Canadian Heritage Committee on Dec. 1st, 2025

[Kerry Diotte, Conservative, Edmonton Griesbach, AB]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

My first question is for Richard Robertson with B'nai Brith.

You probably are quite aware of the attack that happened at Edmonton City Hall. There were shots fired, and a Molotov cocktail was used. RCMP said that the young man was politically motivated, and he's been charged with terror offences.

Can you tell me a little bit about that attack and if you've noted his influences? What influenced him in particular?

[Richard Robertson]

We're seeing increasingly young Canadians who are influenced by the various forms of what is called violent extremism—political violent extremism, religious violent extremism, ideological violent extremism. In this current case, it's political violent extremism that seems to have been the impetus for the attack.

What we need to look at for the purpose of this study is how these individuals are being radicalized. For a young individual to be targeted online, to be indoctrinated, is something we've never had to grapple with before as a society, and it is a national security threat because, as you correctly pointed out, the ramifications are severe.

For far too long, our security apparatus has been ringing the alarm bells about the need for a whole-of-society approach to confront violent extremism as it is permeating the online environment.

Sadly, that is just one of dozens of examples across Canada of an individual being radicalized online, and but for the good work of our national security apparatus and our law enforcement, we would be seeing far more casualties.

[Kerry Diotte, Conservative, Edmonton Griesbach, AB]

I guess the big question is always this: Canada is a democracy and free speech is sacred, so how do we deal with the harms that can be done to children by social media influencers without curbing free speech?

Would you like to comment on that, Mr. Robertson?

[Richard Robertson]

I'd be happy to.

I'd like to go back to our second recommendation, which is digital literacy.

We can equip our youth to confront the information. Perhaps it's Parliament's purview that spreading misinformation or disinformation is not illegal, but we can prepare youth to be less susceptible to the ramifications of it.

If content is going to be awful but lawful, that doesn't mean that it's not impactful, and our youth are especially vulnerable to the ramifications of such content, so there's a need for us to ensure that Canadian youth are prepared for the information that they're witnessing online.

It's not so much about policing the information that's being spread online. It's about preparing youth so that they're not vulnerable to it and won't be indoctrinated in a negative way.

I'd also like to point out our third recommendation, which involved holding Canada to the commitments it made recently as a result of the meeting of the G7 interior and security ministers. There's work to be done by working with these platforms to root out the unlawful content that is online. Right now it's far too easy for harmful content to continue to exist online in perpetuity. We need to work to ensure that we're removing the awful content and preparing our youth to handle the awful but lawful content.

[Kerry Diotte, Conservative, Edmonton Griesbach, AB]

Thanks for that.

Dr. Jocelyn Monsma Selby, I'm wondering if you followed my question about Canada being a democracy and how we walk that fine line in helping children escape the harms from influencers without curbing free speech.

[Jocelyn Monsma Selby]

I really appreciate the conversation today on the importance of digital literacy and educating children and our general population, because people are so unaware of the dangers of how our social media apps work and the algorithms on everything. However, I think there is a solution if we look at the broader picture. Certain levels need certain solutions.

If we look at individuals accessing the Internet, period—and I've been a part of discussions around sexually explicit material in the adult industry and children accessing it—and all of these issues around children accessing the Internet, the question is, how do we protect children and how do we protect the majority of children.

By singling out certain social media apps or certain adult industry players, we are not protecting the majority of children. I think we need to look at solutions that are very pragmatic, not solutions that are going to favour one particular industry.

When I look at what's going on all over the globe right now, I see age verification popping up in numerous places. It is seen as successful, but as the reports start to come out, you're going to see that it's like whack-a-mole with a lot of these sites. There are so many of them, and you might think that you're getting Meta sites, but then other sites are going to pop up.

I think the issue is, and you're looking at what's happening in Australia—

[The Chair, Liberal, Lisa Hepfner]

Thank you, Dr. Selby. Do you have a final point to make? We're quite a bit over time.

[Jocelyn Monsma Selby]

I'm sorry. I do.

I think we need to look at device-level controls and to implement age verification at that level. When you purchase a device, you enable it for adult content. That is the safest thing for children.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lisa Hepfner]

Well done. Thank you very much.

Mr. Champoux, you have the floor for two and a half minutes.

Oh, I'm sorry, Mr. Myles. I missed you.

[Martin Champoux, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

No problem, I'll just take five minutes in that case.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lisa Hepfner]

Mr. Myles, you have the floor for five minutes.

[David Myles, Liberal, Fredericton—Oromocto, NB]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you very much to all the witnesses. This is a fascinating discussion. I always come in with a certain idea. By the time the discussion is halfway through, I have a bunch more questions.

It seems to me that when we're talking about age verification, and we're talking about comparisons with things like alcohol or gambling, things that are considered mostly bad, part of the challenge here, when we're talking about age, is that we have age limits on those things because of what the understanding is: At what point in someone's life are they able to perceive the risk and understand the risk of the thing they are undertaking? This is my concern with social media. At one level, we can talk about the content that is online, but at the other level, we need to talk about the algorithm itself.

I think Mr. Morisset said something similar, namely that it is not always the content, but rather the algorithm that can be dangerous for children. Perhaps there is a way to share content without the algorithm.

For me, sometimes the idea of sharing content is actually not what concerns me as much as the algorithm itself. We've talked about radicalization. We've talked about the idea of explicit images being put in front of people who are looking for them. We know that's how the algorithm works. I tend to think there's a very big difference between how a television works and how social media works. It is driven by negative response as much as it is by positive response, and the proximity between, as we mentioned as well, comments, which can be really, really harmful for young people.

Monique St. Germain, maybe you can speak to some of the nuances between content and the algorithm itself. Is there a way for us to actually regulate the algorithm?

If anybody else wants to speak about it, that would be great too.

[Monique St. Germain]

Certain types of content, such as child sexual abuse material, everyone agrees will be harmful. No one seems to be disputing that this ought not to be online. That's simple. Where it gets more complicated is when we're talking about content that's perhaps encouraging self-harm or encouraging or contributing to the rise in eating disorders and those sorts of things. That's where we start getting into this trickier space of when it crosses the line. That's where the algorithms can really contribute to the harm. They are pushing more and more of this type of content as opposed to more of the balanced type of exposure you might get if you were truly getting results coming up based on a search that was talking about both sides of the equation.

The algorithms themselves and the way in which they are used to push content, particularly when the user is a young person, that's one thing. That's perhaps an area that could be tackled through regulation. Underpinning all of that, of course, is that we need to know who the young users are, not who they are but that the user is a young user. There are many different ways to go about that, but realistically, because of the way the Internet works, there needs to be a multipronged approach. There can't just be one approach. Device-level is one thing, but there's also the individual websites and the individual platforms, particularly the ones that deliver content that we know young people should not be exposed to, such as explicit pornography and those types of things. Maybe you need to have heightened expectations and requirements in terms of who can access that content and why.

What we're going to start seeing—what we're already seeing—is that in the criminal court context, a lot of younger and younger people are getting involved in the criminal justice system. They are telling the courts they were looking at porn and they had been since they were very young. It's driving a lot of other behaviours. Maybe we can't completely pin it on that—we can't say this causes that—but we can certainly see enough correlations out there that we have to start doing something.

[Farnell Morisset]

I may have something of interest to share with the committee.

One of my friends, who is also a fellow content creator, Sylvain Duclos, is a high school math teacher in Lévis. He started a TikTok channel to offer homework help and explain math concepts. Of course, his target audience was high school students, so they were not 18 years old.

I think this is a very good initiative. We should try to encourage this idea and promote it. It should not be blocked in a cavalier, overzealous manner out of concern for protecting young people.

A few months ago, TikTok launched a separate algorithm with a separate news feed called Steam. This algorithm can identify educational content in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, and then, when someone decides to follow that feed, it redirects them to content similar to that of Sylvain Duclos.

Another friend of mine, Michelle Houde, is a health professional. She creates sex education content that is, at times, perfectly suited and appropriate for teenagers. There is social value there, too.

I am concerned that by casting too wide a net, by wanting to protect children from sexual content, this type of content may also be blocked. I believe that the platforms themselves are the algorithm experts; therefore, they are the best people to talk to.

However, I would simply ask the committee not to assume, out of a desire to protect young people from risky content, that there is no good content for them on social media.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lisa Hepfner]

Thank you.

Mr. Champoux, you have the floor for two minutes and 30 seconds.

[Martin Champoux, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

The potential solutions are really interesting. I am learning a great deal from this discussion.

Right now, we're talking about responsible and positive use of social media. TikTok is generally perceived as the big bad guy, because it's likely the most widely used social media platform. It may have an undeserved bad reputation, but it is often the platform with the most problematic content, so to speak. However, knowing that there are initiatives like the ones we've just discussed, I believe we need to protect them. We need to take that into account in our recommendations.

I personally think we should include recommendations from today's meeting in the report, as they will shed light on the idea of age verification for access to social media. This could simply involve restricting activities, as Mr. Morisset said earlier, to allow access to content, but not necessarily conversations.

However, in a context where TikTok offers help with math homework, it is a bit tricky to prohibit young people from asking questions. It's a complex situation. If we decide to legislate on this, we have our work cut out for us.

To return to the subject of algorithms, Mr. Morisset, you say that we need to talk to the platforms. Believe me, when we talk to the platforms and mention the word “algorithms”, they draw the shutters and turn out the lights, and there is nothing we can do about it. The conversation is over and people are on the defensive. So, we also need to be able to have this conversation with everyone.

Ms. Labrosse‑Héroux, when you spoke earlier about consuming culture, you said that content creators and influencers are also vehicles of culture. We also need to take them into account when we talk about the need to promote Quebec culture.

The discussion is focusing more on regulation, but how could we use the carrot rather than the stick?

What could we do to encourage content creators to share more artistic and cultural content, such as songs, videos, films and series produced by Quebeckers?

Is there a way to help content creators and convince them to do more to promote our culture?

[Laurence Labrosse-Héroux]

That's a very good question.

The timing is perfect, because this afternoon the Coalition for the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, or CDCE, launched its call for projects needing funding for content creation. This is the first call for projects targeting content creators. Obviously, this project will fund whatever falls within the CDCE's definition of culture, and artists are part of that.

We could also redefine what culture is. For the CDCE, cuisine may not be a cultural element. However, it may actually be culture. These are avenues for reflection to be considered later.

Promoting our culture is already very well established, at least among Quebec content creators. I will speak about the field I am familiar with. There is a strong sense of nationalism and protection of Quebec Canadian culture among francophone content creators, and even when it comes to speaking French. This is already something that is very deeply rooted.

The more official institutions recognize that content creation is part of culture, the more there will be. So there is still a lot of room to welcome content creators, both in Quebec and in Canada. Our market is very small compared to the United States and France, for example, where content creation is 10 times more prevalent than here. So it will come with time.

The more government institutions encourage us to create, the more creators will do so.

[Martin Champoux, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

I'm not making eye contact with the chair because I know she's trying hard to signal that I'm out of time. I would like to believe that if I don't look at her, I can keep on talking.

In all seriousness, thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lisa Hepfner]

Mrs. Thomas, you have five minutes.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Thank you so much.

My first question is for Ms. St. Germain.

I'm wondering if you can explain exactly how the connection happens between organized crime groups and children being lured and exploited online. It hasn't been addressed as head-on as maybe would be beneficial for this committee to hear.

[Monique St. Germain]

There are a lot of reports that we receive through Cybertip.ca. Of course, we know from our work with police that this is a significant issue. There are the individual offenders who target children online in different ways, but there are also groups of what appear to be organized criminal networks operating offshore that are targeting young people. In many instances, they're targeting young males. They pretend to be female and they manipulate them into some sort of a sexual chat where the male child in Canada believes that they are talking to a female peer. As soon as an image or video is created or shared, the person on the other side will turn around and start threatening that they're going to release to friends and family and everyone else.

A lot of times what ends up happening is that the connection happens on a mainstream social media site like Instagram, and then the conversation is moved into a private channel like Snapchat. In fact, Snapchat is implicated in a lot of the reports that are made to Cybertip. Some recent research that we released last week, where half the children who had responded—all of whom were in Canada and had experienced some form of online harm—implicated Snapchat in that. Not all of those kids, of course, were manipulated or part of a criminal network, but this is a big part of what we know is happening.

We also know that the types of tactics that are being used are very scary. They are very aggressive, and the young people who come into our organization for assistance are terrified in terms of what is going to happen next, etc. A lot of these kids are trying to manage these situations on their own, and they only reach out for help when they feel that they have no other options. Some kids talk to their parents, and then their parents come in.

We know that, for people who are going into law enforcement, it's very challenging for law enforcement to investigate these types of scenarios when they come from an outside organized criminal network. There are all sorts of barriers in place for the police in terms of getting the up-to-the-minute technical information that they need. Obviously, the investigation of online crimes is a lot more complicated than it is when you're just going out and interviewing witnesses in the real world. You need the co-operation of the other countries. There have been some developments on that front.

Canada recently signed on to a cybercrime treaty in Hanoi, Vietnam, that a number of other countries signed on to. That should help in terms of the exchange of information. Still, this is a problem that is facing not just Canadian young people. It is facing young people in many developed nations, because a lot of this is driven towards financial extortion. They're out to make money. It's just like we used to see happening to senior citizens, and that's still happening. Young people are seen as a target. Young people in our countries have money, and criminal networks know they do.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

It's basically being used to blackmail these individuals and their families. Is that correct?

[Monique St. Germain]

Yes.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Okay. Thank you very much for helping to explain that.

We have a very short period of time here.

I want to jump into Project Arachnid.

How exactly does that work to take down images, and how do you know for sure those images have, in fact, been removed from online?

[Monique St. Germain]

I'm not the technical person, but essentially it is using technology to detect similar images and videos that we've already assessed and classified. It's like a really smart crawler that as soon as it sees something we've already assessed and classified, it automates the sending of a notice to the platform requesting its removal. It goes back and checks periodically to see if the content has been removed. We measure removal based on the last time we checked: it was there, and this time it's not, and in the intervening period, we sent a notice.

It's a pretty simple concept in that respect. However, it has given us the ability to see how the responses are occurring when we get push-back from companies, what that push-back looks like, what kinds of questions they're asking or the types of platforms this kind of material tends to sit on for long periods of time. We know that file hosts, for example, are implicated quite a lot in the notices we send.