In Canada, child pornography is illegal under Section 163.1 of the Criminal Code and is punishable by up to ten or fourteen years of imprisonment depending on the offence.
Certain portions of the law concerning one-year mandatory minimums for possession and making of child pornography have since been struck down as unconstitutional.
In 2002, laws passed addressing child pornography on the Internet, regulating the nature of live-time chatting and email communications that may relate to grooming children for pornographic (e.g., web cam) or other sexual purposes.
"[13] The current minimum penalty for possession of child pornography is six months of imprisonment,[13] but it was struck down as unenforceable in R v Zhang (2018).
[3] Moreover, the definitive 2001 Supreme Court ruling on the case interprets the child pornography statute to include purely fictional material even when no real children were involved in its production.
Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin wrote, Interpreting "person" in accordance with Parliament's purpose of criminalizing possession of material that poses a reasoned risk of harm to children, it seems that it should include visual works of the imagination as well as depictions of actual people.
In October 2005, Canadian police arrested a 26-year-old Edmonton, Alberta man named Gordon Chin[25] for importing Japanese manga[26] depicting explicit hentai of child pornography.