SoVote

Decentralized Democracy

Member of Parliament

René Villemure

  • Member of Parliament
  • Member of Parliament
  • Bloc Québécois
  • Trois-Rivières
  • Quebec
  • Voting Attendance: 63%
  • Expenses Last Quarter: $100,349.98

  • Government Page
Context: House Hansard - 265 - Dec/11/23
Mr. René Villemure
Madam Speaker, Bill S‑210 would create an offence for organizations that make such content accessible. Obviously, we are motivated by the desire to better regulate sexually explicit material. Basically, what we want to do here is protect young people from a certain type of danger. When we seek to protect, we want to act proactively to prevent a certain event from happening, and the danger is being at the mercy of someone or something. We need to be very careful. It is much easier then it used to be to gain access to pornography. I remember, when I was young, that people really had to be quite clever to find anything at all, and then it had to be hidden under the bed. I am not talking about myself, obviously, I am referring to others. Today, it is easy to get the material online. The web means everywhere and forever. It is very difficult to regulate online content. In philosophy, it is said that in order to exist, an event must have two characteristics, space and time. Something takes place at a given time. We are used to thinking this way. Where and when? But the Internet is everywhere and forever. This makes it hard to control certain types of content or the businesses that provide it. Without space and time, nothing would exist. I used to ask the following question in discussions: What would happen to a bird in flight if there were neither space nor time? Most people answered that the bird would fall, but it would not, because there would be no time. These are basic building blocks of where we are. When we talk about young people, we are talking about individuals who have not yet necessarily had an opportunity to develop judgment. They are very susceptible to various influences. They can easily form a false idea of the nature of sexuality, love and relationships, a distorted idea that could significantly shape their behaviour. This is a danger. As parliamentarians, no one here can be against preventing such a danger. At the age when the concepts of love, sexuality, relationships and dating are still fluid, we have to be able to act preventively. There is a Creole saying I really like. It says, “the sun sleeps, but danger never does”. That is why we must act. I will reiterate that all action is time sensitive. If we must act, we must do so now. Of course, as we send the bill on to the next step, there will be discussions about what form it might take, but we must never lose sight of its intent. The intent must remain, because it reflects the values underlying it. Values are elements that embody a certain vision of goodness, justice and injustice. They are values like respect. We all demand respect, but sometimes we do not bother to learn what it is. Respect is a second look we take at something or someone so as not to offend needlessly. There is then something here we have to think about now. This said, I have a bit of a problem with the idea of “now”, because, if it is urgent, we have to act. Last Friday, we lost a parliamentary day to useless procedural tactics that delayed the hearing and potentially the implementation of such a bill. We were confronted with a shameful partisan stunt that twisted procedure for purposes other than those intended. This is called manipulation. Manipulation is to use something for other purposes, for one's own ends. While we were voting, the people who forced the vote were forgetting that there was a danger. There was a danger, yet I am told that the party that forced the vote was okay with the danger. In the bill, although it is not referred to explicitly, we can read between the lines and understand that self-regulation will not be an option. Of course, as far as the Internet is concerned, self-regulation is a fiction. In general, online companies, especially the ones that distribute pornography, are not at all trustworthy, and trust is a condition for self-regulation. Trust is the ability to rely on others without having to control everything. Self-regulation is therefore neither credible nor acceptable. In conclusion, I will ask my colleagues to stop wasting time, something we are seeing a lot of, and bear in mind that every hour of time lost is an opportunity for something to go wrong. As I said, there is danger, there is a threat, there are young people involved whose minds are not yet fully formed. We have to act now.
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Context: House Hansard - 265 - Dec/11/23
Mr. René Villemure (Trois-Rivières, BQ)
Madam Speaker, I am very pleased to be here this morning to discuss a very important subject. The law that limits young people's online access to sexually explicit material, more commonly known as pornography, is something we should be concerned about. When we look at certain aspects of the bill, we see that things changed with the advent of information technology. Things are not like they used to be. It is no longer the same. We must have a slightly different concern for that reason. We want—
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