The federal government presents Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, as legislation to protect children from online harms. While that goal is widely shared, the bill would affect Canadians of all ages. Bill C-34 will require identity screening of everyone to access social media. It will also create a powerful new federal regulator with largely undefined authority, and enable extensive monitoring of private AI conversations.The Digital Safety Commission created by Bill C-34 will have vast and largely undefined powers to force social media platforms and AI chatbot services to comply with policies that the Commission itself will create. If this bill passes, the Commission would create the rules, interpret them, and enforce them with penalties of up to $10 million or 3% of a company’s annual global revenues … all of this without input from Parliament. The Commission will combine regulatory, investigative, adjudicative, enforcement, and advocacy roles into one large, very powerful body.Almost all of what the Safe Social Media Act prohibits as “harmful content” is already illegal under the Criminal Code: child pornography, child luring, sexual exploitation, distributing intimate images without consent, uttering threats, criminal harassment, advocating genocide, terrorist conspiracy, and advocating violence. Canada needs better enforcement of existing laws, not a new additional layer of laws targeting the same behaviours.Instead, Bill C-34 enables the Commission to force these platforms to censor opinions on social media and AI chatbots that are “likely” to foment hatred, defined as “detestation or vilification” directed at certain groups. These powers differ significantly from the section 319(2) Criminal Code ban on wilfully promoting hatred. Under the Criminal Code, prosecutors must prove intent, assess the likelihood of conviction, and obtain Attorney General approval to prosecute a Canadian for hate speech. The criminally accused person has defences available, including truth. For these reasons, hate speech prosecutions are infrequent. In contrast, the Commission will exercise its broad censorship powers instantaneously and on a daily basis. Facing severe financial penalties, platforms will have strong incentives to over-remove legitimate expression by Canadians..Bill C-34 is in large part a blank cheque. More than 50 important public policy decisions are left to be decided by the Commission or by the federal Cabinet, after the bill passes. These include which social media platforms are covered, what age-verification methods are acceptable, and how new censorship rules are interpreted. Parliament is being asked to approve a new legal architecture without knowing what it will look like in practice.Canadians under 16 will be banned from having accounts on certain social media platforms under this bill. These platforms will need to prove that “adequate” age-verification and age-estimation measures are in place. Australia’s under-16 social media ban shows that preventing minors from accessing regulated platforms requires screening everyone. Platforms there have used facial age estimation, behavioural inference, and stronger checks including “optional” government ID. Even so, the Australian government’s own progress report found that more than two-thirds of under-16 teens continued using social media.Requiring all Canadians to prove their identity simply to access social media violates Charter-protected privacy rights: to be free from unreasonable search or seizure. Compelling the surrender of highly personal identifying information as a condition of everyday online life is a blunt, population-wide measure aimed at children but imposed on everyone..The Bill C-34 regime also displaces parental authority. The Supreme Court has recognized that the Charter section 7 liberty interest includes a parent’s interest in making fundamental decisions concerning the care and upbringing of their children. Bill C-34 imposes a uniform prohibition and verification system on all families, with no individualized assessment and no room for parents to decide that less restrictive methods are sufficient.Bill C-34 will further require AI platforms to monitor the conversations of Canadians for suicidal ideation, self-harm, or intent to cause serious harm. Operators must interrupt those chats and may report them to crisis services or police. The result is large-scale monitoring of private conversations. When Canadians know their chats may be scanned or handed to authorities, they will avoid sensitive topics. Unclear standards plus severe penalties will also push companies toward over-reporting to authorities. Some companies may simply leave Canada.Bill C-34 therefore creates a framework that sacrifices Charter-protected privacy, expression, and parental authority for uncertain gains. Child protection is obviously a legitimate objective. But it does not require mandatory identity screening of the adult population, a new censorship regime, regular monitoring of private AI conversations, or the transfer of core policy choices from Parliament to an unelected body.John Carpay, B.A., LL.B., is President of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (jccf.ca).
