Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you to the officials for appearing this afternoon.

I would like to focus my questions on Bill C-63. The context for this legislation is the Government of Canada's concern about the alarming rise of online harm and crime.

I will begin by pointing out that the prevalence of online harm has continued to increase over the last number of years. In 2022, a Canadian Internet youth survey revealed that 71% of Canadians between the ages of 15 and 24 had been exposed over the previous 12 months to online content inciting hatred or violence. In that same year, the uniform crime reporting survey reported 219 cyber-related hate crimes, which was up from 92 reported incidents in 2018.

I will highlight a few other important statistics. Between 2014 and 2022, police reported 15,630 incidents of online sexual offences against children and 45,816 instances of child pornography. In 2022, police in Canada received 2,524 reports of non-consensual distribution of intimate images online. A 2020 study by the U.K.-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue found that Canadians were sharing white supremacist, misogynistic and other radical content in more than 6,600 online channels and that Canadians were proportionally more active in such channels than other users abroad.

I've taken the time to go through these statistics in order to underline the importance of this legislation. Among other things, the bill identifies and provides definitions for seven types of harmful content, many of which are directly responsive to the alarming trends around online harm, violence and crime that I have just elucidated. Those seven types of harmful content include content that foments hatred, content that incites violence, content that incites violent extremism or terrorism, intimate content communicated without consent, content that induces a child to harm themselves, content that sexually victimizes a child or revictimizes a survivor, and content used to bully a child.

In my remaining time, I would like the officials to expand on how they see these provisions, once implemented, being able to be deployed by law enforcement for the purpose of reversing the trends that I have identified, which are some of the main reasons it is so important that we study this bill and pass it into law.

I'll open the floor to whoever wants to take the question.

Marco Mendicino

$431,061.00