Kevin Lamoureux

“Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak to Bill C-34, more commonly known as the safe social media act. I believe that everyone in the House agrees that the rapid development of social media has created enormous challenges for families across Canada and the world. What is the answer to this challenge? The vast web of global connection it has brought us has also created serious mental health and addiction challenges for children and teens. As a mother of two grown children, I saw the beginnings of this phenomenon, with the Internet’s opening and expansion into digital spaces, when my children were very young. As early as the mid-1990s, the centre for online addiction was established and Internet addiction disorder was first recognized. In 1997, the New York Times wrote that psychologists are beginning to treat patients who spend 40, 50 or 60 hours a week in chat rooms and online games, ignoring spouses, children and jobs. They described the classic cycle of tolerance, withdrawal and a desperate reliance on the glowing terminal for emotional gratification. This could well describe the same challenges we face today but, instead of just addicted adults, it is children whose health and development are being harmed. The Internet’s uniquely absorbent nature, along with chat rooms and online games, has only become more dangerous because of smart phones, algorithms and AI models. Nowadays, these addictive and mind-altering spaces have become available anytime, anywhere. Ask any parent or teacher, and we will find that children view their digital lives as intertwined with their everyday lives. Purely online friends and hangouts have become commonplace. These spaces let them educate and express themselves. It is why children and teens report the longest screen time and highest social media use of any age group. We know that spending seven-plus hours on personal screen time is significantly more likely to lead to anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts. These platforms were never designed for children, yet children are vulnerable to their design. Recommendations for algorithms, push notifications, endless scrolling and autoplay can repeatedly direct them toward content that keeps them engaged. These design choices can amplify exposure to harmful material and make it difficult for young users to disengage. At the same time, AI chatbots and digital companions are becoming increasingly integrated into the platforms young people use, creating new and largely untested risks. Parents who once set computer time now know that these barriers do not exist when children under 10 can readily access TikTok, Instagram and ChatGPT. They cannot control their children’s algorithms or be notified when harmful material appears. One of the most tragic case studies on this subject involves the death, last year, of 13-year-old British Columbian Maddy Croswell. Her parents and the coroner’s office found this case of teen suicide to have occurred after a social media platform she was using repeatedly pushed hundreds of hours of harmful content onto her feed advocating self-harm and eventual suicide. Her parents thought they had done everything right. They had parental controls on her phone. They monitored her screen time. They believed they had created a safe, loving home environment, but it was not enough. Sadly, many more cases like this exist across Canada. Parental involvement is not enough to challenge the enormous reach of social media algorithms that can push dangerous and harmful content to young children and teens. According to Stats Canada, one in four children aged 12 to 17 experienced cyber-bullying. Police reported that online child sexual exploitation incidents reached 16,000 in 2024, up 347% from 2014. I have heard from many parents about the helplessness they feel and the fear they have for their children. They feel they are in a David versus Goliath battle with Meta, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube. AI companies and their algorithms are also increasingly dangerous in this respect. Reports that the shooter at Tumbler Ridge was assisted in planning this deadly shooting by ChatGPT is sickening for all Canadians. OpenAI’s failure to report clear warnings of violence has left a community devastated for generations to come. Parliament must act on this, but as lawmakers we must ensure that what we pass is good law, not just good intentions. For myself, I would like to see legislation that accomplishes three main goals: protect children and teens from harmful content online; set clear rules on tech giants that affect all our lives; and put more control in parents’ hands, not the government’s. Canada also has the opportunity with this legislation to review other jurisdictions that have established similar measures and see what has worked and what has not. Australia, which was the first to move forward with the social media ban for those under 16, has found that the measure it chose to restrict access has frequently been circumvented. Surveys by Australia’s eSafety Commissioner showed that 61% to 70% of young Australians aged 12 to 15 who previously used restricted platforms still have active accounts. Children still using the apps report that it is easy to bypass the restrictions and still have active accounts. If we were to ask children nowadays what they think about this type of bill, they would say that they would find a way to get through if they have to. Teens easily dodge the rules by lying about their birth year, having older teens create new accounts or using facial recognition workarounds. Platforms also do not always enforce regulations consistently across their sites. We have also had concerning evidence that bans in other countries led to a spike in teenagers using virtual private networks, VPNs, to mask their country of origin when accessing social media platforms. Using VPNs often means youth are accessing unregulated underground platforms that could lead them to more unsafe content rather than less. What can we do to get ahead of this? We have to consider the downstream consequences. If we ask any teenage visitor to the House of Commons today whether a ban we enacted would discourage them from accessing Instagram or TikTok, they would probably laugh and say no. That is why we need to ensure the bill has real teeth, not just vague regulation for future bureaucrats to interpret. For example, Bill C-34 leaves the definition of “regulated social media services” to future regulations, but will it be based strictly on active Canadian user accounts, annual revenue or specific platform features? Will the age restrictions be determined by facial recognition, ID uploads or credit cards? What about privacy? Who will be asked to store this information? Would it be government, third parties or tech giants themselves? How long can they store it, and how secure will it be? The bill’s regulations for chatbot services will soon face open-ended AI models that let almost any website create a functioning chatbot service for everything from customer service to online shopping. Given the Liberals’ poor track record on online regulation and censorship, the House must move carefully as it considers Bill C-34. Previous failures and fiascos, such as Bill C-11 and Bill C-63, infringed upon Canadian civil liberties. This cannot be allowed to be repeated when so many parents are asking us to help them hold dangerous digital platforms and addictive social media companies to account.”