Official Hansard
Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague from University—Rosedale for splitting her time with me. A little less than a year ago, in December 2025, I visited the Hospital for Sick Children, or SickKids, as we know it in Toronto and across Canada. It has been called the world’s best children’s health care centre. It is 150 years old. That day last December, I met with seven researchers and pediatricians on staff. They are working as part of a new child health policy accelerator. It is an encounter that has stuck with me ever since. They told me what their number one concern for children’s health was, which was not what I had expected standing in the wing of a children’s hospital. They sat me down and said their number one concern today was social media and the harms they were witnessing every day in the digital space. They were proverbially ringing the alarm on something they were witnessing with nearly every child, family and condition that came through their doors, whether it was childhood eating disorders, mental health, substance abuse, self-harm, cyber-bullying, cyber-hate, anxiety, sleep disorders or developmental impacts. This was the reality they described in having to open a dedicated clinic, the Lotus Health Clinic, to respond to the harms they were seeing from online child trafficking and grooming. As a mother of three kids, I find that hard to hear. These are people who care for children through some of the most difficult moments of their lives. When they raise an alarm like that, we need to listen. Like any parent, I want all of our children to be healthy and happy. I want them to grow up feeling comfortable in themselves, have good friends and know they can find help when something is wrong. However, parents cannot see everything happening on a child’s screen, and we cannot be expected to understand every algorithm deciding what appears there next. In my work as Parliamentary Secretary to the Secretary of State for Children and Youth, I have met with youth organizations across the country and made young people’s well-being a priority. I bring that responsibility and my perspective as a parent to this debate. The evidence that SickKids shared is clear. Its report cites a Canadian study in which 57% of children aged six to 10 had frequent exposure to social media. That is ages six to 10. We are talking about children in elementary school. The consequences go beyond time spent on a device. SickKids points to survey findings that one in five teens has experienced bullying or harassment online, and 47% of young people aged 15 to 19 report negative experiences from social media use. Behind those numbers are children losing sleep, feeling anxious or carrying something frightening that they have not told anyone about. A few days ago, SickKids and a group of organizations, including the Canadian Medical Association, the Canadian Paediatric Society and the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, launched a campaign for safer online spaces called Six Clicks. The campaign draws attention to how platforms are designed with features that push kids toward extreme or harmful content in six clicks or less. This is not accidental or serendipitous. It is deliberate. It is designed to capture attention. It is not about choice. It is about addiction and monetization. Infinite scrolling, autoplay, push notifications, unsafe defaults, weak and hard-to-find safeguards, manipulative gaming and commercial features are the tactics that in almost any other consumer space, we would scrutinize and regulate. This is the reality our government is responding to with Bill C-34, the safe social media act. Its starting point is straightforward: The global companies profiting from these services must take responsibility for the risks and the social harms that their products create. Canadian families and children cannot be left to carry that responsibility alone. That is what a duties-based approach means. It looks beyond an individual post to the systems that recommend it, amplify it and keep putting similar material in front of a child. The companies design those systems. They control how they work. They have the technical expertise and the resources to make them safer. This bill would give them a legal obligation, a duty, to do so. We already expect safety to be part of the design of the products that children use or the advertising that they see. That expectation should extend to the digital environments where they spend so much of their lives. This bill would establish three core duties supported by transparency requirements. First is a duty to act responsibly. Regulated social media services would have to reduce the risk of exposure to seven categories of harmful content, including bullying, sexual exploitation and content encouraging children to harm themselves. AI chatbot services would also have obligations tailored to their risks. When someone expresses suicidal thoughts, for example, a chatbot would have to interrupt the conversation and direct them to immediate human support. Second is a duty to protect children with safeguards built into services and age-related protections. I will return to that in a moment. Third is a duty to make certain content inaccessible. Child sexual abuse material and intimate content shared without consent would have to be made inaccessible in Canada within 24 hours of being identified or flagged, subject to the bill’s review process. Companies would also have to publish digital safety plans explaining what they are doing and whether their measures are working. I want to focus on the duty to protect children, because this is where the bill speaks most directly to families. It would require certain social media services to prevent children under 16 from having accounts. A service could receive an exemption only if the independent commission was satisfied that it provides adequate safeguards for children. If a platform cannot make itself safe for children, it should not have children as customers. That is a clear expectation, and it is the company’s responsibility to meet it. Companies cannot be left to decide for themselves whether they have done enough. That has not worked, and it will not work. That is why this bill would establish an independent digital safety commission with the expertise to examine these systems and the authority to enforce the rules, review safety plans, investigate compliance and require companies to address failures. Significant financial penalties would give those obligations real consequences. For Canadians, that means having a public regulator working in their interests, able to demand answers from companies whose decisions affect their families and their children’s health. That expertise matters, because technology does not stand still. A framework built only around today’s platforms could be out of date before families feel its benefits. The commission would help develop safety standards as risks evolve. The legislation also provides a process to extend child protection duties to additional categories of online services that pose significant risk to children. It is a modern response to a problem that countries around the world are confronting. It would give Canada the capacity to keep learning, to strengthen protections and to hold companies to their responsibilities as technology changes. I keep coming back to that conversation with SickKids. When the people treating our children tell us that the digital environment is affecting their health, we have a responsibility to respond. We should be doing everything we can to prevent those harms before a child needs treatment. Parents will keep having the difficult conversations, teachers will keep supporting their students and doctors will keep caring for children who need help, but they do need us to do our part, and the companies creating these risks must be required to do theirs. For too long, they have ignored this problem and they have shied away from the obligations that are so obviously theirs. Our children deserve time to grow, confidence in who they are and a childhood that puts their well-being first. This bill is necessary and it is urgent, and I urge all members in the House to support Bill C-34.
