Michelle Rempel Garner

“Madam Speaker, I am pleased to speak to Bill C-34, an act to enact the digital safety act and the digital safety commission of Canada act. I want residents of Nipissing—Timiskaming to know why I will be voting for this bill, so I will explain. I will start with a question. It will show my age, but the question is simple. Do members remember when keeping a child safe meant knowing where they were and who they were with? Many parents and grandparents will remember those days. The rule was simple: Be home before dark. Today, a child can be sitting beside a parent in the living room and talking to someone online who the parent knows nothing about. The child is home, and the parent feels reassured, but the risks on the screen may be hidden. The front door may be locked, but the phone is still connected. A cruel message can arrive at any hour, a humiliating image can spread in seconds, and bullying can follow a child home from school. Childhood has changed. Parenting, as my colleague described previously, has become more complicated. Living in a peaceful northern Ontario community does not shield a child from online harm. We protect children at school and on our roads. They deserve the same protection online. Parents, schools and governments all have a role to play, and so do the companies behind TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, YouTube, others that may be out there and others that will come. I think it is very important to note that all these companies provide so many benefits. They bring benefits to our lives. In northern Ontario, where distances are part of our daily life, online platforms help young people stay close to friends and family, including their grandparents. They help them learn, create and connect. Those connections matter, and there are many more benefits we could talk about. Our task is to preserve those benefits while reducing the risks. The evidence shows that action is needed. According to Statistics Canada, one in four young Canadians aged 12 to 17 reported experiencing cyber-bullying in the previous year. Among young people who have a hard time making friends, that number is even higher, at one in three. Let us think about that. These are young people who struggle to make connections, who go online and are subjected to cyber-bullying. Behind these figures lie children, families and very real suffering. What would Bill C-34 do? I will highlight the three major changes. First, it would provide stronger protection for children under 16. The bill would prevent children under 16 from having accounts on social media services. However, a platform could receive an exemption if it demonstrated adequate safeguards for children. That gives companies an incentive to act and an incentive to make their services safer. Second, the bill would create a digital safety commission. It would review companies’ safety plans and oversee whether they are meeting their duties. If a company is earning money supplying services to Canadians, it only makes sense that it should explain how it is managing those risks. Someone should be there to check whether its measures are adequate. That would be the role of the digital safety commission. Third, the bill would require action on some of the most harmful material online. This includes content that sexually victimizes a child and intimate images shared without consent. The proposed framework would require these types of content to be made inaccessible within hours of being either identified by the service provider or flagged by a user. Members can imagine a young person discovering that an intimate image of them is being shared. We can imagine their fear and a parent trying to find a way to deal with the issue. In those moments, time matters. The bill would also address risks from artificial intelligence and, specifically, chatbots. Regulated chatbot services would have to take steps to reduce harmful behaviour and direct users toward crisis support in certain serious situations. Now, some parents will say, “I know my child. I know what’s best. I should decide.” I respect that view. Parents know their children in ways that governments never will, but parents do not design the systems that decide which video appears next to a video that they approved. They cannot control how quickly an image can spread or check every account that comes into contact with their child. In this environment, how much can a family truly manage? We can think of a parent who is working shift work, a caregiver who has several children, a grandparent who knows little about the app. Online safety should not depend entirely on a family’s spare time or technical knowledge. We already accept that children need different rules as they grow. We set minimum driving ages, require safety features in vehicles and teach young drivers how to use the road. While social media certainly is different from driving, the principle is useful. Education, family guidance and safety standards can work together. Just as there are underage drivers, there will also be some who will try to get around the rules. That is why the bill would require covered platforms to use effective age checks with oversight from the digital safety commission. Companies that fail to meet their duties could face corrective orders and substantial financial penalties. A measure does not have to prevent every incident to serve a purpose. Seat belts are an excellent example of that. They do not, unfortunately, prevent every injury. We still require them because reducing harm matters. The test should be clear. Do these measures work, and are they proportionate to the risks? Some key questions also need to be answered. How can age be verified without compromising privacy? Who will have access to the information collected? How long will it be kept? Those are all great questions. The bill provides for safeguards regarding the information used during the age verification process, including its protection and destruction once the verification is complete. It also restricts the collection and use for the purposes of the verification. Protecting children also means protecting their personal information. The two go hand in hand. It is important to note that Canadians want us to act. In a March 2026 Angus Reid poll of 4,000 people, 75% of respondents supported a ban on social media for those under the age of 16. People in Nipissing—Timiskaming are also calling on us to better protect children online. There are certainly things that should give us pause. Certain details will be difficult to sort out, but doing nothing also has consequences. For a child being bullied tonight, the harm is already happening. For a family trying to stop an intimate image from spreading, the need is immediate. We cannot promise a world without risk, but we can take reasonable steps to make it safer. As Parliament studies this bill, young people themselves must have a voice. I encourage young people from Nipissing—Timiskaming to contact my office and tell us what helps them online, what concerns them and what would make their experience safer. We need to hear from them. I conclude by saying that, ultimately, whether we are young, old, parents or young people, we all share a responsibility to help ensure that all children are prepared for the world they are entering. We have a responsibility to ensure that it is a world that is safe for them. Children deserve a safe world.”