our children and youth.

The Honourable Senator Linda Frum spoke as critic in the last Parliament and congratulated Senator Miville-Dechêne:

. . . for introducing this important bill and for the thoughtful effort she put into crafting it. . . . pornography that if consumed at a young and immature age has the potential to do irreparable harm to the mental and spiritual health of the viewer.

I echo her comments. I once again thank Senator Miville-Dechêne for her tireless work for many children, youth and families who will be protected by this bill.

The preamble of Bill S-210 states that:

Whereas the consumption of sexually explicit material by young persons is associated with a range of serious harms, including the development of pornography addiction, the reinforcement of gender stereotypes and the development of attitudes favourable to harassment and violence — including sexual harassment and sexual violence — particularly against women;

As a former educator and mother of a daughter, I know firsthand how impressionable young minds are and how important it is to teach and protect children from a young age. For them and for future generations, we as parliamentarians can play a vital role in shaping their future and ensure that, above all, we protect them from harm.

Bill S-210, when enacted, will make it an offence for organizations to make porn available to young persons on the internet. It will also enable a designated enforcement authority to take steps to prevent porn from being made available to young persons on the internet in Canada.

As Senator Miville-Dechêne explained so eloquently in her speech last week, Bill S-210 is an improved version of Bill S-203 and will restrict the scope of the regime and further clarify its intention. The objective of this bill, as outlined in clause 4, is to “protect the mental health of young persons” and more broadly to “protect Canadians — in particular, young persons and women — from the harmful” repercussions of porn.

Clause 5 of the bill sets a maximum fine of $250,000 for a first offence of making sexually explicit material available to a minor for commercial purposes. This new bill narrows the scope of the criminal offence to exclude individuals and only targets organizations as defined in section 2 of the Criminal Code. This ensures that individuals, such as sex workers on various porn platforms, will not be in violation of this bill. This narrowed scope makes it possible to directly target commercial distributors of porn.

This question then remains: How can we protect our children from the rapidly growing online world of porn? Unlike the real world, the online world is much more complex. Given the past two years, when much of the world has shifted to online platforms and means of communication, we must ensure there are rules in place to control and protect what is accessible online, especially for children. There still seems to be uncertainty as to how websites should check the age of their visitors before they access pornographic material.

The same rules should be in place online as well as in the real world. For example, accessing explicit material from a store, for a minor, is illegal and heavily enforced by store owners, requiring proof of identification. An age-verification process would provide that layer of protection and a wall to block minors from being exposed to pornography. At the same time, it will still allow pornography to remain accessible to adults in Canada after completing the age-verification component.

This bill aims to create consistent standards, which would then be followed by the regulators who determine the appropriate forms of identification. Bill S-210 would prohibit websites from making porn available to minors by requiring them to implement an age-verification process. Failure to comply with this order would result in a fine, and it could also result in a blocking order against the offending site.

In the previous Parliament, the bill was referred to the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee. The committee carefully studied the bill and heard from witnesses on the merits of, and the need for, this bill.

Laila Mickelwait, who holds a Master of Public Diplomacy, founder of Traffickinghub, Justice Defence Fund, said:

Studies have shown that child exposure to pornography is most often unwanted. The Kaiser Family Foundation has reported that well over two thirds of 15- to 17-year-old adolescents have seen pornography when they did not want to or intend to access it, with nearly half reporting being very or somewhat upset by it. Unwanted sexual experiences are what we call sexual assault. . . . when a child witnesses porn through unwanted exposure or even by curiously stumbling upon it, unaware of what it would contain, it can become a serious and traumatic event in the life of that child.

And Emily Laidlaw, Canada Research Chair in Cybersecurity Law and Associate Professor, Faculty of Law at the University of Calgary, said:

The impacts of children viewing pornography can be profoundly harmful. Arguably, children have a human right to be free from exposure to pornography . . . . But we do have to be mindful that, for adults, viewing pornography is legal and protected expression. . . .

The goal is to reduce the exposure of children to pornography that they should not have access to.

The bill passed third reading in the Senate and was sent to the House of Commons but it died on the Order Paper, like many other bills, when the election was called.

Honourable senators, while I do not feel qualified to offer expertise on the technical merits of the digital age-verification processes associated with Bill S-210, as a woman, mother, former educator of 21 years and as a legislator, I believe Bill S-210 is an important step forward, above all, to do what we can by law to protect our children, young people and women through limited but specific measures.

Therefore, I stand firmly today with Senator Miville-Dechêne and others who have spoken in the past and who will look at this carefully at the Legal Committee and hopefully return it to the chamber quickly this time around. I ask all of our colleagues to support this strengthened bill so that we can send Bill S-210 to the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee for further review.

In an increasingly digitized world, with the proliferation of porn sites — far too many, as cited by Senator Miville-Dechêne — that are too easily accessible to everyone, including minors, I believe we need this bill passed into law — and the sooner the better. Thank you.