“Keeping children safe online is very important. This bill creates a safety group to help protect them. Can the member explain more about what this group would do and why it matters?”

“Mr. Speaker, I listened intently, and I really appreciate the concerns the member brought up. Our children’s safety is paramount, and he talked about how scary it is when they go into a different world when they are online. One of the things Bill C-34 would do is create the digital safety commission, which would allow us to make sure we are protecting our children. Can the member elaborate on some of the things the commission would have and how important it is?”

“We need a strong regulator to enforce this bill. Big tech companies will try to weaken the rules. Free speech and parents' rights are important to talk about, but we need a regulator to hold these companies accountable and actually protect children.”

“Mr. Speaker, it is important to have a regulator with some teeth. Again, we can talk about letting parents parent and about the concerns about free speech, which are genuine and need to be discussed in this place, but in the absence of a regulator to enforce the bill and to hold companies to account, it is going to be a challenge. These are powerful companies that are going to do whatever they can to water down this bill. I have seen it before, but we have to do our best to provide actual concrete protections for our children, and I believe the commission would do that.”

“I want the House to pass this bill. Too many children face bullying, sexual exploitation, and other harms online. This bill makes tech companies responsible for keeping kids safe. It bans children under 16 from having accounts unless the platform proves it is safe. It blocks minors from pornography, covers AI chatbots, and creates a commission to hold companies accountable.”

“Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to be here this evening, hearing from my hon. colleagues in this debate on this important topic, which is one that speaks to me very directly as the father of a young child. I rise to speak in favour of the safe social media act. During debate tonight, we have heard extensively about the merits of the bill, and I echo many of those sentiments. I will speak to the legislation in a moment, but I wish to reflect first on the nature of the digital world that our children today inhabit, which is fundamentally different from that which most of the members of the chamber grew up in, in some cases just a few short years ago. I have worked with young people since I was a young person. As a teenager and as a young adult, I worked with children and youth across Canada in after school programs, in summer camps and as a member of the Royal Canadian Army Cadets. For days and weeks at a time, we would hike, camp, swim, march, paddle, bike and climb. Endless hours were spent outdoors, in nature, interacting with our peers face to face, with nary a cellphone, touchscreen or digital device to be seen. Later in my career as an academic, a university professor and an educator, I worked with thousands of young adults pursuing post-secondary education without ever having heard the words “generative AI”, or “ChatGPT”. I confess that I am an elder millennial, so I remember when dial-up Internet first arrived in my family home, and I remember as a late teenager getting my own first cellphone, which flipped open, could display two colours and was decidedly not smart. The hon. member for Scarborough—Woburn stole my joke about the snake game earlier, so I will move right along. Today, at this stage in my life, it is a great joy but also a great worry to be father to an extraordinary almost 11-year-old daughter, who is growing up in a world that is not only different from the one that I was raised in but is meaningfully different even from the one the hon. generation Z members of the House experienced, as I said not long ago. The reality is that today’s children are growing up in a world fundamentally different from that of previous generations. The Internet has become woven into nearly every aspect of their lives, even if they do not yet have a device. Online is where young Canadians learn, connect with friends, explore interests, create content and engage with the world around them. It is also where they spend vast amounts of their time and attention, consume misinformation and disinformation, encounter strangers, discover pornography and experience a range of negative social experiences, including isolation, bullying, exploitation and in some cases, sexual and psychological abuse. We know that the digital world offers tremendous opportunities, but we must also confront the difficult truth that for too many children, the online world is a place of significant risk. Data that has been widely discussed in debate this evening shows that 52% of Canadian teens have received unwanted sexual images online, while 44% report being pressured to send sexual photos. In 2023 alone, police in this country reported nearly 19,000 incidents of online child sexual exploitation, representing a 500% increase since 2014. Clearly, this goes in tandem with the massive explosion of social media in our society, and we know that young people who experience bullying and victimization online are three times more likely to contemplate suicide. These are not just statistics. They represent real families, real children and real communities dealing with the consequences of online harms from an underregulated, corporate-controlled Internet that does not have their best interests in mind. We know that these harms are also evolving rapidly. The rise of artificial intelligence, conversational chatbots and increasingly sophisticated digital platforms presents new opportunities but also new risks, which our laws have not fully addressed because they were not designed to do so. Parents, educators, advocates and experts are clear: Children’s safety online cannot be an afterthought any longer. As legislators, we have a responsibility to ensure that our laws keep pace with the digital world and provide meaningful protection for young Canadians. This is exactly what the safe social media act seeks to achieve. At the heart of this legislation is the simple principle that digital platforms, and the tech companies that own them, must take responsibility for protecting children who use their services. For too long, responsibility has fallen primarily on parents, teachers and young people themselves to navigate systems that were never designed with the well-being of children in mind. This bill would change that. It would establish a clear duty to protect children that applies to regulated social media services and chatbots. Rather than waiting for harm to occur, platforms would be required to proactively design and operate their services in ways that prioritize the safety of younger users. This represents a fundamental shift in approach. Children’s safety would not be optional. It would not depend on whether a company or its foreign owner chooses to act. It would become a baseline expectation for those companies to operate in Canada. Importantly, the legislation recognizes that children are not all the same. The social and emotional development of a 12-year-old differs in meaningful ways from that of a 16-year-old. That is why, instead of a one-size-fits-all approach, the safe social media act would allow for flexible, evidence-based requirements that can evolve alongside technology and keep up with emerging online risks. The legislation would establish important protections regarding access to social media and digital content, and I wish to highlight five, in brief, in particular. First, regulated social media services would be required to prevent children younger than 16 years old from creating or maintaining accounts unless the platform can demonstrate that it provides an appropriate, safe environment and qualifies for an exemption. This approach would create a strong incentive for companies to build safer platforms, while ensuring that children’s interests remain at the centre of decision-making. A second key aspect of the legislation is protecting children from exposure to pornographic content online. Under the bill, regulated services would be required to implement age verification or age estimation measures to ensure that individuals below the age of 18 cannot access pornographic content. At the same time, the legislation would rightly place a strong emphasis on privacy protection, requiring that any information collected for age assurance be limited, used only for that purpose and not retained any longer than necessary. A third important feature of the bill is recognizing that social media is no longer the only digital environment where children spend their time. Increasingly, young Canadians interact with artificial intelligence systems and chatbots. While these technologies can offer certain benefits, they also present unique challenges. There have been troubling reports of chatbots promoting self-harm, encouraging harmful behaviours, providing inappropriate content, fostering unhealthy dependence and even inciting individuals to violence. A most egregious example of this is the unspeakable tragedy that occurred at the start of this year in Tumbler Ridge in my province of British Columbia. My heart still goes out to all the families affected by that horrible event. This is why the safe social media act would extend to chatbot services. These services would be required to act responsibly by mitigating the risks of communicating harmful content and by implementing crisis intervention protocols when users express intentions to harm themselves or others. Fourth, the legislation would address specific categories of content that can have devastating consequences for children. This includes content that sexually victimizes a child or revictimizes a survivor of sexual violence, content that induces a child to self-harm and content used to bully a child. The other parents in the chamber and parents watching at home will know how pernicious cyber-bullying is and how devastating it can be for our children. Simply put, social media platforms currently amplify and monetize harmful behaviour. When this happens to a young person, the effects can be severe and long-lasting. Finally, the legislation includes strong accountability measures. The new digital safety commission would play an important role in ensuring accountability, handling complaints, strengthening protections and promoting online safety awareness across Canada. Ultimately, the bill is grounded in a simple belief that we have overlooked for far too long: that children deserve to be safe online. The safe social media act would establish a modern framework that recognizes both the opportunities and the risks of the digital age. It would create clear expectations for platforms, introduce proactive protections, address emerging technologies and place the safety and well-being of children at the centre of our government’s approach. Frankly, as a society, we should probably aim to have our children spend less time on the Internet, but as a society, we have a responsibility to ensure that when children are online, they are safe and protected from the harms that we know await them there. I encourage my colleagues to support the bill as it moves through committee and comes before the chamber for a vote.”

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“I have a young daughter. Parents will appreciate this bill. Why does the member support it, and how will it help him as a parent as his daughter grows up?”

“Mr. Speaker, like my colleague, I am a father of a young girl. She has grown up in the days of the digital age. This proposed act is one that will really be appreciated by parents like him. Why does he approve of this measure and how would it make him feel better as a parent as his daughter grows up?”

“I support this bill. Parents should not have to protect their kids from internet dangers on their own. National rules for social media would set standards for everyone and take that burden off individual families.”

“Mr. Speaker, I shared this reflection earlier in response to a different question from a different colleague. At the moment, many parents across this country share these concerns. We know the dangers that await our kids on the Internet, and we are concerned in particular about increasingly young children having access to unfiltered information through the devices that are increasingly common in their classrooms. Having parents bear the responsibility to monitor their children’s Internet use, but also to control their access to digital devices, really does individualize this problem. It makes it a problem for individual families and for individual parents. As all parents know, our kids are extremely good at placing pressure on us to come to their preferred outcome or decision. By having strong regulations at the national level, by having a national framework around social media use for young Canadians, individual families would no longer have to make this choice. As a society, we would draw a line and say that enough is enough.”

“We should pass this bill. Younger Canadians grew up with the internet, so they may not see how it changed life compared to the past. But younger members of Parliament support this bill, and I believe most young people do too.”

“Mr. Speaker, certainly we have much to learn from Canadians of different ages on this subject. We all have different relationships to technology depending upon our age. I do think there is much we could learn from members of gen Z, but I will say that as a generation that, in many instances, perhaps most instances, would have grown up with ubiquitous Internet and ubiquitous digital technologies in their life, gen Z may not be best placed to actually reflect upon how their experience of technology has differed from those of previous generations who did not have that access and whose relationship to the Internet was very different. That said, I will note the speech earlier tonight from the member for New Westminster—Burnaby—Maillardville, who is a member of our generation Z caucus and one of the four 21st century babies in this chamber. We have heard from the younger members of our caucus directly based on his experience, which is shared, I am sure, by many others of his age. He spoke very strongly in support of this bill, as I am sure most members of generation Z would as well.”

“This bill lets social media companies ask for an exemption from the age ban if they can prove they are safe for children. I am asking my colleague if he agrees this is better than a full ban.”

“Mr. Speaker, platforms would be able to apply to the new digital safety commission for an exemption from the age ban if they can demonstrate that their projects are safe for children. I ask my colleague if he thinks this is the appropriate approach, rather than imposing a full ban, so that children can use social media if it can be demonstrated that it is safe to do so.”

“Social media has benefits, so we should not ban young people from it completely. The problem is harmful content. If platforms make their content safe and age-appropriate, young people should be allowed to use them.”

“Mr. Speaker, absolutely, what we have before us is really the preferred outcome of having social media platforms that were hospitable and age-appropriate for young Canadians. We understand there are benefits from social media. This is not a blanket anti social media position. The problem, of course, is that at present, those platforms have content that is not appropriate for young people. If the platforms can clean up their act and have age-appropriate content, then there is no need to ban young Canadians from social media.”

“I want the House to pass this bill. Social media is hurting young people through cyber-bullying, sexual exploitation, and algorithms that keep them hooked. Parents cannot fix this alone. This bill makes tech companies design safer platforms, assess risks, and remove harmful content.”

“Mr. Speaker, it is great to be here this evening and debate Bill C-34, the safe social media act, a bill that I strongly support. Before I begin, I want to ask every member of the House to think just for a moment, not as parliamentarians but as parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, teachers, coaches and mentors, whatever position they hold in relation to younger people. Think about the young person in one’s life. Think about how different their childhood is from the one many of us experienced. A generation ago, when the school bell rang, most bullying ended for the day. If a child was having a difficult time at school, home was often a refuge. There was a chance to step away, to breathe, to reset. Today, that is no longer the case. The playground follows our children home. It travels in their pocket. It sits beside their bed. It is there when they wake up in the morning and is often the last thing they see before they fall asleep at night. The comments, the likes, the notifications, the screenshots, the videos and the conversations continue long after the classrooms have emptied out. I know this is true not just as a member of Parliament but as a father of three girls. I am a proud father of three girls but I also take the responsibility of keeping them safe very seriously. Over the past few years, as social media has grown in influence, concerned parents throughout my community of Whitby have shared similar stories. Some have watched their children become withdrawn and anxious. Some have found themselves dealing with the aftermath of cyber-bullying. Others have discovered that their children were being pressured to share intimate images or repeatedly exposed to content that no child should ever have to encounter. What is most striking is that these parents often feel powerless. They try but they cannot monitor devices. They set rules and have conversations, but they are operating in an online environment that changes faster than any family can reasonably keep up with. It never stops. My wife and I have tried to keep my 15-year-old daughter off social media. She does not have a cell phone, and that is an ongoing battle in our household. We have done that for a specific reason, which is to try to keep her safe, to keep her self-esteem high and to protect her mental health, realizing that she cannot always self-regulate, and that most kids are not able to self-regulate at such a young age. I know I was not able to do that with video games when I was a kid, and my parents gently encouraged me to get off the computer games at night. Social media is a whole new reality, and that reality is what brings us here today. We need to make social media safer for our children and grandchildren. One of the things that has struck me most in those conversations with parents is that they are not looking for government to solve every problem in their child’s life. They understand that raising resilient, thoughtful young people starts at home. They know there is no substitute for parenting, for open conversations around the dinner table or for teaching children how to navigate difficult situations. What they are asking for is fairness. They are asking why the responsibility seems to fall almost entirely on families while some of the most powerful companies in the world face so little accountability for the environments that they create. Parents can set rules. They can limit screen time. They can talk to their children about making good and better decisions but they cannot redesign algorithms that are designed specifically to target them and that are almost impossible to counteract. They cannot rewrite recommendation systems. They cannot remove harmful content from platforms or build safer products. Those responsibilities belong rightfully with the companies that create those services. I think most Canadians would agree that if a company profits from the attention of young people, it should also have a responsibility to consider their safety. The Internet has transformed our world in remarkable ways. It has connected families, opened doors to learning and created opportunities that previous generations could never have imagined. Our children are growing up in a world where communication, education, entertainment and community increasingly exist online. The challenge is not the technology itself. The challenge is that many of the safeguards we would expect to accompany that technology have not evolved at the same pace as the technology. The evidence of that gap is impossible to ignore. More than half of Canadian teenagers report receiving unwanted sexual images online. Nearly half say they have felt pressure to send intimate images themselves. One in four young people between the ages of 12 and 17 report experiencing cyber-bullying. Police-reported incidents of online child sexual exploitation have increased dramatically in recent years. In fact, it is up 500% since 2014. Research consistently shows that young people who experience online victimization are far more likely to struggle with serious mental health challenges. I have a very active constituency youth council. Members of my constituency youth council often cite mental health issues as their top issue. It is no doubt that online involvement and things they encounter online are contributing to the youth mental health crisis across the country. When we look at those numbers, it becomes clear that online harms are not isolated incidents. They are affecting children in communities right across our country, including in my own community of Whitby. What is also becoming increasingly clear is that these harms are not solely the result of individual bad actors. They are often amplified by the design of the platforms themselves. Many online services are built to maximize engagement. The longer users remain on a platform, the more valuable that engagement becomes. Recommendation systems continuously serve up new content. Endless scrolling eliminates natural stopping points. Autoplay features keep videos running long after the user intended to stop. For adults, these features can be difficult enough to navigate. For children and teenagers, whose brains are still developing, the impact can be far greater. We need to remember that young people, as they develop, do not have the same self-regulation abilities that are developed in adults and this is the challenge that we experience. Even adults become addicted to online doom scrolling. We are all probably guilty of that in this place. My daughter often says to me, “Dad, you’re always on your cell phone. You’re always on social media, so why can’t I?” I say to her, “Because you don’t know how to regulate. I know how to put it down.” The reality of it is that she is right. We are all guilty of this. We all need to do a better job regulating ourselves. I think young people are more vulnerable and susceptible to not being able to control that urge and the online platforms are designed specifically to exploit that addictive behaviour that we see in most young people when they get online. This is why Bill C-34 represents such an important shift in how we think about online safety. Rather than responding only after a child has already been harmed, the legislation asks for a fundamental question to be answered: What responsibilities should platforms have to prevent harm in the first place? At the heart of this bill is the duty to protect children. It recognizes that children are not simply smaller adults and that services used by millions of young Canadians should be designed with their safety in mind from the outset. That safety by design is a principle that is sound and straightforward, but it represents a significant change. For years, much of the responsibility has rested with parents, educators and children themselves. While those roles remain essential, there is growing recognition that platforms must also be accountable for the environments they create. The expectation is not perfection. No legislation can eliminate every risk and no platform can prevent every harmful interaction. What Canadians are asking for is something much more reasonable. They want companies to identify foreseeable risks, take meaningful steps to reduce those risks and be transparent about the measures they have put in place. Bill C-34 would establish those expectations and obligations, and hold online platforms accountable. It would require regulated services to consider how their products affect children and build age-appropriate safeguards into the way those products operate. It would require companies to assess risk, publish digital safety plans and provide users with practical tools that help them protect themselves. Most importantly, the bill would focus attention on some of the most serious forms of harm that exist online today. Specifically, it would entrench a duty to make that content inaccessible. Whether it is non-consensual sharing of intimate images, the sexual exploitation of children, persistent cyber-bullying, content that encourages self-harm, or material that promotes hatred, violence or extremism, Canadians increasingly expect platforms to take responsibility when their services contribute to those harms. I will end it there, but I just want to say I am really proud to stand with a government that has put forward this legislation. It is a really essential topic for me and the constituents in my community, and it will help keep my children safe.”

“I worry about my young daughter. I want the member to explain how laws like this will actually protect our children.”

“Mr. Speaker, it always good to listen to my friend from Whitby. I know that he has three young daughters. I only have one young daughter, and I am always worried about her. He has been talking about the worry he has. When we move forward with laws like this, how do they ensure that he and his daughters, and any future children he may have, are protected?”

“I want this bill passed to protect children online. Right now, social media companies have no real rules to follow, and parents cannot protect their kids alone. This bill will hold those platforms accountable and keep children safe.”

“Mr. Speaker, as I said, we really want assurances. My wife and I have had many conversations about how to keep our daughter safe online. We have found it challenging to keep her off these devices and platforms. With no real regulatory framework in place in Canada, it just seems like it is the wild west of online engagement. For my daughter’s digital safety, we have had to take extreme measures to try to protect her, from taking away her devices to monitoring all online activity. She can be doing her homework late at night on a laptop, but she is really online on Snapchat or some other platform. The things we see that she has been exposed to make us really concerned. Some of her friends have been exposed to intimate images, which they have been encouraged to share, and that has created problems in her friend group. This bill would hold the social media platforms accountable. It would put in place a mechanism and a set of responsibilities that would ensure my daughter’s safety in the future.”

“I want the House to pass this bill. It makes clear rules for online platforms to have safety plans and take down harmful images, and it sets up a commission to watch over them. Even though we will need to update the rules as technology changes, this is an important step to keep young people safe online.”

“Mr. Speaker, the bill would put in place obligations, which would be very clear, to have online safety plans. It would put in place a digital safety commission, which would oversee and monitor things, look for any infractions and understand that there are obligations for platforms to take down or make inaccessible images that are harmful. The bill would also codify the types of online harms in many ways. From multiple perspectives, it would create a framework that would be useful in regulating online platforms. These platforms are innovating, developing quickly and continuing to evolve, so I imagine we would have to continue amending this legislation in the future. However, it is a significant step forward from where we are at today, where I fear for young people’s safety online every single day.”

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“This bill would apply to all social media platforms. Its goal is to keep young people safe online by adding rules and protections, and that is a good step.”

“Mr. Speaker, it would apply to all social media platforms, as I understand it. I do not understand the nature of the question or where it is coming from. Maybe there is a sense of skepticism on the other side, but I think this bill has been written in a way to focus on the outcome that we want, which is to keep young people safe while they engage online. It would put in place a number of different safeguards and guardrails around that, and I think that is a positive step forward.”

“The member says she wants to protect children, but she criticized our bill that does that. The Conservatives have voted against past safety bills they claimed to support. I want to know if she will support sending this bill to committee for study or vote against it.”

“Mr. Speaker, in her introduction, my colleague mentioned the importance of protecting our children, yet she spent the next 10 minutes criticizing just about everything that we included in Bill C-34 to achieve that objective. This is hardly surprising, given her voting record. Members will recall Bill C-22, a bill that police forces had called for to make our communities safer, something that the official opposition claims it wants. When it was time for the vote, the official opposition’s position on the matter was unclear. As for Bill C-16, which was intended to improve protection for victims, the opposition said that was important, but when the vote was held, it voted against the bill. This time, my question is simple: Will my colleague support referring Bill C‑34 to committee for a detailed study, or will she oppose it, as we have come to expect since she was elected?”