Mr. Speaker, I am truly honoured to share my time with the minister himself as we begin debate on his safe social media bill. I sincerely thank him and his team for their leadership.
This debate is about young people's safety, but it is also about their rights and their freedom to learn, connect and express themselves. Our responsibility as parliamentarians is to preserve these rights and freedoms while protecting young people from harm.
This debate is about the kind of childhood we want our children to have: a childhood with room to explore, to make friends and to make mistakes without those mistakes necessarily following them for the rest of their life, and a childhood in which their safety comes first.
The numbers tell us how much is at stake. Twenty-three per cent of teenagers aged 12 to 17 spend five hours or more a day on social media, one in seven girls in grades 9 and 10 shows signs of addiction, and 52% of teens report receiving unwanted sexual images, mostly through social media platforms. Statistics Canada reports that the rate of police-reported online child luring rose by 65% in 2024, and that number continues to climb. That same year, cybertip.ca received more than 2,300 reports of sextortion.
I approach this debate of course as a parliamentarian but also as a mother. My daughter is nine years old. She is not on social media yet, but she is curious about technology and always comes home with stories about TikTok that are being shared in the playground, and I know the decisions so many Canadian parents have made already or are wrestling with today are waiting for me just on the other side: when to say yes, how to say no and how to keep her safe.
Parents are being asked to navigate technologies that evolve faster than most of us can follow, built by some of the largest and most sophisticated companies in the world. We tell parents to set better boundaries. We tell children to show more self-control. Well, it is time we told companies designing these platforms to do better. For too long, we have asked families to take on technology giants by themselves. We have asked children to resist products deliberately designed to hold their attention. It is just not a fair fight, and it is time we changed the rules.
The call for change has come from across Canada: grandparents worried about their grandchildren, parents struggling to set boundaries, teachers seeing the pressures in their classrooms first-hand, and pediatricians and emergency room physicians confronting the consequences on a daily basis.
This call to action has come from people in my own community. In Outremont, our riding association submitted a resolution to make 16 the minimum age for having social media accounts and to require the major platforms to enforce that age restriction. I want to thank all members of our association, especially our chair, Jonathan Nuss, for spearheading this resolution with such conviction.
I was very proud to champion the resolution at our Liberal convention in Montreal in April, where party members from across the country overwhelmingly voted in its favour.
Going from the concerns of parents and teachers in our community to a debate here in Parliament is what grassroots politics can achieve. That is what democracy is capable of: people coming together, speaking up and pushing for change, and then change coming right here before the people's House in Ottawa. An Angus Reid Institute poll found that three-quarters of Canadians support a ban on social media use for children under 16. This is not a partisan issue. There is room in the House to disagree about the details. There should also be room to work together to get them right.
I have had the privilege of learning from advocates at the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, SickKids, the Canadian Medical Association, Apathy is Boring, Unplugged Canada, Phone-Free Schools Movement, Raising Awareness About Digital Dangers and many others. Their persistence has helped us come to this moment. We have also listened to teenagers. Many told me that they supported an age limit because being online did not feel like much of a choice anymore. When every friend is on the platform, opting out means being left out. We should listen carefully when young people tell us they want help.
Canada is not acting alone. Australia has already implemented a minimum age of 16 for accounts on social media platforms, and other governments are pursuing stronger protections as well. We should learn from those experiences and build an approach grounded in Canadian rights, Canadian values and our responsibility to children. At the heart of that approach is safety by design. That means looking at how a platform works. What does its algorithm recommend? What keeps a child scrolling for six or seven hours? What happens when a child is in distress, and what protections are in place before something goes terribly wrong?
Infinite scroll is a design choice. Autoplay is a design choice. Recommendation systems are design choices. Safety must be a design choice too.
In practical terms, under the bill before us, platforms subject to the age restriction would be required to take measures to prevent young people under the age of 16 from having an account. The bill also allows companies to seek an exemption if they can demonstrate that they have provided adequate safeguards for the protection of children. The decision would be made by the new digital safety commission of Canada, an independent body that sets the conditions for granting an exemption. Companies would have to provide evidence to convince the commission. We want companies to compete to better protect children, not just to keep their attention for as long as possible. They should use their capacity for innovation to keep young people safe.
AI chatbot services would also have certain obligations, particularly to reduce dangerous behaviours and to intervene in crisis situations. An independent regulator would enforce these obligations and would have the power to investigate, issue compliance orders and impose penalties. This framework is based on clear responsibilities, independent oversight and consequences for non-compliance.
Parliament has important work ahead. We must continue to hear from parents, young people, doctors, teachers, privacy experts and child safety advocates, as well as from the companies that would have to implement these rules. We must protect privacy and freedom of expression and make sure that the rules work in practice. That scrutiny is part of our responsibility, and so is acting. Innovation and accountability can and should go hand in hand. If we can build technology powerful enough to transform society, we can build that technology with children's safety at its core.
My daughter is nine years old. The decisions we make here will help shape the digital world she grows up in. I want her to benefit from technology, but I also want the tech companies building that digital world of the future to take her safety as seriously as I do. That is what every parent wants. That is what we should all want for every child. We are talking here about the next generation of our country.