Back in 2015, Justin Trudeau was asked about the rise in sexual violence against women. “I don’t know where exactly to point my finger,” Trudeau replied. “I think there’s probably an awful lot of factors that come together to shape societal behaviors, whether it’s certain types of music – there’s a lot of misogyny in certain types of music. There’s issues around pornography and its prevalence now and its accessibility, which is something I’m really wrapping my head around as a father of kids who are approaching their teen years.”
I was surprised at the time – to hear a Trudeau expressing concern about any aspect of the Sexual Revolution was, to say the least, unexpected. Now, however, he seems to have recanted his previous concern about the impact of pornography. Last month, he attacked Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre for endorsing some form of age-verification for pornography websites as a way of protecting minors from stumbling across such material. The average age of first exposure to pornography in Canada is 12; the material they are encountering overwhelmingly consists of sexual brutality against women and girls.
At a housing announcement in Cape Breton, Trudeau insisted that seeking to protect kids from porn was a bad thing, actually. “[Pierre’s] proposing that adults should have to give their ID and personal information to sketchy websites or create a digital ID for adults to be able to browse the web where they want,” Trudeau claimed. “That’s something we stand against.” Poilievre and the Conservatives, for the record, do not support requiring users to verify age through a digital ID. Trudeau went on to claim that Poilievre’s support for age verification was hypocritical because he opposes the disastrous Liberal “Online Harms” bill, which even feminist author Margaret Atwood has condemned as “Orwellian.”
Poilivre spokesperson Sebastian Skamski responded to Trudeau by stating that adults should be “free to view what they like assuming the content itself is legal,” and stated that: “But children cannot legally purchase pornography in person, and most Canadians have accepted that fact for many decades. If Justin Trudeau believes that those same children should be able to freely access pornography online, he is free to say so.” Indeed, I would say that he already has. (For the record, I think that porn should be banned and I have detailed the fact that this would be very possible in Canada.)
One of Canada’s key anti-porn advocates is the Liberal-appointed Quebec Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne, who noted that countries such as Germany, France, and the U.K. have all drafted age verification laws. “If you’re a minor, you can’t see a movie if it’s classified 18 years and over. If you’re a minor, you can’t buy a Playboy. But if you’re a minor, you have complete, unfettered access without barriers of any kind to 4.5 million porn sites around the world,” Miville-Dechêne told the CBC. Her anti-porn bill passed the Senate last year, and is now being spearheaded in the House of Commons by Conservative MP Karen Vecchio as Bill S-210, the “Young Person from Exposure to Pornography Act.”
In response, Pornhub has threatened to block the entire country, as they recently did with Texas and other states. We should be so lucky.
Despite gaining support from Bloc Quebecois, Conservative, Liberal, and NDP MPs, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, his cabinet, and the vast majority of his MPs voted against protecting children from pornography. Why? It’s a good question. Any claims about privacy concerns are laughable coming from Trudeau, especially considering his draconian Online Harms bill. It seems more likely that the Liberals simply do not wish to curtail any sexual freedom at all – and if that means that children will continue to be exposed to horrifying sexual violence against women and girls online so that adults can arouse themselves to scenes of sexualized brutality, then so be it.
But we should be calling them out and stating this in blunt terms every chance we get.