For over a decade, Robin Sharpe has been known as Canada's most notorious child pornographer, a label he wears with considerable pride. After a 1995 raid on his Vancouver apartment, where police found pictures of children engaged in sexual activity, along with several often violent works of fiction depicting sex between men and young boys, Sharpe launched a sustained legal campaign for the right to be a proud, practising pedophile.

His ensuing notoriety, though, meant he could hardly walk down the street without someone recognizing and, more often than not, swearing at him. So after his many legal battles(and 18 months in jail)Sharpe moved to Montreal, a city that affords him not just anonymity but also respite from the persecution to which he is subject elsewhere. "I love it," he said in a phone interview from his apartment in the city's Plateau district. He's been here a year, ever since returning from Sri Lanka to visit what he calls a "young friend." "Things aren't taken as seriously here as they are in English Canada. It's a bit more laid-back, accepting. I think people tend to mind their own business a little more."

Dozens, if not hundreds, of pedophiles would agree. The arrest of Steve Goldberg, a notorious U.S. pedophile in his own right with a spot on America's Most Wanted list, in a Montreal suburb this week further illustrates a point many pedophiles themselves admit: far more than any other city in North America, Montreal is a good place to live if you happen to be attracted to children.(Goldberg was ultimately arrested on immigration charges; he was living in the city illegally.)

"I have never felt persecuted in Montreal," pedophile Ian Hodgson said in an email. In 1990, Hodgson was convicted of gross indecency and sexual assault against boys as young as 11. Nevertheless, the 63-year-old has been an active member of the city's pedophile community, particularly as a founding member of the Ganymede Collective, a loosely organized group of pedophiles -- adults who are attracted to children -- who gathered for 10 or so years until about 2004 to chat, socialize and, according to one member, encrypt their computers to better hide child pornography from the authorities.

Montreal is also home to Epifora, a company that provides hosting services to some of the most prominent pedophilia-related sites in North America, if not the world. These include Boy Chat, Girl Chat, Open Hands, Christian Boylove Forum, as well as Sharpe's own sites and Alice Mail, a pedophile-friendly site owned by prominent pedophile Lindsay Ashford, who recently waxed poetic about Barack Obama's six- and eight-year-old daughters. The city is also the birthplace of Free Spirits, an online resource "dedicated to promoting open communication among boylovers, the most underserved and misunderstood sexual minority remaining in today's human society," according to its website.

These sites, all of which are text-based and include no explicit images, serve as online bulletin boards for pedophiles worldwide. Topics range from the banal to the profane: everything from recent court cases to cute young movie stars to graphic descriptions of sexual fantasies. "None of our resources are used to meet children or making dates or anything," says Epifora's president, John White, an admitted pedophile who says he has effectively taken a vow of celibacy.

Epifora was started in 2000 by White, a Montreal computer programmer and founding member of the Ganymede Collective, in conjunction with two others. Aside from hosting, Epifora collects subscription funds for services such as Web Bleu, which promises pedophiles anonymity when sending emails. Potential clients must prove they are pedophiles by answering questions about other contacts in the scene. Only then -- and after a three-month trial period -- are they instructed to place their fees in cash in an envelope between two sheets of paper and send it to the post-office box that serves as Epifora's mail drop. Subscribers are urged to stop using popular email services such as Hotmail when communicating with other pedophiles.

Site users say the Montreal company is doing well. "It has led to a substantial reduction in the amount of abuse that would have been carried out by the people who lurk or participate," says Sharpe. "Popabear," a computer technician at a Montreal CEGEP and lifelong pedophile, agrees. A founding member of the Ganymede Collective, he is unequivocal that he couldn't live his lifestyle anywhere else in North America, particularly since he has a prior record of abuse against a boy in the early 1990s. "Because of attitudes in Montreal and Quebec, there was a level of comfort for us to make some public announcements," he says. "I'm not saying we had billboards up or anything, but I don't think people in Toronto would do that."

He is probably right. Notwithstanding the recent capture of Steve Goldberg -- which came thanks to a local tip to TV's America's Most Wanted(the Laval resident has been promised a $100,000 reward by Oprah)-- police have done little to monitor the Montreal pedophile scene, according to Université de Montréal criminologist Pierre Tremblay, who wrote a definitive study of pedophiles in 2001. He points to the Ganymede Collective, in which at least three members had prior sexual assault records against children. "What I find incredible is that it worked for 10 years without any trouble," Tremblay says. "That surprises me. It's public information. I asked the cops why [Ganymede] was working, but I never got a response."

Popabear suggests Ganymede was only a club for pedophiles to talk about computers, though there is evidence members tried to cover up the sexual exploits of a fellow member. John Melanson, a convicted pedophile, was part of Ganymede for roughly a year; he left suddenly after allegedly molesting and abducting a young boy. His then-roommate, Jason Garrison, allegedly spoke to the boy's mother and shared his alarm over Melanson's actions with other members, only to be told to hush up. "To make a long story short, the people in charge ... decided that they didn't want anything to do with it," Garrison wrote in his blog. "They said that if anyone asked about the [collective], that we'd say it was a computer users' group, and that's all."

Montreal's cultural climate remains tolerant. Recently, Garrison, who is Sharpe's former webmaster and Epifora's original designer, published On the Possibility of Just Pedophilia: An Ideal Approach. It was his honours thesis at Concordia. He was due to speak at the university but the talk didn't happen.

Sureté de Québec representative Jason Gauthier, of the police force charged with rooting out pedophiles, says Epifora had its"backbone" removed when Verizon stopped providing Internet connections to the company in November 2006 -- and that most of the company's hosted sites were taken off-line as a result. But as Epifora's John White notes, getting someone to provide bandwidth and hard-drive space for its forums was as easy as sending a few inquiring emails to hosting companies overseas. Today, he says the majority of those sites that went down in November are back up. "It's actually really easy."

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