Official Hansard
Mr. Speaker, I am going to share my time with the member for Cambridge. Every parent in Montmorency—Charlevoix and, I suspect, across all of Quebec and Canada has gone through the same experience. It is 10 p.m. and our teenager’s bedroom door is closed. We see a faint blue light under the door. Sometimes we hear them laughing to themselves, or we hear strange noises from a video. When that happens, every parent starts wondering the same thing. What are they watching? Who are they talking to? We wonder how long they have been online. We also want to know who is on the other side of the screen. I think that is a completely reasonable question to ask. Today, we have to be clear. Phones are not the enemy, but they come with problems and challenges that we have rarely encountered in our lifetimes. In fact, our generation may have no experience with that kind of thing at all, and the generation before us has even less. Few of us here have lived in the kind of world our children are growing up in. This is what Bill C‑34 addresses. We have to be clear from the outset. From the start, we have to be clear about the fact that protecting our children online is non-negotiable. It is not a partisan issue. We all agree on that, and so we should. However, we are not going to give the government carte blanche when it asks for powers in the name of protecting our children. More power for a good reason is how these things always start. Our role as opposition members is to challenge the government, ask questions, seek out the little details hidden in the legislation and make them public knowledge. Two things can be true at once: We have to protect our young people, but we must not close our eyes and hand over unrestricted power. I think we understand that, and parents, of all people, understand that the best. Why is this discussion important right now? It is because things are changing at a pace we have rarely seen before, and the numbers are really heading in the wrong direction. In 2024, the police reported 17,000 cases of online child sexual exploitation. That is four times as many as in 2014. In the span of a decade, there was an exponential increase. Behind each of these cases, there is a child, but there is also a parent who never saw it coming. Let us read this bill the way a parent would read it, and I am going to talk about it the way a parent would, focusing on two questions. Will this really protect my children? For me, that is the first question I ask myself. We can certainly pass laws, but will they really protect children? The second question is this: Who will get to decide? The most prominent provision in Bill C-34 is the proposal to prohibit young people under the age of 16 from having social media accounts. This is what has been highlighted in the media, namely that this is a major initiative to protect young people and that social media is being banned for those under 16. Many parents see this minimum age as the right age to regulate access. In fact, an Angus Reid poll found that three in four Canadians support the measure. That is 75% of the population. However, the poll reveals another very important fact, and that is that 72% of Canadians believe that parents, not the government, are primarily responsible for what teenagers look at on social media and how they use those platforms. Canadians want both. They want something that protects their children, but they also want to have the final say at home. They want clear guidelines, but they want to remain in control. Now let us look at what happened in Australia. My colleagues talked about this earlier today in the House. Australia banned social media for children under the age of 16. This happened last December, so it is a very recent thing. Three months later, Australia’s own online safety regulator found that eight in 10 children were still using at least one platform that had been banned or age-restricted, and more than half of those who had kept their accounts said that no one had checked their age. That does not mean that we should do away with this, but clearly we can look at what other places are doing, draw inspiration from their approach and try to improve on it. If we have a ban that does not work, that does not protect anyone. It just creates a false sense of security. That is what we need to stop doing. We need to stop making laws that only create more bureaucracy. Then there are video games. If we ask a 10-year-old where they meet up with their friends after school, the answer is often online, playing a video game with a live chat feature. That is where the young people talk to one another. However, video game platforms are not covered by this bill. If we lock the door but leave the window open, are we really protecting young people? My second question is one that requires us to really look at the details: Who gets to decide? If we are going to prevent young people under 16 from accessing social media, we will need a way to verify everyone’s age. That means asking everyone for proof of age: me, my grandmother, my grandfather, my parents. We will have to ask all of them how old they are. How exactly will that work? Will people be expected to upload their driver’s licence and send it to companies they have never heard of? Will they have to submit to facial analysis software? This raises questions once again. The bill does not provide the answers. Instead, it says regulations will be made later. We have not yet seen the regulations. What I just talked about is not an isolated example. Under the bill, 50 major decisions will be put off until later, with 19 reserved for the minister responsible and 31 referred to a commission that does not exist yet. Which platforms are covered by the ban? Cabinet will decide that. Moreover, the bill does not currently identify any criteria for that. Which platforms could be exempt? The commission will decide that upon request. The 24-hour deadline for taking down content can be changed by cabinet. That way, a minister can personally choose the time frame. We are told that the ban is temporary, but that is not indicated anywhere in the bill. This commission would draft rules, conduct investigations, hold hearings and impose fines. That is absolute power, and it is not bound by any rule of evidence. Once again, it is total control. This is the kind of detail that is important to raise in bills that have a nice catchy title. Until the other members are appointed, the chair of the commission will make all decisions on their own. Again, there is a problem here. That is not all. Five days after introducing Bill C‑34, the government introduced Bill C‑36, which makes that same commission a super-regulator of personal data, taking that power away from the Privacy Commissioner. Oops. The privacy protection being sold to us in Bill C‑34 is already changing hands in Bill C‑36. This is the kind of detail that deserves to be pointed out in the House, but it does not come up in the speeches touting the bill’s virtues. These details are never mentioned in the big announcements, but they really change things. My questions are not meant to be partisan. I am not saying that this is the Conservative perspective. Other people have raised these same questions. Exactly what powers will the new commission have? That is important to know. When a government asks for more powers in the name of protecting our children, we have every right to read each line of its proposal twice and to ensure the intent really is to protect our children. In this case, I believe the Liberal government has a questionable track record. Now, to be honest, some things in this bill are good. Because I can see the good, I feel entitled to say that I see other things that are not good at all. The bill addresses deepfakes, fake intimate images generated by artificial intelligence. This is something we really do need to take action on. It forces the platforms to identify AI content. Again, that is very good. It does not touch private messaging. That is good. It requires chatbots to intervene when a person is in crisis. That is a must. In her speech, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister said that infinite scroll is a design choice. She was right. The platforms have the ability to make better choices. I think it is up to us to steer them in that direction. Bill C-34 has that to its credit. Ultimately, this is not about platforms or commissions. It is about families. People do not need a commissioner to make decisions for them. Our families, our parents, need tools. They need information. Above all, they need to have the final say. Parents must continue to be responsible for their children. The final decision cannot always be made in an office in Ottawa like the Liberals do. On the contrary, the final decision must be made at kitchen tables in the homes of families in Quebec and Canada. What should we be looking at and working on in committee? I think that is what all parents want to see us do. First, we want to put parents first. We need to work on simple tools and safer default settings. We need to give parents the final say. That is what we should be working on. Second, Parliament is the one that sets the rules. How age is verified and how long the ban lasts are things that should be included in the act, not in regulations that will be voted on later. Third, we need a commission with checks and balances. We want clear limits, transparency and a right of appeal. Fourth, we need to protect our children where they actually are: video games, chatbots and app stores. Our position can be summed up in a few words. We say “yes” to protecting children. That is obvious. We say “no” to placing blind trust in the government. We say “yes” to platforms that are accountable. We say “no” to a commission that is accountable to no one. We say “yes” to security. We say “no” to mass surveillance. We say “yes” to a government that supports parents. We say “no” to a government that wants to take their place. It is important that this bill be referred to committee. We need to hear from parents, doctors, police officers and experts. We need to hear from our young people. We need to be able to invite them before the committee and ask them about their experiences, because that is important. We must get this bill right. Our children deserve a bill that will work for them, and our parents deserve to be trusted.
