The Carney Liberals finally tabled their big online safety bill yesterday. After all the talk at their Montreal convention and in the press about protecting children from social media, the so-called Safe Social Media Act (Bill C-34) turns out to be mostly make-work for a currently non-existent commission.
The real rules on who gets regulated, what platforms actually have to do, and whether there will even be a minimum age for accounts are all left to cabinet regulations and the new Digital Safety Commission that doesn't exist yet.
Teenagers worried they're about to lose TikTok or Instagram can relax. This will take years to stand up, assuming it ever does. Setting up a brand-new commission, consulting everyone, gazetting them, and then actually enforcing new regulations across major platforms is going to be a multi-year bureaucratic slog. By the time anything meaningful happens, the kids who are teenagers now will be adults.
That doesn't make the bill good. It just makes the immediate panic premature.
The legislation dumps a pile of new duties on "regulated" social media services and chatbots. They have to mitigate “harmful content,” give users blocking and flagging tools, label AI-generated material, submit digital safety plans, and potentially make certain illegal content inaccessible.
There are nods to protecting children through design features and age restrictions on porn. But the actual minimum age for having a social media account itself? That's only “if provided for by regulations.” In other words, the government can decide later, or not.
This is classic modern legislation: announce something that sounds tough on a popular issue, then write a bill that kicks the hard decisions down the road to cabinet and an unaccountable commission. The uncertainty is astonishing.
We don't know the user thresholds that will determine which platforms count as "regulated," or what the specific child-protection design features will be. We don't even know what kind of age verification, if any, will be required, and whether that means uploading government ID for millions of Canadians who just want to comment on a news article.
And we still don't know how any of this actually protects kids better than parents using the tools that already exist on every phone and tablet. I didn't buy your teenager's device. You did. The parental controls are already there. The option to take it away when they're on it too much or seeing things you don't like has always been there. Creating a massive new regulatory apparatus because some parents are too lazy use it is not a serious solution.
The people who will feel this most aren't the average teenager scrolling in their bedroom. It's the kids who already have the hardest time offline—including many LGBTQ youth whose homes aren't safe places to be themselves. For some of them, online communities are the only consistent support they have.
Broad restrictions and verification requirements risk cutting them off from those networks and pushing them toward darker, less moderated corners of the internet. That's what happens when you try to wall off the open web instead of dealing with the actual problems on the platforms.
The Minister of Culture and Identity keeps saying this is urgent because “kids are dying.” If it's that urgent, why is so much of the bill still to be written by regulation years from now? The gap between the rhetoric and the actual text is wide.
I've been against this approach since the idea first floated years ago, and nothing in yesterday's bill changes that. Parents are responsible for their own children. The internet has always had risks, just like the real world. The answer isn't forcing every Canadian to prove their identity to speak online or handing a new commission sweeping powers to decide what content is acceptable.
The answer is the same one it's always been: raise your kids, supervise what they do online, and leave the rest of us alone.
Bill C-34 may not bite for a while. That doesn't mean we should let it pass without a fight. The direction is still wrong, even if the timeline is slower than advertised.
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