Official Hansard
Madam Speaker, it is a real honour for me tonight to join what is a very important and substantial conversation about how we protect our kids in the age of the Internet. Obviously, as members know, this is a deeply important and personal conversation for me, as I am the father of six children I have met so far and one who will be born in April. If the House will indulge me briefly, I just want to say that I am so proud of and grateful to my kids. I love them. I care about them. I am proud of what they do, and I feel so supported by them in the work that I do in this place. The way my kids take care of chores and responsibilities around the house, which maybe I would do if I was home more, is really heartwarming and something I am very grateful for. I am grateful that my kids can come with me to Ottawa from time to time to learn about the work I do here. Even when they are not physically with me, I always have them on my mind and in my heart as I think about the work we are doing and the country we are trying to build for them. That is especially the case, of course, as we deal with these weighty questions of child safety online. It is interesting the way, coincidentally maybe, the parliamentary calendar has lined up tonight. We are having a debate on Bill C-34, and during private members’ hour, we were debating Bill S-209, another important piece of legislation that deals with the question of the safety of children online. It is interesting to look at what these two bills would do, and at some of the similarities and differences. During my speech, I will make reference to some extent to both of those pieces of legislation. Because I did not have a chance to speak to Bill S-209, I want to recognize and express my appreciation to the whole House for the passage of it at second reading. I think it is excellent legislation. I look forward to the study that is going to happen at committee. I salute the hard work of Senator Miville-Dechêne, as well as my friend and colleague from Battlefords—Lloydminster—Meadow Lake, who sponsored the bill in the House, and my friend and colleague from Peace River—Westlock, who has done so much work on the protection of children online for the entirety of his time as a member of Parliament. In Bill S-209 in particular, but also included in the provisions of Bill C-34, is the issue of trying to address the scourge of early exposure to pornography on the Internet by young people. This is a massive problem, and I think we should correctly identify it as a form of Internet-based child abuse. Exposing children to sexual imagery is child abuse. So many children are exposed very early on in life to sexual and often violent sexual images that they stumble upon when on the Internet. Some statistics suggest that the average age of first exposure to pornography is 11, so many children, boys and girls of nine, 10, 11 and 12, are seeing sexual scenes and violent sexual scenes at a time when they are obviously not making choices. They are not knowingly and wilfully doing this. They are stumbling into things they do not understand, and it is shaping their beliefs and expectations in ways that have lifelong effects that lead to increased sexual violence, all kinds of other harms and wildly dangerous expectations of what is expected in the context of intimate relationships. It is incumbent upon all of us to try to address and confront this epidemic of early exposure to pornographic material by children. This is something we have been talking about in the House and has been talked about repeatedly in the Senate for many years, yet there has been a failure to complete the required legislative action. We almost got there in the last Parliament, and now we have the continuation of these efforts. There was a similar bill to Bill S-209 in the previous Parliament that the government was not supportive of, so I am very pleased to see the adoption at second reading and look forward to the continuing work as we go forward. I know that Bill S-209 has certain new features that are different from a similar bill in a previous Parliament. It is now the absolute gold standard in terms of privacy protection. The way Bill S-209 has been written, it has been endorsed by the Privacy Commissioner. It has been worked over so extensively across multiple Parliaments to be airtight in terms of the provisions to protect privacy. Again, I want to recognize Senator Miville-Dechêne for her extensive work on that, as well as the colleagues I already highlighted in this House. Bill S-209 and other bills aimed at protecting children online obviously have to include requirements around age verification or age estimation tools. This is inevitable. If we want to take the position that, on the Internet, some material should never be accessed by children and the same material should be available to adults, the only way to make that distinction is to have credible tools for age verification or estimation. The only alternative to that is you make it available to everybody or you make it available to nobody. Assuming that we agree that a distinction has to be made, we need age verification or estimation tools. That is the only way to do it. The legislation that has moved forward to committee today would require age verification or estimation. It does not prescribe the specific mechanics of that method, and I think that is appropriate because technology will develop and we will find more and more credible and effective ways of doing this over time. In an area where technology is constantly developing, even over the time the bill is being discussed, we should not prescribe the specific method. The legislation would require that age verification or estimation occur in such a way that children are not being exposed to these materials. Further, it provides an opportunity for the government to prescribe age verification methods that could be used and also establishes criteria for those methods that include the use of third parties and the protection of privacy. The use of a third party for age verification means that an individual would go to a third party to verify their age or have age estimation in some way with that third party and then receive a kind of digital key. I am not a real technology person, I will admit, so I am sharing terms that may not be the precise technical terms, but this is how the design of the legislation works. It is that people can go to a third party, get what is effectively a digital key and bring it back to whatever site they are trying to access, and the site they are accessing is not the one that did the age verification. The age verification was done externally. It is what I know Senator Miville-Dechêne has called double anonymity. People’s privacy is protected because of the use of the third party verification method. There are these various requirements in Bill S-209 that really make it the gold standard in terms of privacy protection, but we need to have age verification or estimation if we are going to say there is going to be an age cut-off required for access to these kinds of materials. This is very important. We know the problem. The early exposure to pornography is something that desperately must be addressed. We finally seem to have an emerging consensus in this House to be able to move toward the realization of that objective. As I understand it, Bill C-34 would address the issue of exposure of minors to pornography. However, it would only address it in the context of social media. Bill C-34 would not deal with age verification or estimation for dedicated pornographic websites; that is in Bill S-209. Bill C-34 would deal with pornographic content on social media and the presentation of it on those platforms. Those provisions are certainly important, and action is required on the social media side, but it is important to be clear that Bill C-34’s provisions would not address the full range of places where this material is available. This is why Bill S-209 is very much required. Bill S-209 would address everything. It would address all of the places that kind of content is available. I spoke about being a parent, and I want to just reflect a bit on some of the discussion about the relationship between parents and the state in terms of protection of children online. I believe very much in the paramount importance of parental involvement and parental decision-making. I think the job of the state is to act as an ally to parents, to support parents in the protection of their children by helping parents and maybe by performing tasks parents are not able to perform. The state should prevent bad actors from trying to interfere in the lives of my children. It should try to prevent bad actors from targeting my children with dangerous or abusive material. It should try to protect my children from being exposed to things out and about outside of my home. People have rightly pointed out that parents can, in the context of their own homes, establish rules around what material their kids can access online. This is true, but many of our kids have access to screens and to the Internet in other places, maybe when they are at school or with friends. We can do our best as parents to provide protections elsewhere, but we cannot be everywhere. We cannot be in those places all the time, so I think it is right and legitimate for the state to seek to protect children in ways that are allied with the efforts of parents. Parents want to protect their kids, and I think they are looking for state action in those other spaces, which is why it is right and legitimate for the state to seek to prevent minors from being exposed to, for instance, sexual material online, but also to other types of dangerous material, insofar as they are doing so in a way allied with their parents. If we are talking about sexual material, exposing children to that material is a form of child abuse. It should never be allowed, ever, under any circumstances, and the state obviously has a compelling interest in preventing child abuse. I really see the importance of allied action between parents and the state, the paramount importance of the role of parents in the lives of their children, and state action that supports child protection in ways that are allied with the actions of parents. There is obviously a lot in this bill. I am going to try to cover as much as I can here. On the issue of social media, I agree with what members have said. They have grave concerns about early exposure to social media and some of the design features of social media, aspects of the algorithm, etc. They have an addictive quality. They tend to create anxiety. It is important for us to discuss and look for ways to respond to that. I am quite sympathetic to arguments in favour of establishing that, under a certain age, kids should not have access to social media. I share many of the concerns members have articulated. I also think it is important to identify that Bill C-34, as it relates to social media, would not impose an age ban as many people understand it would. I was just chatting informally with a colleague about what we mean by an age ban. What Bill C-34 says is that someone cannot access social media if they are under 16, unless this social media company makes certain adjustments in terms of design features and it complies with certain directives established by regulation. The member said that I have that right. If the social media companies comply with those directives of government, then they will be able to issue youth accounts. In fact, the Liberal member who spoke before me said that they want the existing mainstream platforms to be able to act in ways that will allow them to offer youth accounts so that young people do not end up accessing other dark corners of the web that are less regulated, etc. The point is, I think it is important for parents at home to know, this bill is not about saying people under 16 should never be on social media. It is about the government saying that it will allow young people to be on certain social media platforms that comply with certain things that the commissioner has established, but it will retain the ability to prevent young people from being on other social media platforms if certain other requirements are not met. I do not think that constitutes an age ban, as maybe it has been sold, or as most parents understand an age ban to be. I think parents would understand the communications around an age ban to be that young people are not going to be on social media anymore, period. That is not what Liberal members are talking about. Liberal members are talking about a world in which young people would be on social media, on the same social media platforms, and those social media platforms would be required to comply with certain design features. I say that not to affirm or criticize that approach, but simply to say it is important for people to know what that approach is, so that people are not expecting this legislation to be something that it is not. We can have an argument about the idea of an age ban, but we should also kind of debate what is in this bill and whether this is the right approach as opposed to other kinds of architecture. I think the other concern worth raising and reflecting on, and I know this is going to go to committee and it will be studied there, is how much, in terms of those design features, is being left to regulation. At what point is this going to be through regulation, through the action of a commissioner saying, okay, we kind of like what is going on on this platform and we do not like what is going on on that platform? Of course, we have different kinds of social media platforms that are doing different kinds of things. Some skew a little one way politically, some skew another way politically. There are different things going on, on different platforms. If we were saying, always and ever, our young people should not be on social media, that would be one kind of architecture, but this sort of involves the government saying, in any case, we are going to have some platforms where people are on them and some platforms where people are not on them, or they can be on those platforms if they comply with certain things the government says. That just raises some potential questions about how regulatory intervention could shape what digital platforms are doing in a world where young people are ultimately still on the platforms. If someone’s concern is the anxiety induced by a presence on these platforms, it seems like the world envisioned by the government on Bill C-34 is still one in which minors, people under 16, are accessing social media. It is just subject to some of these limitations. I do think another thing to just point out is that there is always concern when we have government legislation, with the Liberal government in particular, about the implications for censorship. I am very concerned about genuinely harmful content online and its impact on young people. I also know that sometimes, informally in debate, government members will call things misinformation or disinformation simply because they disagree with it. They will accuse someone else’s argument as being disinformation, simply because they disagree with it. I think there is sometimes a lack of trust, legitimately, in the government around actions that it takes online. We are eager to engage in the discussion around this bill in good faith, because we think there are many important issues that are raised in it. Certainly, we need to act and look for opportunities to act together to protect our children, but there is a lack of trust in the actions by the Liberal government in the online space in general. I think there are good reasons for that if we look at some of the legislation it has brought forward in the past. Twenty minutes flies by. I could talk for another 20, if this House would allow, but we will have questions and comments soon, so maybe I will be able to add to it at that point.
