Ruby Sahota

“Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise today to speak to Bill C-34, the safe social media act, on behalf of the constituents of Richmond Hill South. Children need real protection online and parents need confidence that the services their children use are designed with their safety in mind. Children are being harmed, families are looking for answers and technology companies have too often left parents to manage risks that those companies are sometimes better positioned to address. Holding social media platforms accountable should be a shared commitment across the House, but would Bill C-34 deliver that accountability? If it is passed, how will we know whether it is working? Would success mean fewer children experiencing exploitation, harassment and harmful interactions, or would it mean that platforms have filed the required plans and completed the necessary paperwork? Those are different outcomes, and Parliament should be clear about which one matters. As lawmakers, we should examine its proposals seriously. At the same time, supporting the objective does not relieve us of the responsibility to scrutinize the approach. The bill shares important features with and seems to draw inspiration from the European Union’s model of platform regulation, including risk management obligations, transparency requirements and an oversight regulator. That comparison is particularly timely because the Canada-European Union summit begins today in Montreal, with digital co-operation among the subjects on its published agenda. What does the government intend that co-operation to include? Will it involve research, enforcement, co-operation and sharing evidence, or could it involve commitments to align Canadian legislation with European rules made overseas? Will we be ceding our authority in this Canadian Parliament to the European Parliament? Will the Canadian government retain our own regulatory authority in respect of Canadians, or will co-operation yield jurisdiction to European regulators? The EU’s proposed kids act provides an interesting comparison. It proposes independent accounts from age 15 and up, with supervised restricted accounts for 13- and 14-year-olds and a ban on access for children under the age of 13. Bill C-34 proposes an under the age of 16 account restriction for specified services. The Europeans have chosen to go with a different age threshold and a phased approach. The EU’s proposed kids act is also far more broad in scope, covering app stores, operating systems and gaming platforms, which are not contemplated in Bill C-34. Canadians should know whether their government is contemplating any commitment to follow the European proposal and how it intends to preserve the Canadian Parliament’s ability to make decisions suited to Canadian circumstances. Will Parliament see the terms of any proposed alignment, and will Canadian families have a meaningful opportunity to explain how those choices would affect them? That brings me to the implementation. The bill would require protective design features, but important details would be established through regulations by unelected government officials rather than legislation made by elected lawmakers. What would that mean for recommendation feeds and that repeatedly direct children toward disturbing material? What would it mean for autoplay, persistent notifications or design choices that encourage young people to remain online long after they intended to leave? How much of the practical protection would Canadians understand when Parliament votes, and how much would become clear only after regulations by this new digital safety commission are developed at a future date? There can be reasons to leave technical details to regulations, particularly when technology changes quickly, but elected representatives should still understand the specifics of the framework they are being asked to approve. What measurable outcomes would the government publish and what would trigger a change in approach if the evidence shows that children remain exposed to the same harms and that the unelected regulators and this new digital safety commission are failing to meet the stated legislative objectives? We should examine the proposed account restriction with the same seriousness. If teenagers lose access to familiar platforms, where would they go? Could some move to smaller services with weaker safeguards, less moderation and fewer opportunities for parents to understand what is happening? That is a risk to investigate rather than an outcome we should assume, but surely an implementation plan must consider what would happen after an account is blocked. Australia’s early experience illustrates why evaluation matters. Its online safety regulator reported that 70% of children under 16 who had accounts before the restriction were able to retain them or create new ones at the three-month mark, while also reporting that harm complaint did not decline at all. What lessons has the government drawn from that experience? What would Canada do differently where enforcement has proved difficult? How would platforms deal with false ages, borrowed accounts or attempts to evade location checks, including through VPNs? Would those efforts produce effective protection or repeated demands for more information from everyone using the service? Parents know their children in ways that politicians and regulators cannot and will not, so how would this framework give families practical tools while ensuring that companies retain responsibility for the risks they may have helped expose children to? The scope of the legislation also deserves careful examination. The bill provides for user thresholds established through regulations but it also allows particular, smaller social media services to be designated where significant risks exist. It contains a mechanism for bringing additional categories of online services into the framework. The question, therefore, is how effectively those powers would be used when children’s behaviour changes. Would elected members in the Parliament get a say? Would this inadvertently create uncertainty for industry? How quickly could government respond if young people migrated to a smaller service that fell below the general threshold but presented comparable dangers? We should also ask how interactive gaming environments would be assessed, as opposed to just conventional social media feeds. When a service combines gaming, public interaction, private communication and user-generated content, which features of the service would determine its treatment and how would parents know which protections apply? Those implementation questions become even more important when we consider privacy. Age assurance and verification call into question whether it would require every Canadian to upload a driver’s licence or photo identification and what sorts of technologies would be used in the process of verification and storage. The legislation would, however, contemplate age verification or estimation, which raises practical questions about what information would be collected, who would handle it and how compliance would be checked. The bill includes safeguards restricting the use of that information, requiring its protection and providing for its destruction once the age check is complete, but how exactly to ensure that? Those requirements matter but parents will reasonably ask how they would be enforced across contractors, verification vendors, backup systems and the data retention laws of other jurisdictions. What evidence would establish that information has been deleted? How would failures be detected and what remedy would a family have if sensitive information was exposed before the regulator discovered that something had gone wrong? No government can honestly promise that a data breach will never occur, which makes it essential to minimize collection and demonstrate why any information being requested is necessary. The governance of the new commission deserves an equally careful examination, particularly because rule-making, investigation, enforcement and decision-making functions place substantial authority within the same institution. The bill would assign substantial powers to cabinet and the commission rather than to Parliament. The new commissioner would serve as a sort of superregulator that will wield serious power by acting as a rule-maker, investigator, enforcer, prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner all at the same time. When Parliament delegates consequential choices about the boundaries of an online safety regime, Canadians should be able to understand who makes those choices, what evidence supports them and how an error can be challenged. Would the opportunities to make representations, the reporting requirements and the available avenues of review be sufficient to provide meaningful accountability, especially for an individual or smaller business without extensive legal resources? How would Parliament assess whether the commission was exercising its authority proportionately and what information would allow members to distinguish effective protection from administrative activity? Freedom of expression must remain part of that assessment. Bill C-34 leaves the definition of regulated social media services to future regulations by unelected government officials. It defines some categories of harmful content but those definitions still require further interpretation and platforms still make decisions about individual posts in circumstances where context can be difficult for automated systems to understand. How would it distinguish the discussion of self-harm intended to help a young person from material encouraging it or distinguish reporting on hateful conduct from endorsing that conduct? How would the threshold of harmful content be determined and how would it be applied? The maximum administrative monetary penalty is the greater of $10 million and 3% of global revenue. Could the penalty create an incentive to encourage excessive restriction of lawful, educational, artistic or political expression? How would the government measure and correct that possibility? Would it inadvertently stifle freedom of expression and the creation of new services? Related legislation elsewhere has faced constitutional challenges just south of the border, including state-level laws on social media age verification and bans, with various provisions from at least half a dozen jurisdictions being suspended or subject to judicial scrutiny. The question is how the Canadian charter would apply to Bill CC-34. What has the government learned from those disputes in other jurisdictions? How has that analysis informed provisions intended to provide durable protection rather than years of uncertainty and litigation? These questions come from taking the objective seriously. Families deserve protection that works. Companies deserve clear obligations that can be held to. Canadians deserve confidence that privacy and lawful expression will receive meaningful protection throughout implementation. We should study Bill C-34 carefully and insist not on a mere compliance regime where success is measured by how much paperwork it produces but a framework where success is measured by safer children and accountable companies. That is the responsibility before the House.”