Official Hansard
Mr. Speaker, I am going to split my time. In 1965, The Who sang The Kids Are Alright. In 1998, The Offspring answered that with The Kids Aren’t Alright. That was before Instagram and Snapchat and before strangers across the world could come into a child’s bedroom. Today, that answer is truer than ever, and I think most would agree in the House the kids are not all right. They are being hooked by algorithms engineered on purpose to keep them scrolling past midnight because every extra minute they scroll is worth money to somebody on the other side. They are being bullied in ways that never log off, and they are being hunted in their own bedrooms by predators who never have to pass a parent’s bedroom. A generation ago, a child’s bedroom door was a wall, and now it is a window to the entire world. There are no Liberal kids and there are no Conservative kids. There are no NDP kids. There are just kids, so I want to approach this bill, Bill C-34, in a way that any parent would: not asking whether it sounds good, but whether it actually keeps people safe. Every member of the House knows the name Amanda Todd. She was 12 years old when a stranger in the Netherlands hiding behind 22 different aliases found her online. He coerced her. He captured images of her. He threatened to send them to everyone she loved, and then he did. Weeks before she died, Amanda held out flash cards to a camera one at a time and told the world what was happening to her. She was 15 when she took her own life, and she carried all of that alone. Then it took 10 years to put the man responsible behind bars, and by then he had been convicted of crimes against 33 other young people. We told ourselves that this would not happen again. Then came Carson Cleland, 12 years old, from Prince George. A sextortionist found him on Snapchat, an app whose own rules said that he was too young to be on there. Nobody stopped him from signing up. Nobody stopped the stranger from finding him. My colleague from Cariboo—Prince George told the House it was just 12 hours from the first threat to his death. His father said it best when he said our kids are “not built for adult problems in a kid’s world.” For Amanda, justice took a decade. For Carson, the harm took half a day. The predators get faster and the laws do not keep up. Amanda and Carson are not rare. They are just names that we know. Behind them, there are thousands of names that we do not know of thousands of other cases. In 2023, Canadian police recorded almost 20,000 incidents of online sexual exploitation, up 59% in a single year. That is more than 50 cases a day. Sextortion reports to Cybertip.ca rose 300% between 2020 and 2025. Where the victim is known, more than four out of five are boys, boys like Carson. Nearly two-thirds of cases happen on Instagram or Snapchat or some app on some kids’ phones tonight. These companies have the data, the engineers and the billions, but they have lacked will. One in four Canadian youth has been cyber-bullied. In a classroom of 28 people, that is seven kids. Every one of those numbers is a child on the edge of their bed at two in the morning with a phone glowing in the dark, scrolling and too ashamed to wake their parents up to tell them what happened. Here is a number I want every member of the House to remember: Nine in 10 Canadian teens who were sexually victimized online were harmed in private messages. It was not the public feed and not in the DMs, but behind a closed door on a screen that no parent can see. There are ideas in this bill that deserve our attention, there is no question, such as a duty on platforms to act responsibly, a 24-hour takedown of child sexual abuse material and non-consensual intimate images and a duty on AI chatbots to connect a child in crisis with an actual real person. For years, we let these platforms police themselves. They buried the safety fixtures six menus deep. Self-regulation has had its chance and it has failed kids. Parents were too busy maybe to find it six menu items deep. An idea on paper has never really protected a child. What matters is how the law works on an ordinary Wednesday night like tonight when a stranger sends that first message. Those questions cannot be settled just on the floor in a short debate. The committee has to do some work on this. These are some of the questions. First, would it reach the harm where it happens? Private messaging where nine out of 10 victims are harmed would be expressly excluded from the bill’s duties. We want to know why. Committees should ask what safety-by-design duties, like stopping strangers from messaging minors by default, could protect kids in the DMs without anybody reading their messages. Second, what would the rules actually say? This has not been clear in the legislation. Roughly 50 key decisions in this legislation are left until after passage: 19 of them for cabinet and 31 of them for a commission that does not actually exist yet. Which platforms are covered? What is safety by design? Are gaming platforms in there or at all, or will that only come later? Parliament should vote on the whole house, not just a framework of it. Third, we all have seen the example of Australia. We want to know what it teaches us. Australia went first, so we do not really have to guess. Platforms there shut down 4.7 million children’s accounts in the first month, but three months in, its own regulator found that teen social media use had barely moved. It went from 86% to 81%. About half of the teens still online said that nobody even checked their age. As a result, parents became less aware about what their kids were doing because of it. A ban with a weak age check is not really a ban at all. It is like leaving the key under the mat at the front door. It does not really keep kids out. It moves them out of their parents’ sight, or it moves them, in the case of Australia, to other platforms that are not captured within the legislation. Fourth, we want to know if the penalties are strong enough. The last online harm bill, which was a terrible bill in this House, set the minimum fees at 6% of global revenue. This one would cut that to 3%. There are some questions about why. For some of the richest companies in history, a fine that they can budget for is not really a punishment. It is like a licensing fee that they work into the cost of doing business. Fifth, does it touch the actual business model? On these platforms, kids are not the customers. Their attention is actually the product. That is the problem. Our own heritage committee recommended banning targeted ads and data harvesting aimed at minors. The government declined, while admitting that the algorithmic feeds drive the actual addictive designs. We want to know more about that, certainly. Finally, most importantly, the member before me spoke about the digital safety commission, but who will watch the watchdog? Who will write these rules? What judge would enforce this? Is it five people? Is it one person? The legislation really is not clear on any of that, so we would like to hear more from the government. Hopefully we will get that in the course of this debate in this House. What recourse does a family have when the platform fails a child? Through all of this, there is one principle that should guide everyone here: Parents know their kids better than any government or tech company ever could. A mother can tell her son to put his phone down and go to sleep, but what she cannot do is out-muscle an algorithm built by thousands of engineers to keep him awake at night. A good law does not take her place. It stands beside her. I hope that we have that conversation in this House. There must be a law that protects all privacy. It is the work of the committee not to blindly support something that needs clarity, but to hear from the experts and parents like Carson’s parents. It must be a law that protects adults’ privacy too. We cannot find every user under 16 without checking every user over 16, so there are some real questions about what that could mean for every parent and grandparent who would have to give their identification to a platform. Who stores that data and for how long? What happens when it is breached? It is not a question of if, but it is a question of when. I will end with this. A paper tiger does not keep a child safe. It does not stop a predator and it gives no parent peace of mind, so it is important to get this right. We owe it to the families of Carson and Amanda and thousands of others. I started by saying the kids are not all right and I mean it. The kids are not all right today, but if we ask the hard questions and put down good legislation to keep kids safe, then maybe they will be all right.
