A coffee with… Julie Miville-Dechêne | She stands up to the porn giant

Pornhub recently threatened Canada: it could block access to its site in the country. Who is the David who makes this Goliath tremble? Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne. Its goal is the noblest: to protect our children.

From the start of the interview with Julie Miville-Dechêne, one subject emerged: the place where she arranged to meet me. A small café in Mile End called Les Impertinentes.

Do you know the story of Proust’s madeleine? He takes a bite and his childhood memories come flooding back. The memory of Julie Miville-Dechêne was activated by the name of the café.

She remembers that one day, her mother received a visit from her doctoral thesis supervisor, a Frenchman. This man then calls young Julie “impertinent”.

For what ? It’s not very clear anymore. She knows, however, that she is not offended. Today she is proud of it.

“I’m sassy. I believe in frankness, which can sometimes border on impertinence,” the senator told me.

Julie Miville-Dechêne is a petite, flirtatious and smiling woman, who resembles a dynamic teacher (diction included), but who also has the poise and composure of a high-level athlete.

Listening to her, it only took me a few minutes to understand how and why she dares to stand up to a porn giant (Pornhub), while finding herself at odds with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

It’s all there: in this mixture of impertinence and aplomb, which she puts at the service of the issues that she has the freedom to choose and which she addresses with frankness.

And ardor.

His bill (S-210) aimed at limiting “young people’s online access to sexually explicit material” is his second major fight since arriving in the Senate in 2018.

The first was the fight against forced labor and child labor in supply chains. She won it in June 2022, when the House of Commons unanimously adopted the bill she had tabled in the Senate on this subject.

“An extremely rare gesture,” our office head in Ottawa, Joël-Denis Bellavance, wrote at the time. This is because in Canada, we do not adopt masses of major bills that come from the Senate.

I obviously spoke about the usefulness of the Senate with Miville-Dechêne and I will come back to it a little later.

But first I wanted to hear him talk in detail about his fight to protect our children from porn.

I was served. She speaks without any shame, without omitting the dangers that current laxity poses for young people – and for society as a whole.

Chronologically, her struggle began on March 8, 2020. She then participated in a demonstration in front of the offices of MindGeek (Pornhub), which were, by pure coincidence, 15 minutes from her home.

At the time, what Pornbhub was criticized for, in particular, was disseminating images of women without their consent and images of children. “It was prohibited by the Criminal Code,” she said.

At the same time, however, she “started to think about those who were watching” these videos. She quickly realized that “children of any age had total access, without any verification, to all these sites which have nothing to do with what we saw in our youth”.

Because we are far from the content of magazines Playboy And Penthouse, said the senator. What you find on sites like Pornhub can be degrading, violent and deeply disturbing.

Julie Miville-Dechêne knows this because, to be able to speak about it with full knowledge of the facts, she has “consumed quite a bit”, she tells me.

She adds: “I have images of half-asphyxiated women, unconscious women who are subjected to sexual relations, violent images, images, above all, where it is the man’s pleasure that dominates. »

A correlation has been demonstrated between viewing pornography among young people and “trauma, a stereotypical view of gender and, in some cases, among adolescents, a more violent view” of sexual relationships, underlines the senator.

Her bill on the issue made its way through the Senate before dying on the order paper during the dissolution of Parliament in 2021. She presented a second version which, once adopted by the Senate, was warmly received in the House of Commons , except… by the liberals.

Last December, this version received the green light from all opposition parties to move to the parliamentary committee stage – which should be done in the spring. A majority of liberals, however, tried to block his path. In vain, since they are in the minority in Parliament.

What has happened to the Liberal government?

” I would like to know ! I am quite devastated because I don’t understand,” says the independent senator.

“The message they are giving is that the bill is dangerous for privacy and freedom of expression. » I point out to him that these arguments are usually used by conservative leaders in Ottawa.

However, it is indeed Justin Trudeau, whose government recently presented a bill to restrict “harmful content” on the web, who is making this speech.

The Prime Minister made a public outing in February on this subject. And he took the opportunity to criticize Pierre Poilievre for supporting Julie Miville-Dechêne’s bill.

“In my opinion, he tried to transform the question of my project into a divisive issue between Poilievre and him,” she said.

It is clear, for the senator, that the right of children to be protected takes precedence here over the freedom of expression of the creators of pornographic content and the customers of porn sites.

“Children are not allowed to go see XXX films in the cinema. They don’t walk into a sex shop. They don’t even buy one Playboy without a card. And there they go to see hardcore scenes [sur l’internet] and it is not up to the State to intervene? Why would this be allowed on the internet but not in real life? »

And added, to illustrate that this will not be resolved without intervention from Ottawa: “Don’t forget that these sites have benefited from around fifteen years of freedom without ever taking responsibility for anything. »

The proactivity of Julie Miville-Dechêne and some of her colleagues, like the increased interventionism in the Senate observed in recent years, is a legacy of Prime Minister Trudeau.

It was he who reformed this institution, often the target of ridicule.

The majority of senators are now “independent”, like Julie Miville-Dechêne. She does not hide all the good things she thinks of this formula, which has favored “the emergence of a new political culture” within this chamber, she said last year.

When I ask her to clarify her thoughts, she says she sees that now, “senators can both work seriously on government bills, but also have initiatives to fill the government’s blind spots.”

Filling in the blind spots… No offense to the Liberal government, this is exactly what it is trying to do by crossing swords with Pornhub because it seeks to protect children from pornography on the internet.

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