Hon. Ratna Omidvar: Senator Miville-Dechêne, my question is more of a political nature. I must congratulate you on the work you have done over the last year, and the searchlight that has been shone on this issue, particularly on MindGeek and other pornography sites. I don’t know the answer to this question, but you may: Do you know if any political party included this particular issue in their policy platform during the last election?

Senator Miville-Dechêne: That’s a good question, Senator Omidvar. I have to say that Steven Guilbeault, when he served as Minister of Canadian Heritage, publicly said that this was an interesting bill, but he didn’t go any further. As you know, he was very involved and busy with Bill C-10, so I didn’t have an opportunity to discuss it with him any more than that.

I think one of his concerns was that we shouldn’t focus only on porn sites, but that all social media and the internet had harmful material and that our view should be broader. Obviously, it makes sense, but from my point of view, with a private bill, I couldn’t just go straight to the internet as a whole. It was too complicated, so I focused on porn sites. To be frank, half of teenagers go on porn sites when they want to watch porn. It’s not something that’s not used.

I have support among MPs from different parties. What I find incredibly interesting with this particular bill is that it’s non-partisan. I have support among people with different ideologies and who are in different parties, because obviously you could be a feminist, or you could be a more conservative person and still want to protect children. The way we do that can be the same. I really think this support is important. But no, there was nothing in the political platforms on that. I’m very sorry about that.