I’ve fallen behind on catching you up on media policy news because I felt compelled to write a series of three posts commenting on the CRTC’s ruling on Canadian content. The last one, the rant I promised, was published this week in Cartt.ca.
While I was ranting, one of the things I let slide was telling you about a new report out of Denmark proposing to refashion its policy design for government aid to news journalism.
The Danes are serious about news subsidies: they spend 540 million krone ($120M CDN) every year on private media in nation of six million people (Canada spends about $200 million in country of 42 million).
According to the Reuters Oxford Digital News Report, Denmark’s “public trust in media” score is 56% and it ranks sixth out of 180 in the Reporters Without Borders’ press freedom index at 86.93. By comparison, Canada’s trust score is 39% with a press freedom index of 78.5, 21st in the world.
The Danes also have something we don’t: a 2018 Media Liability law that established an independent national press council and conferred the force of law on editorial independence from ownership.
The Danish subsidy report was commissioned by government and written by a committee led by Rasmus Nielsen, the former chief of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
Despite the ocean separating us, there are strong parallels between the Danish system of news subsidy and Canada’s jigsaw of federal programs: we have the QCJO subsidy of journalist salaries, the Local Journalism Initiative that funds 700 full time reporters in under-serviced regions across the country, and the Canadian Periodical Fund which supports editorial expenditures by community weeklies.
The untranslated 144-page Danish report covers a lot of ground, but Nielsen’s own English language summary of it captures the essence: a weighted emphasis on supporting news outlets that are regional, local or “independent” (owners of single-titles) rather than mere incumbency as a news organization.
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The Senate deliberations of Senatrice Julie Miville-Dechêne’s Bill S-209, that would require age verification for online pornography is on hold until February while the Senate justice committee deals with other matters.
During the pause, the Canadian Press reports that Meta has joined the fray by lobbying the federal Liberals to step in with their own bill that would shift the age verification responsibility from pornography websites and social media platforms to app stores.
Meta obviously doesn’t run an App Store, as do Google and Apple, and the latter two Big Tech companies are cheesed about what Meta is up to.
Meanwhile, Canadian children continue to be exposed to online pornography featuring choking and slapping. The CP story is well done and informative.
Meta is having a good month of course. It won the anti-trust trial brought by the US Justice Department that claimed Meta was running a monopoly in personal social networking. In the interim five year period between filing and judgment, TikTok greatly improved its market share.
Matt Stoller has a very good analysis of the lawsuit, the trial, the judge, and why he thinks Big Tech will never be slowed down by anti-trust litigation: he says it takes public policy and legislatures to change things.
A test of his theory may happen soon: the trial judge in the Google Ad Tech case will be handing down her decision on whether to dismantle that illegal monopoly in the new year.
Meanwhile a consortium of US school boards just filed a new lawsuit against Meta and several other Tech companies.
Their allegation against Meta in particular is that company documents reveal CEO Mark Zuckerberg squelched evidence of harm to teenage girls while Meta designed lax safety features, including ineffective measures to expel sex traffickers from the platform. Of course, the allegations must be proven in court, probably over several years.
This does raise the question of whether Americans (and Canadians) should count on US courts to adjudicate Big Tech’s excesses by giving full due process and demanding conclusive evidence of the allegations, or whether governments should just cut to the chase, stop litigating whether the harms to kids persist, and legislate a solution.
The National Film Board’s website is recommending “Ghosts of the Sea,” a riveting documentary about the ill-fated Norwegian father-and-son sailors, Peter and Thomas Tangvald.
The filmmaker is Thomas’ half sister Virginia, who settled in her mother’s hometown of Montreal. The father Peter was married seven times and two of his wives died at sea.
I’ll say this: the film offers a visceral take on “intergenerational trauma.”
I think you will enjoy the one hour and 37 minute film and I absolutely guarantee you’ll have strong opinions afterwards.
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In response to the October 30, 2025 post from MediaPolicy.ca, I have some ideas on how Canada could proceed with accomplishing the objectives behind S-209, “An Act to restrict young persons’ online access to pornographic material”, while respecting user privacy and dramatically reducing the chances of a data breach.
Who am I? I’m a Java software developer with over 25 years of experience not only paid to write code, but participate design software solutions, assess requirements, work with product managers, and occasionally lead times. As part of our profession, we’re expected to proactively address potential security vulnerabilities, such as upgrading software libraries before they become outdated, and thus, more likely to be vulnerable.
Prologue:
First of all, I have no fundamental objections to restricting internet porn from minors via an age verification scheme that guarantees anonymity.
My issues with S-209 are how it captures many sites and services that are not primarily for porn, and how it risks violating user security and privacy, especially for those not seeking porn, by storing their age (and possibly identity) proofs on the internet, where they could be breached.
Maximizing Privacy and Limiting Data Breaches:
Any age verification scheme ought to maintain biometric data used as an input exclusively on the client device.
By client device I mean the phone, table, or PC used to access the internet, but on no server on the internet itself. In turn, this client-side software sends proof of the user’s age, in a way that can be authenticated as legitimate, to the site in question. This means no server on the internet would have the biometric data, such as a face scan or government ID.
This doesn’t eliminate risk, but since each piece of user-identifiable data is on one client device at a time, it means a far lesser incentive for bad actors to try to steal such data. That is, it’s far more work for far less benefit than targeting a single server.
Lower Compliance Costs for Sites Hosting Porn:
Any site that’s captured by this law would still have compliance costs, but would be much lower than what is currently proposed under S-209.
The client device vendors (Google, Apple, Samsung, etc) would be responsible for implementing this scheme. They’d be tasked with providing software for the sites in question, and those sites would simply have to install and configure this software in order to complete the verification process.
Blast radius of the law:
In addition, I propose there be clear guidelines for a site to opt out of being captured by this law.
Part of the controversy of S-210 and its current iteration S-209 is the number of sites captured by the statute. This would have included search engines and social media sites, which are light years away from primarily hosting porn but on which porn is hosted to a small degree.
In my opinion, the proposal to exempt search engines is insufficient, since many people including myself largely use AI instead of Google/Bing/DuckDuckGo searches. Also, social media has a whole series of non-porn uses. I believe the vast majority of AI and social media users are not interested in porn, at least, not while using those vehicles.
So what I propose is a way for any site, such as with news under the Online News Act Bill C-18, to opt out of this law by meeting guidelines to not expose porn at all to the users of those sites.
I admit to not having fully considered the mechanisms under which this would, but likely it would involve AI scanning for pornographic images and text. Obviously, it wouldn’t be 100% bulletproof, so sites would have to merely prove a good faith effort to accomplish this. Such sites could then offer premium versions, which would be captured by age verification mandates.
Furthermore, many computing devices are “headless” and quite simply can’t comply with an age verification scheme to access the internet. Among these devices are servers like NAS’s, which must access the internet for updates. There are also minitower PCs, which don’t come with cameras.
Final thoughts:
Many users have zero interest in porn, but are very adamant about accessing the internet anonymously, and are understandably wary of data breaches given the Discord experience in the UK.
Furthermore, many minors have a long list of legitimate reasons to access the internet, AI, and social media while having no interest in porn.
Why risk blocking non-porn seeking minors from accessing the internet, or make it harder for non-porn seeking adults to access the internet?
According to many polls, Canadians are wary of digital ID schemes. On the other hand, many are also rightfully concerned about minors accessing pornography.
The solutions to the stated objectors to the framers of S-209 is a client-based age authentication scheme that maintains biometrics and other age proofs on the client device, and off servers.
It also involves allowing any general site to make porn unavailable to the vast majority of its users and thus opt out of being captured by new porn-gating mandates.
The Senate’s justice committee will soon be voting on Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne’s Bill S-209, an age verification bill for pornography that was launched in the upper house and will eventually make its way to the House of Commons.
The committee was scheduled to stop hearing witnesses and consider amendments on November 5th but hit a snag on October 29th when a representative of the German online regulator told Senators that the Canadian-owned PornHub had not complied with German law, something that appeared to contradict PornHub lawyer Solomon Friedman‘s testimony on October 8th that PornHub would obey a Canadian law as it had elsewhere, specifically mentioning Louisiana and the United Kingdom. The Senate committee is now considering its options which could mean recalling the fiery PornHub lawyer to answer questions again.
Regardless, the bill will likely get to a committee vote in November and then move on to the full Senate where an earlier version was previously endorsed in 2024 as Bill S-210.
The committee debaters, including Senators, seem to be divided into two groups, one for those that are single-minded in their concern about the privacy risks to porn consumers and another for those fed up with the lack of a policy response to the scourge of violent pornography miseducating children about sex.
UBC law professor Janine Benedet, in the bluntest possible language, described porn as a harmful cultural product sold by companies hiding behind an expansive view of the right to privacy:
So far the Senate debate has been preoccupied with adult porn subscribers being outed in a data hack. The policy challenge for the bill is how to avoid, minimize or secure the risk of personal data stolen through hacks, a risk that goes up when Photo ID is required.
That’s why the bill is designed to exploit age estimation as far as possible to dramatically drive down the number of Internet users who would ever have to verify age by submitting ID proof of majority.
Age estimation technology is driven by AI-fueled online surveillance and web scraping: the age-estimating company searches the web or commercially available data for the Internet footprint associated with the viewer’s e-mail address, suggesting either an adult or a child. To the extent that estimation misfires and wrongly concludes the viewer is ineligible as a minor to access porn, the viewer can then submit ID to the age estimator.
The fear of data leaks is an anxiety that can’t be medicated by amending the bill, but likely amendments will be tabled anyway.
Right now, S-209 says that porn sites (which could include social media platforms that allow porn) have to contract with a commercial age verification service that meets federal government standards, including a critical requirement that personal data is digitally expunged as soon as age is verified.
In this regulatory model, thousands of websites or content applications become the age-gaters for porn in partnership with age verification companies. This is how the UK is doing it.
Some US states, like Utah and Texas, have moved the responsibility for age verification further up the chain of online distribution and are hanging the age gating role on apps and content applications (like Meta, X, Google etc.) by making them contract with age verification companies. If age estimation generates false positives and denies age verification to an adult, ID would likely be required.
California has gone one step further up the tech chain. The California bill puts the onus on companies selling device operating systems to require device users to volunteer their age. Perhaps the reason that the state’s Silicon Valley giants endorsed the bill: there’s no ID required at any point.
(An interesting aside, Google’s corporate policy is to use age estimation first, requiring ID if necessary, but only for their own products available in the GooglePlay app store).
The thinking seems to be: the bigger the tech company managing the age estimation task, the better their access to data, and therefore the better their age estimation results.
The downside to moving age verification up the Internet chain is that all adult users of a major online product, like Google Search or Facebook, might be caught in the age verification net, even if they’ve never sought out porn or never will.
Google’s approach to S-209 is generally supportive: it applauds sticking the porn providers with age verification responsibility and opposes PornHub’s view that it’s simpler and less risky to make a few Big Tech companies responsible.
The S-209 amendment that Google is proposing to the Senate is to narrow the scope of porn regulation to online entities that are porn sites by nature, as opposed to most websites, apps and platforms whose overall content is not “primarily intended” for porn. That might let Elon Musk’s X off the hook even though X officially permits porn. (Google’s YouTube does not allow porn, but age-verified adults can find it on Google Search if you disable the SafeSearch default settings. On the other hand, X allows under age children to view pornography if they opt-in).
As drafted, the Bill delegates to a future government regulatory body the line drawing exercise of which online entities with porn content are going to be in or out of the age verification scheme. Age verification could be restricted to conventional porn sites or expanded to a site like X which reputedly is the source of 41% of porn consumption by children.
Critic and law professor Michael Geist told the Senate committee that such an impactful decision on requiring age verification for social media apps or search engines ought to be written right into the legislation, not deferred to a regulator.
Geist does not offer an alternative to S-209 however, other than suggesting the bill be scrapped entirely and the problem of underage consumption of violent pornography punted to a broader Online Harms bill that the government has yet to table.
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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:
Courtesy of SenVu
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 popularsupport 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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Senatrice Julie Miville-Dechêne does not give up easily.
The senator appointed by Justin Trudeau in 2018 is now engaged in her third try to get the pornography-regulating Bill S-209 passed through Parliament before it gets killed off by another election call. Her previous bills died that way: S-203 by the 2021 election and S-210 by the 2025 election. Both times, her Bill passed the Senate but got a frosty reception from the governing Liberals.
Described in MediaPolicy’s post earlier this week, Bill S-209 would introduce age verification technology to force pornography websites to screen out children under 18 years of age so that impressionable kids don’t view, and internalize, violent sexual behaviour. Adult access to pornography remains uncontested.
The issue of children viewing porn is definitely down her feminist alley as the former head of Québec’s Council on the Status of Women, but the Senator works hard and champions many underdog and progressive causes.
In 2022 she and fellow Senator Paula Simons fought relentlessly (but ultimately not successfully) to carve out Canadian YouTubers from the scope of the Online Streaming Act. In vindication, the CRTC later agreed with them and exempted YouTube videos from broadcasting regulation for the foreseeable future.
In 2023 Miville-Dechêne initiated legislation in the Senate that requires Canadian governments and large companies to report on their global supply chains so that the federal government can enforce prohibitions against imports of goods manufactured by forced and child labour. The Liberals played ball on that one and it was sponsored in the House by Toronto MP John McKay and it passed with broad support.
Her pornography bill has already stirred the Kraken of a regulation-free Internet, so if S-209 does make it to a House of Commons Committee in the next few months, expect some debate, especially about age verification technology that could also be used to stop children from opening social media accounts, were the federal government to consider legislating that.
Media Policy: It’s a little unusual for a bill to have the support of the Senate and the opposition parties, but not the government. What can you say about any discussions you have had with the Justice Minister?
Julie Miville-Dechêne: Not much, I had a confidential discussion very late in the game [in 2024] with [former] minister Virani. But let me say that in general, my conversations with Liberals were mind boggling.
I don’t think they knew what pornographic sites have become, hardcore and violent, so our conversation was difficult. It’s not ‘70s era erotica, a form of sexual liberation. They brought up the importance for young people searching for their identity or sexual orientation to have free access to porn sites, as if seeing violent stuff was the path to sexual identity.
There’s a whole generation at risk, we need to get something done. Studies show a correlation between viewing and harm. Kids think this is what sex is all about. The British Commissioner for children did surveys and found that 47% of youth aged 16 to 21 stated that girls expect sex to involve choking.
MP: So the former Prime Minister didn’t see it that way?
JMD: In talking to media in 2024 he called S-210 a Conservative Bill which would do shady things with personal data. It was easier I suppose than to state that the sponsor was a feminist, an independent senator. The Trudeau government never proposed any improvement to the Bill as they do with private member bills that they like. On the other hand, there was support for the Bill from all the other political parties, not just the Conservatives, but the Bloc and the NDP as well.
MP: What was it about the government’s own online harms Bill C-63 that you thought did not adequately address underage access to hardcore porn?
JMD: I was very disappointed. Nowhere in their Bill did it say that, to minimize harms to minors, age verification or age estimation is expected. Nowhere. There was only an indication that digital operators must adopt “age-appropriate design” for their services. That’s not specific enough. In the UK’s Online Safety Act, social media platforms and large search engines must also prevent children from accessing pornography and material that promotes or encourages suicide, self-harm and eating disorders. This has to be kept off children’s feeds entirely. By comparison, the Liberal Bill C-63 was vague and weak.
MP: An important practical consideration for your bill seems to be the effectiveness of age verification and estimation technology. The most recent technology doesn’t require personal information or facial recognition but claims to be able to use videos of human hand movements. Privacy lawyer David Fraser dismisses age estimation as “magic fairy dust technology.” What is the current state of the age verification/estimation technology as you understand it?
JMD: It’s obviously improving fast. I did rely on the expert on privacy matters, Privacy Commissioner Phillipe Dufresne. Because I introduced two similar bills on age verification since 2020, M. Dufresne took it upon himself to research the matter and speak with his counterparts in other countries. He testified on my Bill before the House of Commons Committee and proposed stronger safeguards
I took his advice and I rewrote section 12 of the new Bill S-209 where Parliament instructs the government on what standards it should enforce for age verification technology. The bill says that government can only approve a verification method that is “highly effective,” operated by a third party and not the pornographers themselves, collects solely personal information strictly necessary for age estimation purposes, and requires the destruction of the data once age verification is completed.
We are not re-inventing the wheel here. Germany has been verifying age for a decade on national porn sites and it’s working fine. Around twenty US states are doing age verification Also, age verification is already happening in Canada when gambling, buying alcohol or cannabis over the Internet.
Age assurance technology is getting better. I have added age estimation to age verification in the bill because facial age estimation is now more precise, two years plus or minus, and there are also other emerging technologies like estimation of age through hand scanning which is said to be 98% accurate. No identity card is needed.
As you know, the UK started age verification and age estimation on July 25th of this year and are engaged in five million new age checks. Opponents are claiming it is a disaster because a few sites were blocked without reasons. I would argue that tech platforms are the ones who have to adjust themselves to block only what is in the law. Some might say they are acting upon an interest in the law not working.
MP: Let’s say the technology is not here yet but reasonably close to happening, does this mean the government might not implement this law until cabinet is satisfied with the technology?
JMD: I would say at this point it is more a question of transparency than technology, in the sense that the public should know what government will ask age verifiers to do in terms of privacy before authorizing them to check the age of Canadians. Right now, the bill says it must be implemented in a year after Royal Assent, but I expect that will be discussed in the House review of the Bill.
But Europe and countries like France, Spain and the UK are already in the process of implementing age assurance, why should we be the only country to think the technology is not ready? I think this debate should be put in the context of protecting children as soon as possible, because harm is being done now.
In Canada, on this issue I have support from feminists, Christian groups and worried parents. It goes beyond left-right I think.
MP: Seems so. A Leger poll conducted last year says that public support for your bill is high. But that support might change if administrative overreach ends up including something as mainstream as hot sex scenes on Netflix or HBO. Is the definition of pornography in the bill —“dominant characteristic,” “sexual purpose”— too broad?
JMD: I don’t think it’s that broad. Depiction for a sexual purpose of a person’s genital organs or anal region and breasts must be the dominant characteristic of the film or video. It’s the same elsewhere. In the UK, pornographic material is defined as ‘primarily intended for sexual arousal’. But for movies or series on Netflix, we also have the “legitimate purpose” exemption in section 7 (2) which states that no offense will occur if there is a legitimate purpose related to arts, education, science, or medicine. Movies and television series are generally considered a form of art.
MP: Okay, but I was just watching an HBO show —I would definitely not consider it pornographic in any way—that had a teen aged sex scene, body parts under clothes, and they acted out a spin-the-bottle sex game where the girl choked the boy as he masturbated. Is that “pornography” or is it exempted as “artistic” erotica?
JMD: I don’t think a single scene meets the test of ‘dominant characteristic.’An expert scholar Janine Benedet wrote a brief to the House committee hearing on S-210 that stated: The scaremongering that accompanies any attempt to define pornography in legislation is depressingly familiar. I have over the years heard predictions that any legal interventions in this area would result in the “banning” of works such as Lolita, American Psycho, Fifty Shades of Grey, and now Game of Thrones.
MP:The US Supreme Court just ruled 6-3 in favour of a Texas age verification law not unlike S-209. Even the dissent was limited to the “level of constitutional scrutiny,” meaning how much of an intrusion on free expression or privacy is too much. If that means age verification laws take hold in the US, one will think that it will here too?
JMD: It’s interesting question, because historically, the American courts have upheld the 1st Amendment of their Constitution, the freedom of expression, more strongly than in Canada.
So, the latest decision, last June was an important one: the Texas government had a legitimate interest in preventing minors’ access to porn and the law is appropriately tailored because it permits age verification of users through established methods.
Opponents of age verification will point to the fact that the US Supreme Court is now controlled by a majority of conservatives. True, but in first instance, it was a conservative trial judge who blocked the Texas Law, and in appeal court, the conservative justices were divided for and against age verification. So, it is an oversimplification to say that this is only a conservative issue.
MP: I believe US Supreme Court Justice Alito observed that 15-year-olds are far more tech savvy than their parents?
JMD: He’s right on this. So, you can imagine I was flabbergasted to hear technology expert Michael Geist in a Senate committee stating the responsibility of protecting children from porn with parental controls is solely with parents, like him, not with public authorities. Professor Geist stated: I believed then and believe now that addressing the issue is my responsibility, which includes education, frank conversations and an assessment of whether to use internal blocking tools or filters.
Obviously, not all parents are as knowledgeable as Professor Geist, and this is why the State has long imposed age verification in stores selling alcohol and cigarettes.
MP:Many US states and the UK are looking at age verification for viewing all social media content, not just pornography. What’s your view of that issue?
JMD: There are pressure and policy being brought forward in Australia and France to restrict social media for children and permit only teenagers of a certain age. So yes, it is a trend, not only pushed by the conservatives. I’m still reflecting on the issue. I find it is more complicated than age verification to limit exposure to porn because social media is also a form of socialization for kids. But addiction to social media exists, harm exists, so it is not an easy proposal. A Québec commission recently recommended restricting social media to 14 years and over.
MP: David Fraser is on YouTube describing you personally as “oblivious” to freedom of expression concerns and that supporters of your legislation are “finger waggers and pearl clutchers.” What’s your view of the freedom of expression and privacy interests raised by this kind of regulation?
JMD: I’m not a puritan if this is what he means, far from it. I’m a feminist and I was a public proponent of strong sexual education when I was head of Quebec’s Council on the Status of Women.
I’m a strong believer in freedom of expression. I was a journalist for 25 years, and then the ombud for news and current affairs at Radio Canada, so I have reflected and written on these questions. I don’t believe an age verification for porn sites which takes seconds unduly limits the freedom of expression of adults. It’s a very limited restriction. Adults can still access the sites. Asking an adult to identify themselves in a sex shop has never been seen as a limit to his freedom of expression. I also think no right is absolute. Here, we have to balance the inconvenience of proving you are an adult with protecting all children from harm.
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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 characteristicof 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.
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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