OTTAWA, Ontario, June 22, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) MP Shannon Stubbs has called upon Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to take action against the Canada-based pornographic website Pornhub, which has allowed rape videos of children to be posted on its site.
“Prime Minister and various ministers said they were also horrified and promised action. But as of right now, the brutal reality is this: There is no new legislation, no new policies, no new regulatory mechanism, no new resources, no new measures for law enforcement to apply the current laws,” said Stubbs, who serves as the CPC shadow minister for public safety, last week at a press conference.
Stubbs led the way on a recent House of Commons’ Ethics Committee report which called on Trudeau’s government to crack down on Pornhub.
Last week, a report said the Ethics Committee recommended that Pornhub be held liable for not preventing explicit material of child sex abuse from being uploaded to its platform.
Stubbs said that Trudeau’s recent words saying he was “horrified” about what has happened to minors has not been followed up by “urgent action.”
“That is not too much for Canadians to ask or expect. And it’s already woefully and shamefully too late for so many victims,” said Stubbs.
Pornhub is owned by Montreal-based MindGeek and is the most viewed pornography website in the world. It has come under fire in recent months after reports surfaced that it has repeatedly allowed pornographic videos involving minors to be uploaded to its site.
A December 2020 New York Times report — titled “The Children of Pornhub: Why does Canada allow this company to profit off videos of exploitation and assault?” — gained international attention for its analysis of Pornhub’s allowance of illegal content involving minors to be uploaded to its site.
On Thursday, Stubbs recalled how she was “blown away” by the “resilience and courage” of the victims’ testimony, but was “horrified” that “the harmful, heartless, and demeaning treatment they endured” has come with no “consequences, and at the evasion of executives.”
“Now it is up to this government to look in the mirror and act,” said Stubbs.
As for MindGeek, company CEO Feras Antoon told the committee earlier in the year that sexually explicit material involving minors against their will has “no place on our platform, and it’s contrary to our values and our business model.”
Despite this, a $600 million lawsuit, filed in the Superior Court of Québec in December, but only recently reported, claims the site did host child pornography.
In addition to the Canadian lawsuit, there is an $80 million California lawsuit recently filed by 40 women from around the world that claims MindGeek aided a global trade of sexually exploitative photos of underage girls.
In a recent interview with Jonathon Van Maren, CPC MP Arnold Viersen said that “85 percent of 15- to 35-year-old males are viewing pornography on a weekly basis,” noting in particular that Canada has some of the highest viewership’s of digital pornography in the world.
Viersen is part of an All Party Parliamentary Group to End Modern Slavery, and he told Van Maren that the goal of the group is to stop Canada from being the “headquarters of the largest porn company in the world.”
A petition which calls upon Pornhub to be shuttered for “allegedly enabling and profiting from the sex trafficking and rape of women and children” currently has over 2 million signatures.