'No Porn Please, We're The Conservative Party Of Canada'
Pierre Poilievre hopes to put the lube back in the tube.
Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre Polievre gave an uncharacteristically straight answer last week when asked by a reporter if he would introduce new laws to restrict access to online porn if elected next year.
“Yes,” was the one-word reply. No further elaboration.
It may come as a surprise a man who polls say is likely to be the country's next prime minister — mainly by convincing a sizeable chunk of voters current PM Justin Trudeau is a filthy commie dictator who loves nothing more than taking away people’s freedoms — himself wants to take away people's freedom to pleasure themselves at their computers without Big Brother being all up in their business.
How exactly the Tories plan to do this remains a mystery, not unlike their plans to address the climate crisis.
Billed as “an act to restrict young persons’ online access to sexually explicit material,” Bill S-210 would make it a criminal offense for nekkid people websites to fail to provide “a prescribed age-verification method” or risk a fine of up to $370,000.
Karen Vecchio, the Conservative MP for Elgin–Middlesex–London, is the sponsor of the bill; she would probably prefer her Ontario riding didn't have the word “sex” in it even though it’s a suffix not a pronoun. In a speech to Parliament last November, she gave reassurances "there should be no direct collection of identity documentation by the site publisher from the pornographic site, no age estimates based on the user's web browser history and no processing of biometric data for the purpose of uniquely identifying or authenticating a natural person."
The late Maude Flanders would no doubt approve someone is finally thinking of the children, but it doesn't appear much actual thought has gone into this.
Most reasonable people will agree allowing minors unrestricted access to porn isn't a good thing. Kids shouldn't be exposed to, say, hi-def double-penetration scenes before having yet gotten to second base themselves, and we require age-checks for all kinds of grown-up stuff — booze, tobacco, weed, gambling, even weapons of mass destruction — but bringing in new restrictions would likely make a bad situation even worse.
Sebastian Skamski, Poilievre's head fart-catcher, quickly put out a statement clarifying there are no plans to bring in new mandatory digital IDs for Canadians who just want to pull their goalies or paddle their pink canoes in peace since this is the same party who was bigly against proof-of-vaccination status during the pandemic. Being anti-government interference is their whole pitch, so you’d think people’s right to interfere with themselves would be included. Conservatives are also desperate to attract People's Party of Canada voters, a far-right lunatic fringe party that nonetheless captured five percent of the popular vote in the last election. Alienating these wankers isn't going to help.
So how exactly would this work since computers already have parental control settings? Most adult-themed websites requiring age-verification do so on the nudge-nudge wink-wink honor system, and curious minors are perfectly capable of figuring out what year an 18-year-old was born. Another shot would be to force people to upload government-issued ID like they now do in Louisiana, which reportedly caused Pornhub traffic to drop by roughly 80 percent since no sane horndog wants to risk identity theft by a sketchy smut peddler, and tech-savvy teens on a mission to masturbate would surely have no trouble creating fake ones with Photoshop or whatever the kids are using now.
Canada isn’t Louisiana though, even if the country is responsible for providing the Cajuns.
Facial-recognition software that could guess your approximate age could be an option although it seems likely to kill the mood. Unless the idea of having your face stored in a database somewhere is what gets you off. Handing over credit card info is another idea since not many minors have them although this too comes with the stranger-danger it could simply be sold on the dark web to the highest bidder.
The long and short of it is there's no way to keep teens from finding a way to look at naked ladies if they want to. Which of course they do.
My own adolescence was pre-internet days, and I had few (ahem) handy release mechanisms apart from some forgotten Penthouse magazines in my father's closet, freeze-framing a certain scene from Fast Times at Ridgmont High on the VCR, and memories of kind girls willing to put up with my beginner fumblings. (“Canadian girlfriends” are actually quite common in Canada, as are summer band camps.) I can only imagine how easy access to every human depravity under the sun is fucking up teenagers' natural sexual development, and I say this as a grown man still recovering from googling “goatse” after the word was used to describe Bane's mask in a review of the The Dark Knight Rises.
Canadian political discourse hasn't yet sunken to the level where right-wingers simply accuse anyone who disagrees with them of being groomers or pedophiles, but it seems likely Polievre is hoping his opponent will take the bait just so he can ask: “Why does woke Justin Trudeau want your kids to watch porn? Some of it is even gay porn!”
But it runs the very real risk of reminding potential voters fatigued after nearly a decade of Trudeau just how damn creepy and out-of-touch the Tories truly are at the core.
[Bill S-210 / Politico / CBC]
First they came for the porn, and I did not speak out—because I was not a porn frequenter (I am old and therefore a good morning bowel movement is far more pleasurable than sex).
Then they came for the poutine, and I did not speak out—because I don't like cheese curds.
Then they came for hockey, and I did not speak out—because I preferred Canadian football.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me, because they were all down at the curling club.
I'm not saying that Karen Vecchio looks like she's just finished a delicious meal of live rodents and is now eyeing the cow that wandered into her backyard. But I'm not not saying it either.