August 12, 2025
There’s a media bill coming to the House of Commons this fall that will create a stir.
It’s called “An Act to enact the Protection of Minors in the Digital Age Act and to amend the Criminal Code,” Bill S-209. (“S” because it originated in the Senate).
It isn’t another child porn law (that’s already illegal). Rather it’s legislation that bans children (under 18) from viewing online porn and makes it a crime for porn websites to permit it, enforced by requiring the pornographers to subscribe to a commercial age verification service for all site visitors.
What follows is a cheat sheet describing the bill and some context.
The point of the bill, according to its sponsor Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne, is to stop the serious harm to impressionable kids and teens resulting from exposure to hardcore porn, particularly the violence and aggression that has become widely available even on free sites. The dangerous stuff —hitting, slapping, choking— normalizes sexual behaviour that boys and girls should practice and accept among themselves, both as youth and later as adults.
So far —and this bill has bounced around Parliament since 2022— no one is litigating the harm.
But how to fix it?
The first thing the bill does is to identify what pornography is going to be off limits. There is a series of legal fences drawing the line between regulated and unregulated websites and content:
- The porn site must be a commercial service. But only website operators are responsible: search engines and ISPs are not liable.
- Websites that allow kids to view porn aren’t breaking the law if the content is for a “legitimate purpose” relating to science, education, medicine or ——this is the question-begging loophole— “the arts.”
- The definition of porn is carefully drafted: “pornography means any photographic, film, video or other visual representation, whether or not it was made by electronic or mechanical means, the dominant characteristic of which is the depiction, for a sexual purpose, of a person’s genital organs or anal region or, if the person is female, her breasts.” I italicized the words inviting interpretation.
- Websites will be expected to implement age verification technology.
- The characteristics of acceptable age verification technology will be set by government regulation described in section 12 of the bill. Notably the pornographer must contract with a third party service (of which there is a growing industry) that protects data privacy and destroys the data as soon as viewer age is verified.
- Porn sites that violate the law can be convicted of a crime but the penalty is a large fine ($250,000 for a first offence) rather than jail. As the likely offenders will be foreign sites that ignore Canadian laws, the legislation provides for a yet-to-be-named government regulator to warn the site and back it up by going to court to seek a site-blocking injunction. The site blocking powers include a de minimus rule that tolerates blocking non-pornographic content on the same site.
- The bill comes into effect one year after it passes the House.
The bill has the support in principle of a majority of MPs in the House. The NDP, Bloc and Conservatives support it. The Liberals do not.
An earlier, slightly less well tuned, version of the bill got through the Senate and made its way to the House of Commons, only to be wiped off the order paper by the April 2025 federal election. Prior to the election writ dropping, the bill had languished undebated in committee for nine months, suggesting the three parties in support of the bill in principle had other priorities.
The policy support for protecting vulnerable youth, especially girls, comes from both progressive and conservative directions. Getting tough on porn is a long time conservative issue, now making common cause with feminist-inspired safety concerns. Miville-Dechêne is in the latter camp having once led Québec’s Council on the Status of Women (and a 25-year career as a prominent television journalist).
The bill also has some solid polling support, I’ve provided a link to a Leger poll below.
The Liberals under Justin Trudeau fought the bill and held it up in the House until it died. An interview with Miville-Dechêne that I will publish this weekend provides some insight into that.
Now that the bill is back in a new session of Parliament we will have to see if the Carney PMO takes a different approach to the issue.
The bill has passed second reading in the Senate without serious opposition and third reading approval ought to happen quickly. Then the bill goes to the House where the all important gatekeeping in House committee must be navigated. Even if the bill is opposed by the Liberal government, S-209 is not a “private member’s bill” that can be shunted to the back of the queue. As a Senate bill, and without a majority government controlling committee votes, S-209 might grab the Parliamentary spotlight sometime in the next year.
The bill was once denounced by Michael Geist as “the most dangerous Internet bill you never heard of.” Canadian privacy activist David Fraser has a YouTube video that parses the legalities of the legislation, salted with some unlawyerly insults of the bill’s supporters.
The kind of things you will hear in opposition to the bill include:
- Age verification technology may not protect privacy and we should rely on parental, not state, regulation.
- Site blocking injunctions may go beyond “de minimus” intrusions on non pornographic content and usher in fast and loose censorship of the Internet.
- Regulating porn is for Puritans, “finger waggers and pearl clutchers.” (Fraser’s words)
It’s also important context that age verification for porn bleeds into broader policy issues.
Other countries are further ahead of Canada on age verification for porn sites, in multiple American state jurisdictions as well as the United Kingdom. The US Supreme Court just ruled it constitutional.
But age verification is also the enforcement mechanism for legislation that goes beyond access to porn to viewing all sorts of social media content deemed harmful, so opponents see S-209 as the proverbial slippery slope. The Americans and the British are well underway with this and Canada’s federal justice minister is contemplating the revival of the Liberals’ own online harms bill.
These kinds of debates echo the big question that you’ve read about here and elsewhere for the past five years: is policy based regulation of content over the Internet acceptable, or is the wild and free Internet untouchable?
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This blog post is copyrighted by Howard Law, all rights reserved. 2025.
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