Elizabeth May

“Mr. Speaker, it is always a pleasure to rise in the House. Today, I will be speaking about Bill C-34, but before I begin, I want to take a moment to honour the memory of Chief Warrant Officer Ron Nutt, from my riding, who served in the 1st Hussars for over 30 years and sadly passed away at age 67. Taken too soon, he was a quiet, gentle man, but a really intelligent, forceful human being. He will be sorely missed. When it comes to Bill C-34, I can tell members that I have been in Parliament for quite some time, and this is the third version we have seen of the bill. I am really happy. The first two were terrible, but this one is much better. My colleague, the member for Calgary Nose Hill, tabled a private member’s bill on this topic, because I think we all agree that we need to protect children from online harms. That private member’s bill, Bill C-216, informed a lot of the work of this one, which is definitely helpful. What the bill would do is make what is illegal today in the real world illegal in the digital world. That is a simplification, but it is essentially what is happening. We really need to protect our children and ourselves because the rise in online harm has been unbelievable. In 2023, half of students were experiencing online bullying. In 2024, police reported 19,516 instances of online child exploitation, an increase of 59% over the previous year and an increase of 500% since 2014. In terms of harms, we see that they are not just online. They are becoming physical and mental harms. I am still struck and saddened by what happened to Amanda Todd and Rehtaeh Parsons. We studied this the first year I was elected. These girls had, without their consent, intimate images of them put up on Facebook, and as a result, they both took their own lives. It is just terrible. This is where online harm can become physical harm. We also see the impact on our children. The pandemic was a time when many people spent more time online and could not go outside. Young people’s depression doubled. Their anxiety quadrupled. The suicide rate among young people doubled as well. Online harms are a real deal for our kids, and we all want to protect our kids. Each parliamentarian in the House has probably experienced online vitriol aimed at them. Certainly I have. It was awful when I started, but I have seen nothing like what I saw in the last year. These are harms. These things are illegal, and we have to address them. When it comes to online harm, people will ask what it really is. The things that are defined in the bill include content that sexually victimizes a child or revictimizes a survivor, intimate content communicated without consent, content that induces a child to harm themselves, content used to bully a child, content that foments extreme hatred, content that incites violence, and terrorism or violent extremism content. Essentially, those things would be covered. There have been concerns expressed about the freedom of expression and some of the charter rights. Everyone will know that I am a passionate defender of our Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and certainly the government is well aware that people are concerned about who is going to determine what can be said and what cannot be said. We have a good definition of hate speech, which has been recently improved, but we need to make sure that everything is clear and that we not have overreach happen. In terms of privacy, I have also heard the concerns there. Bill C-36 would address many of the concerns that I have heard raised in debate today. In addition to that, people have talked about the need for transparency. I want to be clear about the digital commission that would be put in place. Obviously, if we are going to try to do something about online harms, we need somebody whose job it is to respond when bad behaviour is pointed out and come up with a remedy. That is why we want to take the idea from Bill C-216 to put the onus on service providers to make sure they are enforcing the standards. However, this digital commission, which would have three to five experts in the area, would be responsible for enforcing the laws that are described, and every year it would report to the minister and produce a report that would be tabled here in Parliament. Then Parliament could have oversight to make sure that it is working, that there are no abuses and that we are comfortable with where it is headed. There have also been discussions about under-16 age verification. Different techniques can be used, and I look forward to the discussions at committee reviewing what other countries have done and reviewing what people think is a better method to ensure age verification. There is everything from uploading an ID, which some people think is a privacy violation, to using AI to guess how old someone is. That is getting very accurate, but I do not want it to guess how old I am, so I will stop there. The other thing we have to do is be realistic. We know that when Australia implemented this, 70% of kids under 16 found a way around the system, so this will probably happen. It is important to say what is bad behaviour, say it is illegal and put mechanisms in place to enforce the rule of law, but we will have to deal with how we as parents and legislators encourage kids not to expose themselves at a young age to what is really the wild west of the Internet, where content that they should not be seeing is showing up. We know it is harmful to them. I think about when I grew up. I did not even have a TV until I was eight. I never had a cellphone until I was 30. There would be some advantage to not having the social harms that kids have to deal with when their maturity and the confidence they have in themselves are not yet developed. Let us talk a bit about what the safety commission would do. It would review the safety plans that are prepared and published for the different social media AI chatbot services. It would evaluate whether the age verification mechanism that the services are using is adequate. It would maintain transparency from both social media and chatbot platforms in publishing their policies and thresholds for notifying the RCMP, police or other law enforcement. Let us keep in mind that what is illegal in the real world would be illegal digitally, but the people who would follow up on that would not be in the digital safety commission; they would be the police of jurisdiction in that area. The commission would also provide support for victims of online harms and users of online services, and it would have the ability to issue fines to platforms of up to 3% of their global revenue. I have a lot of respect for the member for Kamloops—Thompson—Nicola. He has encouraged the government to consider more serious sentencing, especially in cases of child luring and sexual exploitation. I think the government should take that into consideration. There are some potential myths we have heard about this bill because of some of the previous versions that were not great. Let me just quickly look to those. One is that the government would get access to our private data. That would be specifically excluded; that would not happen. I already talked about the freedom of speech and already talked about the other concerns. I have also heard from the Bloc the concern that this bill would violate provincial jurisdiction. I look forward to hearing those discussions at committee. They have implemented something with age 14, so the discussion of what age it should be is a very good discussion. With that, I would be happy to answer any questions.”