Calls mount for Carney government to not abandon regulating tech companies over online harms

OTTAWA — Calls are mounting for Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government to revive a Trudeau-era effort to regulate tech companies in an attempt to safeguard children from harmful online content.

While the issue has been raised internally, ministers are awaiting direction, including from the Prime Minister’s Office, which remains consumed by U.S. President Donald Trump and advancing the government’s economic agenda.

What’s left is a confusing picture of who is even responsible for the file and whether the Carney government intends to move on the issue of regulation or has abandoned that approach, choosing instead to tackle online harms through criminal justice, as outlined in the Liberal platform.

Meanwhile, children’s health organizations have joined child safety advocates and digital policy researchers in sounding the alarm over the damage minors in Canada face through their online activity, calling for the government to introduce regulations.

“Despite clear evidence of harm, digital platforms face no meaningful accountability in Canada,” Emily Gruenwoldt, president and CEO of Children’s Healthcare Canada and the Pediatric Chairs of Canada, said in a statement.

Gruenwoldt wants to see the Liberals introduce a new version of their online harms bill, known as Bill C-63, which failed to pass through Parliament before the spring federal election.

This time, she added in her statement, it ought to focus more narrowly on “platform accountability” rather than include any proposals for stiffer hate crime and hate speech punishments from the last bill, which garnered widespread pushback from civil society groups and opposition parties, before the Liberals, in a last-ditch effort to save it, proposed splitting it.

“I think there’s a huge opportunity for the Carney government to learn from the missteps that we did and that the Trudeau government did, and to come forward with a much more streamlined bill that I think can gain a lot of cross-partisan support,” said Supriya Dwivedi, who served as a senior advisor to former prime minister Justin Trudeau.

Dr. Charlotte Moore Hepburn, a pediatrician and medical director of a child health policy wing at the Hospital for Sick Children, Canada’s largest children’s hospital, echoed those calls, saying cases of anxiety, depression, self-harm, and eating disorders were rising and tied to young people’s time spent online.

“We fully support re-introducing the parts of Bill C-63 that focused on protecting children online, including through the creation of an online safety regulator,” she said in a statement.

Earlier this summer, a “safer online spaces” campaign launched, urging the government to pass new child safety legislation, which included, as listed supporters, the Canadian Paediatric Society and the Canadian Centre for Child Protection.

“A decision to not act and to take a step forward is a decision unto itself, and so I think that’s the real risk here, is inaction,” said Jacques Marcoux, director of research and analytics for the Canadian Center for Child Protection.

Dozens of researchers, authors, and other civil society groups recently sent an open letter to Carney, pressing his government to take 14 different steps to protect “Canada’s digital sovereignty,” which listed among its calls, introducing a “new and improved” online harms bill.

“It’s clear that social media companies do not have our children’s best interests at heart. These platforms are engineered to be as addictive as possible,” Dr. Margot Burnell, president of the Canadian Medical Association, which was among the signatories, added in a statement.

“Clinicians in doctors’ offices and hospitals across the country are grappling with the impacts of this harm.”

In the face of growing calls, National Post sought clarity from different ministries to confirm whether the Carney government has any plans to introduce a new version of its online harms bill.

A spokeswoman for Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault, who steered previous efforts to clamp down on harmful content online the last time he held the job under Trudeau — and would be expected to do so again this time around, according to other government departments and offices — directed questions to Justice Minister Sean Fraser.

Fraser’s predecessor, former justice minister Arif Virani, was the one to introduce the Liberals’ last bill.

Jeremy Bellefeuille, a spokesman in Fraser’s office, confirmed that it intends to legislate against the online sexual exploitation and extortion of children, as well as toughen the country’s child luring laws. It also plans to increase penalties for the non-consensual distribution of intimate images and create an offence for the non-consensual sharing of sexualized “deepfakes,” which refer to digitally altered images, including through AI.

“We will have more to say as we finalize the legislation,” Bellefeuille wrote.

No timeline was provided for the proposed changes, which were promised in the Liberal platform and focus explicitly on the Criminal Code.

For Shaheen Shariff, a professor at McGill University’s education faculty who specializes in cyberbullying, the approach marks a good first step, but she pointed out that there are many other dangers children face through what she called “technology-facilitated violence,” outside of sex-based crimes.

“The impact is quite devastating for kids who are harassed online or cyberbullied,” she said.

Emily Laidlaw, a Canada Research Chair in cybersecurity law at the University of Calgary, who sat on the Liberals’ expert advisory group regarding online harms, said she agrees that sexualized deepfakes should be criminalized, but that it does not address the issue of getting them removed once online or stopping their spread.

“The only avenue through this to really address internet safety is corporate regulation,” she said.

Laidlaw added she worries the priority of trying to regulate tech giants in the name of online safety may be slipping.

“It’s a thorny issue. It’s like playing hot potato, right? I mean, there’s no way to take on this issue without it being highly controversial.”

With Carney’s government being the first in Canada to appoint a standalone ministry for artificial intelligence, questions have been raised about the file potentially going to Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation Minister Evan Solomon, who is preparing to table his own, separate legislation.

Solomon has said his forthcoming legislation would not contain the same sweeping regulatory provisions for AI systems proposed in Bill C-27, which failed to pass Parliament before the election. Instead, it would focus more narrowly on data and privacy protection, as the Carney government is more interested in promoting AI adoption.

In an interview earlier this week, the minister told host Ryan Jespersen he was also aware of the concerns surrounding the harms caused by this technology and was talking to people about protecting consumers as well as “kids and people from deepfakes.”

Asked whether the bill would address any AI-related harms, his office did not directly answer, citing only how the legislation was under development.

Another complicating factor is U.S. President Donald Trump, given his ire towards countries’ policies on regulating American tech companies and online speech.

Such circumstances mean hopes within Canada to adopt models like those in the U.K., which has its own digital safety regulator, now face a more challenging reality should they be viewed as a trade irritant.

Establishing a new digital safety regulator was at the heart of the Liberals’ last bill, which proposed giving the regulator the power to force platforms to submit safety plans and be subject to fines for non-compliance. It also featured a 24-hour takedown rule for child sex abuse materials and sexual images shared without a person’s consent.

Taylor Owen, the Beaverbrook Chair in Media, Ethics and Communications at McGill University, who also served on the government’s online harms expert advisory committee, said countries are dealing with “some of the most powerful companies in human history,” and getting them to listen requires “a vehicle that has authority over operations in your country.” 

“Without that, they are ungovernable.”

Owen pointed out that the U.K. managed to retain both its Digital Safety Act and its digital services tax, the latter of which Canada decided to scrap in an effort to progress negotiations of a trade deal with Trump, who demanded Canada abandon the policy.

Even with Trump changing the landscape, Owen says countries must ask themselves: Are they prepared to give up control of setting their own digital policies?

“Are they going to really cede the governance of their entire digital economy to the whims of the US forever? Like, is that what we’re talking about?”

Michael Geist, the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, said he believes U.S. opposition to Canada’s digital services tax and law regarding online streaming platforms may have more to do with requiring companies to pay money. 

“The U.S. has talked about opposing heavy-handed speech regulation, but a narrow C-63 premised on the requirement to act responsibly – may not be viewed as threatening,” he wrote in an email.

• Who's responsible for online harms? Responsibility floats between ministers
• Liberals revamping online harms bill with focus on deepfakes, exploitation and AI

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