Child safety law S-209 is back in Parliament, porn sites want Californian-style age verification

Image by Open AI

October 16, 2025

Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne’s age verification bill for pornography is back in the Parliamentary pipeline.

The Senate’s legal and constitutional affairs committee has already held four days of hearings on Bill S-209 with two more days scheduled next week.

Earlier this summer, MediaPolicy interviewed bill sponsor Miville-Dechêne about the legislation aimed at protecting children from the harmful pornography that is widely available on the web, both on porn websites and social media apps.

In the video below, Lord James Bethell, a British Parliamentarian who pushed through similar legislation in the United Kingdom this summer, had this to say to Canadian senators about the impact of porn on the “plasticity” of young minds:

The lightning rod for critics of the bill is the introduction of age verification into regulation of the Internet.

In the Senate hearings, fears about data breaches and leaks, increasingly remote as technology improves, have consumed most of the oxygen in the room.

But the bill seems likely to get through Parliament, eventually. So representatives of the porn sites want Canada to follow California and shift the legal responsibility for age verification from porn websites to the phones, tablets and laptops pre-installed with operating systems sold by Google, Apple and Microsoft.

The device-centred approach emphasizes parental responsibility for setting up devices to send “adult-only” or “child-access” signals to app developers who still have to obey the signal but otherwise are off the hook for age verification, as are porn sites and social media platforms.

That’s a better system of age verification, say the Canadian-based porn providers, because it only has to regulate a few tech giants instead of a constellation of porn sites, especially the offshore sites that are likely to defy the law and force the government to chase them from one website address to another with site-blocking orders.

Another key issue is whether the bill will apply to social media platforms. As written, the legislation only excludes its application to search engines.

According to Miville-Dechêne, the bill can apply to social media companies. Elon Musk’s X is reputed to be the largest conduit of pornography to children, surpassing porn sites. But the text of the bill leaves the decision to cover social media services to the federal government or its regulator.

Miville-Dechêne says she’s content to defer to a regulator on that point as her age verification bill will have to mesh with the government’s online harms bill, should it decide to revive Bill C-63.

As the hearings progress, the elephant in the room is the Liberal government’s opposition to S-209.

Miville-Dechêne’s old bill passed the Senate and second reading in the House of Commons during the 44th Parliament with majority support before dying on the order table at election time. Barring a swing in the strong popular support for legislation, the bill seems likely to keep the votes of Conservative, NDP and Bloc MPs once resubmitted to the House of Commons.

The only question is whether the Carney government maintains the barge-pole distance from the bill that the previous Liberal administration kept. Former PM Justin Trudeau criticized the Senator’s bill as likely to push pornography-seeking children to the dark web and Liberal MPs voted against it in the House.

Alas, the Carney cabinet observed Parliamentary convention by not appearing at the recent senate committee hearings on the bill. Instead, heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault sent mid-level civil servant Amy Awad, his subject expert on digital regulation.

Awad handled the Senators’ questions adroitly and advanced the idea that the Liberals’ much broader Online Harms Act Bill C-63 —-which also died on the Commons order table earlier this year— could have addressed the same policy goal of making porn sites responsible for age verification through third party service providers. 

Those of you familiar with Online Harms bill might wonder where she finds that in the text of C-63. Answer: it isn’t there, at least not explicitly

Nevertheless, Awad argued that the concept of age verification was not inconsistent with the self-designed safety codes that C-63 would have required from the digital platforms and that the proposed Digital Safety Commission might have ordered age verification.

The decorously unasked question of Awad was “where is Bill C-63 now?” A candid answer would have been “bolted to the back burner while we deal with Trump.”

This sets up a scenario in which Miville-Dechêne’s Senate bill gets back to the House of Commons in 2026 and forces the hand of the government on Bill C-63.

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This blog post is copyrighted by Howard Law, all rights reserved. 2025.