Official Hansard
Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time with my colleague from Brampton West. Our need to provide better safeguards to protect children online is real. In fact, just to illustrate this point, one in four Canadian youth aged 12 to 17 has experienced some sort of online harm. Police reported online sexual exploitation reached 16,905 incidents in 2024, and this rate has risen under the Liberal government 347% in the last decade. Parents are trying to provide some safeguards for their kids online, but they are also asking for our help. Any approach that we take to provide these safeguards should support parents while also protecting both their rights and their children’s rights, and parents’ right to determine how their child becomes a digital citizen while ensuring that environment is safe and also looking at the privacy and speech rights for Canadians. The question that we should be looking at in this House is not whether we should act, but how and whether this bill is sufficient or if it is asking us to undertake measures that devolve powers that we as parliamentarians have, for vague assurances that really deserve answers from the government. I have a lot of questions with this bill, and I am going to start with the matter that we were just debating in the previous section, which is the ban on social media accounts. My first question relates to the best practice that we have already seen as Australia has rolled out similar provisions. We have seen that most kids at the age of 16 still had accounts months later. Harm complaints did not meaningfully decline. In fact, teens turned to VPNs, shared family log-ins or simply lied about their age. The ban did not actually do anything. With regard to this aspect of Bill C-34, the questions I would have are the following. If a teenager is pushed off a large platform that has a well-established trust, safety team and system, where do they go, because they are going to go somewhere, and has the government been seized with this question, particularly knowing that other jurisdictions have already had this experience? Are they going to smaller, unmoderated corners of the Internet where their parents cannot see them and has the government thought about whether this measure may push vulnerable kids somewhere darker on the Internet? How will the government measure to know whether this is working? The government has been silent on these issues. This deserves much more scrutiny because of how the bill proposes that the ban would work. A platform could apply to the new commission that is proposed in the bill for an “exemption” if it shows “adequate safeguards”. Adequate by what standard, set by whom and when? The bill is silent on these things. If the largest platforms could win exemptions, is this a ban or is it a negotiation between a regulator, not elected officials, and big tech held outside of this chamber? I have a problem with that. If safeguards exist that are good enough to earn an exemption, why not write them in law for every platform today? These are questions the government has not answered, and I suspect that it is facing internal questions within its caucus on this issue as well. Bill C-34 sets out the general types of services it would cover, social media, livestreaming, adult content platforms and AI chatbots, but the exact test for which specific services count as a regulated social media service is left to regulations to be written later. Parliament is being asked to pass a bill before knowing where that line falls. That decision would be made by cabinet, not by this House, so we are being asked to devolve that power. In fact, the ban itself would not be automatic through this law. It would only apply to the platforms that cabinet later chooses to name in regulation. We should probably be having that debate in Parliament. Additionally, many types of the severe dangers children face online, like grooming and sextortion, happen on gaming platforms and chat services. Would those be covered under this bill? It does not seem like it. The government may say that cabinet can add new categories of services, but why is that being left to regulation? Why are we not having that debate now? I would like to know why the government is silent on this and if it is being silent for a reason. Is it because of lobbying or is it because existing safeguards are good enough or it does not think that it can make privacy work or because the bill is not technology agnostic? Those are all questions that the government should be able to answer. The bill is also quiet on how age verification would be done. Those details would also be left to regulations, and that raises big questions for me. Will Canadians be asked, for example, to provide a driver’s license to access social media? Australia’s law specifically says that no one can be forced to hand over a government ID to prove their age, yet the bill is silent on that matter. Bill C-34 is also silent on the use of third party vendors, which platforms often hire to run age verification checks. How would the government make sure that those vendors do not reuse that data, and how would an operator destroy that data while also keeping the records the bill requires to prove it complied? Protecting kids should never, ever require every adult to hand over their identity to the government, and the bill is silent on these matters. Much scrutiny needs to be paid to the amount of regulatory power that the bill would hand over to a body that does not yet exist. Independent analysts have counted roughly 50 major decisions left to cabinet and the new commission after Parliament votes on the bill. Questions like which services are covered, what age verification is adequate, what counts as safe design, how complaints are judged and who gets an exemption remain unanswered. These questions deserve answers, because these make up the substance of the law. When Parliament passes this frame but leaves the substance of what could amount to limitations on speech and privacy to regulation, we are opening the door to a process where well-resourced tech lobbyists and unelected bureaucrats would have a seat at the table and parliamentarians who are elected to make these decisions would not, and these are not minor decisions. The commission outlined in the bill would be the rule-maker, investigator, enforcer and judge. It would have a wide variety of powers that it could use to compel information, and its members would be appointed by cabinet, so these would essentially be political appointees. Also, until enough are appointed, the chairperson alone could make these decisions, and that deserves further scrutiny and debate as well. Would these regulations come back to the House or a committee before they take effect? I do not think they would. I think that deserves scrutiny. The only review in the bill would be done by the minister, not by a committee of the House, and not until three years after it would take effect. There are so many other questions. Where would a small operator go if it is fined? Why should unelected bureaucrats, rather than members accountable to Canadians, set the boundaries of online safety? There are ways that we could be having that discussion here today, but the government has again chosen to try to get us to devolve powers to regulators without answering some pretty fundamental questions around efficacy, like whether this would actually work and keep kids safe online and whether it would protect speech. I have tried to stand in this place like Cassandra, for years, saying that we have a problem, and the government has been slow to act. As an individual member, I have spent years writing legislation. I tabled a revised bill, Bill C-216, which had a prescribed legislative duty of care for online operators. It is more tech-agnostic and also more clear in terms of what the powers are. It would also give more options to parents on how they curate their children’s digital experience as they become digital citizens. Also, Bill C-216 is designed to keep pace with technologies like artificial intelligence, and I have questions about whether Bill C-34 can do that. The last thing I will say is that my bill would clearly protect privacy. It would require operators to use age detection technology that they already use to target ads, with further privacy safeguards, rather than collecting IDs, and it would expressly prohibit using a digital ID. I am wondering why the government took this approach, which has failed in previous legislation, and once again listened to bureaucrats. We know that parents need these safeguards, but given that the government has presented a bill that deserves so much scrutiny, I worry that it is going to lead to constitutional challenges down the road from regulations that perhaps have not been fully scrutinized here. The government has a lot of explaining to do. There is a lot of detail that needs to be filled in by the government to ensure that kids are kept safe online and that Canadians’ privacy and speech are protected.