Lisa Hepfner

Mr. Speaker, small businesses are the lifeblood of our economy, so I spent much of the summer checking in on businesses on Hamilton Mountain to see how they are managing the unfair U.S. tariffs that have upended their business models. One particular highlight was my visit to Niko Apparel Systems with owner Joe Camillo. The factory floor has 66 advanced machines for designing and sewing niche market sports jerseys. One employee, Olga, proudly described how she juggles six different threads at a time while sewing jerseys for local hockey, cycling or lacrosse teams, or referee jerseys for Ron Foxcroft. These are jerseys designed and made on Hamilton Mountain with Canadian materials. Hamilton businesses are fiercely proud to be Canadian. The U.S. tariffs are a threat, but thanks to the regional tariff response initiative, our government is helping businesses such as Niko expand and adapt despite these trying economic times. Niko has been on the mountain for 30 years. We want to see it continue for decades to come.

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the member for her speech. I served with her on the veterans committee in the last Parliament. I know she was a great source of support for many veterans, including women veterans. I want to thank her for her service and wish her all the best in her retirement.

Mr. Speaker, I have the honour to present, in both official languages, the eighth report of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, entitled “The Effects of Influencers and Social Media Content on Children and Adolescents”. Pursuant to Standing Order 109, the committee requests that the government table a comprehensive response to this report. While I have the floor, I move: That the House do now proceed to orders of the day.

Mr. Speaker, I was very moved by my friend's speech. He was my first mentor in this place, and I have learned so much from him over the last five years. I would like him to reflect on the amount of misinformation and disinformation that has spread across this country in relation to the bill.

Mr. Speaker, today on Parliament Hill, I recognize and applaud the leadership of the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network. Bravo to the team for their first Canadian Screen Award for best national newscast. It is likely not the last such award, given the talent and hard work among the journalists and the rest of the news team. In 1999, the APTN became the first national indigenous broadcaster in the world. Since then, the APTN has continued to grow, connecting indigenous and non-indigenous audiences. These are stories and perspectives that would not be heard if it were not for the network dedicated to indigenous people and their stories. Given that we are in National Indigenous History Month, I would encourage all colleagues to check out all of the APTN offerings, from the award-winning national broadcast to the sports coverage and the brilliant new North of North TV series. Congratulations, APTN, on 10 Canadian Screen Awards this year.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate that the hon. member brought up Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables. I read all of those books when I was a little girl growing up. That was before the Internet, when Canadians were able to talk to each other and find Canadian content. We have heard at heritage committee, over and over again from Canadian artists in every genre, that they would have not made it as far as they did without the supports and the Canadian content rules we have in place today. Does the member opposite believe that it is important to have Canadian culture?

Mr. Speaker, today on Parliament Hill, we welcome police unions from across the country, including a stellar team from my riding in Hamilton. I got to know a lot of police officers in my previous role as a journalist, particularly in my specialty of covering criminal court cases. I appreciated how all the elements of crime were laid bare in a trial, and I learned how doggedly detectives had to work in order to crack a case. I saw how much the officers cared, how they got to know the families of the victims, felt their pain and did what they could to make the process easier. Police officers have truly difficult jobs, but they do them with dedication. On their days off, they are typically raising money for causes or raising awareness about harms. We must ensure that police officers have the tools and resources they need to fulfill their mandates to keep our communities strong and safe. We should thank police, loudly and often, for their vital work.

Mr. Speaker, as chair of the permanent Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, I have the great honour and pleasure of presenting three reports to the House of Commons today. First, I have the honour to present, in both official languages, the fourth report of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, entitled “Impacts of Artificial Intelligence on the Creative Industries”. Pursuant to Standing Order 109, the committee requests that the government table a comprehensive response to the report. Second, I have the honour to present, in both official languages, the fifth report of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, in relation to Bill S-227, an act respecting Arab heritage month. The committee has studied the bill and has decided to report the bill back to the House without amendment. Third, I have the honour to present, in both official languages, the sixth report of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, in relation to Bill S-210, an act respecting Ukrainian heritage month. The committee has studied the bill and has decided to report the bill back to the House without amendment. It is clearly a very busy and very productive committee.

Mr. Speaker, I know the member for Brantford—Brant South—Six Nations from our previous careers as prosecutor and journalist. Something I noticed in the last several years is that a lot of the really important cases, murder cases, were solved by police using tools in the digital world. Perhaps the member can respond to that.

Mr. Speaker, I met with the Canadian Gaming Association or the advertisers in question here late last year. Their position is that the provinces already have enough regulation and that there are enough controls already to protect Canadians. What is her response to this position from the industry?

Mr. Speaker, I am truly honoured to have the opportunity to speak in favour of Bill S-211 today, an act respecting a national framework on sports betting, for many of the reasons we have heard already this evening. I am not someone who spends a lot of time watching professional sports, I will admit, but they are often on my TV when I am home with my family, and even I have noticed that sports betting ads are ubiquitous. It has become a topic of conversation in our house that people are not just watching sports anymore; they are participating with their money. They can bet on the next play of the football game they are watching or how many points a professional baseball player might make. Every few minutes, there is an ad encouraging Canadians to gamble, because watching sports seems to no longer be enough of an experience in itself. Our sports, sports figures and teams are part of our national identity. Sports have long brought Canadians together, and now Canadians have to navigate endless gambling advertisements in order to watch a game or a competition. For many people, this presents a risky temptation. Back in the early 2000s, when I was a journalist, I got to know a prominent Hamilton man who lost his career due to a gambling addiction. We spoke at length about this, and he introduced me to some of the men he had met at Gamblers Anonymous. All of them were people who had important careers until they lost everything due to their gambling addictions, including a lawyer who was supposed to be appointed to the Superior Court bench the same day that police were raiding his offices to find evidence that he had stolen money from clients to fuel his gambling addiction. We did a whole long TV series about this, and these people told me how difficult it was to resist when they were routinely bombarded by advertising that compelled them to keep spending money at casinos and other gambling venues. Remember, this was back in the early 2000s. It was before the tsunami of social media and the avalanche of betting sites we have available online today. Today the world is different. We know this. It is not just adults in the prime of their careers who are falling into destitution and despair due to addictive behaviours. Elderly people, vulnerable people and people susceptible to mental and physical harms are all being bombarded with the same sports advertising. Today children are glued to their devices. They are watching sports and, inevitably, are fed a constant stream of sports betting advertising. Gambling has become normalized as a part of sports. This is what our children are learning as they grow up. I chair the permanent Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage. We recently completed a study on the impacts of social media on young people, and we heard that many online applications used by children encourage addictive behaviour. The gamification of everything means that our kids are becoming addicted to their favourite vice earlier and earlier in life. They are learning how to become addicts. We heard this testimony from several witnesses. For example, Maude Bonenfant, the Canada Research Chair in Gaming, Technologies and Society and a professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal, told us that platforms use games of chance and money. They use gambling as a strategy to keep users engaged as long as possible, and the line between video games and gambling is becoming increasingly blurred, so video games are becoming more like gambling. There is more betting within video games, and the algorithms are increasingly sophisticated, with the aim of keeping kids immersed in online content through gambling. Michael Cooper from Mental Health Research Canada told us that one addictive behaviour can be a catalyst for another addictive behaviour. For example, people who spend more than six hours online are more than twice as likely to be at high risk for alcohol and cannabis abuse and a host of other addictions. The same is true for gambling. This normalizing of gambling in everyday life can mean, according to Cooper, that our ability to regulate ourselves in the face of temptation is broken. Today, we are inundated with enticements to gamble, particularly in sports. Bill S-211 is a first step in preserving the integrity of the sports culture in Canada, but it is also about preserving the mental health of Canadians. Our colleague from Waterloo and other members have spoken about the former Bill C-218, the Safe and Regulated Sports Betting Act. This was something Parliament brought and became law in 2021, because before that, all we had was black-market bookies with ties to criminal organizations. The bill was an attempt to put the industry under the purview of the provinces so that it had greater oversight. However, today, only Ontario in Canada authorizes third party gambling operators, as we have heard several times tonight, and sports betting operators have taken full advantage. They have purchased oodles of ad space on regional and national broadcasts, particularly on sports channels during sporting events. Some estimates say that we are subjected to three gambling ads every minute while we are watching sports on TV. We now see sports betting ads even when we are watching live. They appear on athletes' jerseys and on the boards around the ice rinks. In Canada today, we have more than 19 million active online gamblers. This is one of our fastest-growing industries. Canada rates eighth in the world for the most money spent on gambling, about $4 billion every year. Also, as I impressed upon this chamber earlier, children, teens and vulnerable people are also watching these games. They are talking about the experience the next day with their friends and their community. Do we really want them to think of gambling as a normal part of taking in a sporting activity, or even that a person has not really experienced a game if they have not put some money down on an outcome or player? We need to deeply consider whether we want important, healthy Canadian cultural institutions to be intertwined with the often harmful habit of gambling. Research shows that the more we are exposed to gambling ads, the more positive our attitude becomes toward gambling, intentions to gamble become greater and gambling activities increase. The Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction found that almost one in four young people who bet online reported harms due to gambling behaviour, and that online sports betting is associated with double the risk of gambling harms compared to other forms of gambling. Also, sports betting advertising is four times more appealing to children than adults. I learned a lot about the significant impacts that problem gamblers face when I did that news series 25 years ago: impacts on their own health, on their mental health and on their well-being, and equal impacts on their family and their loved ones. Problem gamblers are four times more likely to have anxiety and depression, and seven times as likely to have planned suicide in the past 12 months. Excessive advertising can exacerbate all of these issues, as I heard from problem gamblers, and that was a quarter century ago, long before the onslaught of the advertising we face today. Researchers say that there is a possibility of a connection between the extent of exposure to advertising and the intensity of the gambling addiction. Bill S-211 asks the federal government to establish a national framework, regulate sports betting advertising, provide tools for the prevention and diagnosis of gambling and support those who are impacted by a harmful gambling addiction. Canadians agree that something should be done. In 2024, a poll by Maru Group found that most Canadians have a negative attitude toward gambling ads: 75% say that we need to protect children and youth from gambling ads, 66% say that those commercials should not be allowed during live broadcasts and 59% believe in a national ban on this type of advertising. When we pair gambling with the broadcast of a game, we normalize sports betting as an integral part of the sport experience. It is not. I will leave members with words from Bruce Kidd, a retired professor of sports policy. He wrote an article in The Globe and Mail on February 7, in which he established that about four million Canadians, the population of about Alberta, are at risk of a gambling addiction. He said: Think about multiples of the number of people who watch a Blue Jays game in Rogers Stadium. And then think about their families. If we fail to pass Bill S-211, those will be the numbers of...people we’ll have abandoned to the careless greed of the advertisers who think they’re doing their part by saying over and over again—and disingenuously, of course—“Please gamble responsibly.”

Mr. Speaker, we recently hit 100 days since Build Canada Homes was launched, and we are already seeing real momentum on the ground. Projects are moving faster, partnerships are coming together, and communities are seeing concrete progress on affordable housing. Would the Minister for Housing and Infrastructure please update the House on all we have accomplished and what more is to come?

Mr. Speaker, I will start by thanking the dozens of people who came to Ottawa today to support this legislation, because these reforms are urgently needed. We have organizations like the National Association of Women and the Law, Women's Shelters Canada and YWCA Canada. There are 300 women's organizations across this country that support this legislation, because they hear from victims almost every day. These are victims who are asking, “How do I protect my child?” We have a dentist here who has seen so much family violence in his practice; he did not know how to address it. We have lots of victims, including, as we heard from my friend, a 15-year-old girl. Her dad claimed parental alienation even though he was a sexual abuser. Next year, she will be going to criminal court to testify against him. She was here today to tell people that if this legislation had been in place, she would not have had to go through that. Opponents ask about about parents' rights, fathers' rights and mothers' rights. I do not think it should be about the parents' rights. I think we should centre every decision on the best interests of the child, especially when there are allegations of abuse. Right now, in family court, it does not look like allegations of abuse are taken seriously. In fact, it is an aggravating factor if one brings up allegations of abuse during divorce court. We have police and women's organizations in this country today advising women not to disclose to family court that they have suffered abuse, whether it be coercive control or physical abuse, because disclosing that leaves them vulnerable to losing their children, and they just want to protect their children. We cannot let this stand. We have to listen to children. We have to take domestic violence seriously. We have to treat it, and we have to understand how it affects families, including children. As my good friend from Brampton South said tonight, let us stop penalizing survivors. As my good friend from Ottawa West—Nepean has said tonight, let us not let the justice system be another tool of harm. I thank all the members in the House who seem to unanimously be supporting this legislation. Next week, we will vote. Let us send this bill to committee. Let us make it as good as it can be, and let us pass this law so that children are safe in this country again.

Mr. Speaker, I have to say that I do not really understand where my colleague's opposition to this bill is coming from. Bill C-16 restores mandatory minimum penalties, which is something he is advocating for. We know that every time the government has tried to impose a mandatory minimum sentence in Canada it gets thrown out by the Supreme Court because, in some cases, it can violate a person's rights in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Bill C-16 gives us exactly what the Supreme Court has been asking for in those very rare cases. For example, if a 17-year-old shares an intimate photo of a 16-year-old girlfriend with his friend, does he go to prison for 25 years? It is definitely a bad thing he has done. The bill addresses all of the issues the member has just raised.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for her excellent speech. I also want to thank her for saying a few words about feminist organizations. I have also heard that police associations support this bill. I would like to know whether my colleague has heard the same thing.

Mr. Speaker, I am so grateful to have the opportunity to speak to Bill C-16, the protecting victims act, and the government's ongoing efforts to protect children and ensure that child sex exploitation is unequivocally denounced, deterred and prevented. Colleagues may know that I also have a private member's bill coming up for second reading in a couple of days, the keeping children safe act. I feel that this bill works in the criminal context to do what my bill does in the family courts. It protects children, it gives them a voice and it protects them from coercive control after a relationship is done. I served as a journalist for more than 20 years. I spent a lot of that time in criminal court, so I know a lot of victims of really heinous crimes. I know that they expect a justice system that does not tolerate things like sexual exploitation, that protects victims and that hands serious consequences to people who commit serious crimes. Bill C-16, the protecting victims act, reflects the government's commitment to ensure that our criminal law is strong, principled and capable of meeting that responsibility. I will start by addressing the mandatory minimums that we have heard so much about here in this chamber today. I know it has been a controversial topic. I have covered criminal court, and it has been a controversial topic for decades. Mandatory minimum penalties, for those who are not aware, mean that a judge cannot impose a sentence any lower than the prescribed minimum penalty, regardless of the circumstances. They can impose a longer sentence, but they can never impose a shorter sentence. It does not matter what the evidence was that they heard. Victims like mandatory minimum penalties because they clearly denounce serious crimes. They can be a deterrent for some offenders, but they can also be unfair in some circumstances. That is what we have heard from the Supreme Court. Judges currently do not have any discretion, even if they feel that a mandatory minimum is too harsh for the particular case that is in front of them. Mandatory minimums risk violating the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. They can result in grossly disproportionate sentences. Unlike what we have heard from the Conservatives so far today, “grossly disproportionate” is a really high threshold. It means that it must outrage our society's sense of decency and that Canadians would find the sentence abhorrent or intolerable. That is the only time a judge would be allowed to use this mechanism, because there is no mechanism like this. Mandatory minimums have been declared unconstitutional by courts across Canada, including in child sex offence cases. However, the government agrees that mandatory minimums can be a good thing. They can denounce and deter some of the most serious crimes. That is why we have these provisions in Bill C-16. That is why we see this decisive, immediate action and these reforms in Bill C-16, where we would amend the Criminal Code to restore mandatory minimum penalties that have been found unconstitutional by the courts. We would do this by including a provision that provides judges the ability to have some discretion. They could order a sentence of imprisonment lower than the statutory mandatory minimum, but in very narrow situations. In most cases, the mandatory minimum would still apply, but if the court is sentencing an offender for something where the mandatory minimum will be found to be grossly disproportionate, should we just let it go to the Supreme Court to be thrown out and not have that law at all? With Bill C-16, the court does not need to do that. It does not need to throw it out. It does not need to find a mandatory minimum unconstitutional, and there would always still be a prison sentence. A conditional sentence would not apply in these circumstances. We would strike a balance, as the Supreme Court suggested. This is an approach that is responsive to stakeholders and suggestions that have been made repeatedly by the courts. When Bill C-16 comes into force, all the mandatory minimums that were found unconstitutional but that remain on the federal statute book would be considered restored. They would all come back into force. The courts would once again be required to impose mandatory minimum penalties for all the offences for which the penalty has not been repealed from the law, except in the rarest cases where the mandatory minimum penalty would result in cruel and unusual punishment for the offender before the court. It is a very high bar. I know victims will appreciate these measures, and I applaud the government for finding this middle ground. I also want to say that, as a feminist, I am so proud of this legislation. I am so proud that Canada is bringing this legislation forward. We know that gender-based violence and sexual exploitation are growing in this country. Around the world, they are growing. Online and off-line, predators are increasingly using digital tools to target our children. Bill C-16 addresses that. We heard about the victims who did not have their cases heard at all in court because of Jordan's principle. Bill C-16 would deal with those delays we have seen in court. That means that more cases would actually be heard in court. The bill addresses and calls out femicide. It addresses criminal harassment and the non-consensual sharing of images, particularly deepfake images produced by AI. As we have heard, which makes my heart sing, Bill C-16 would criminalize coercive control. I was here in the last Parliament when former NDP member Laurel Collins brought the coercive control bill to Parliament. I remember the impassioned speech that she gave about why we need this law on our books. Bill C-16 takes that private member's bill, the amended version of it that was meant to pass in the House, and incorporates it. Too many women and children are living in fear in this country. My private member's bill and Bill C-16 address a lot of their concerns, and I encourage all members of the House to support them.

Mr. Speaker, I am happy to explain. It has not been happening all over. It has been happening at the Supreme Court when a case comes to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court decides that we cannot have a mandatory minimum sentence if it is too broad, if it encompasses a situation where Canadians would find it abhorrent for the mandatory minimum sentence to be applied. It is a very high bar. A case the Supreme Court talked about, for example, was if a 17-year-old shared an intimate picture of his 16-year-old girlfriend with a friend. It is a terrible thing. It is illegal and he should not do that, but should he spend his entire life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years? Most Canadians would say no, and that is why the Supreme Court said that we need to have an off-ramp. We need to give judges discretion. They have to be able to hear all of the evidence. In the worst cases, yes, we need a mandatory minimum. We need people to know that these crimes are intolerable in Canada. However, for those cases, if we want the Supreme Court not to throw out the mandatory minimum penalties, we need this off-ramp.