Thank you for the question.
The online harms act would apply to social media services. It proposes three core duties, one of which, as was alluded to earlier, is the duty to protect children. That is fashioned as quite a flexible duty, which would permit the digital safety commission to put in place a number of different kinds of measures or obligations to better protect Canadian children in the online space through the use of age-appropriate design.
The government's view is that this is a sufficiently flexible duty that could accommodate a question of whether there are certain services, for example, that should use age-assurance or age-verification mechanisms. The government's view is that the framework has the appropriate safeguards in place, and there would actually be a regulator with that mandate and the necessary expertise, through consultation with civil society and experts, to do that in an accurate way and in a privacy-respecting way, if that were to be considered.