Debates of Oct. 28th, 2026

Safe Social Media Act

[Pauline Rochefort, Liberal, Nipissing—Timiskaming, ON]

Madam Speaker, that is a fairly long question that has been posed and that is why I am proposing that this bill go to committee. It should be studied and discussed. I think that is exactly the type of question that is very valid and should be brought up at the committee level.

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time with my colleague from Brampton West.

Our need to provide better safeguards to protect children online is real. In fact, just to illustrate this point, one in four Canadian youth aged 12 to 17 has experienced some sort of online harm. Police reported online sexual exploitation reached 16,905 incidents in 2024, and this rate has risen under the Liberal government 347% in the last decade. Parents are trying to provide some safeguards for their kids online, but they are also asking for our help. Any approach that we take to provide these safeguards should support parents while also protecting both their rights and their children's rights, and parents' right to determine how their child becomes a digital citizen while ensuring that environment is safe and also looking at the privacy and speech rights for Canadians.

The question that we should be looking at in this House is not whether we should act, but how and whether this bill is sufficient or if it is asking us to undertake measures that devolve powers that we as parliamentarians have, for vague assurances that really deserve answers from the government.

I have a lot of questions with this bill, and I am going to start with the matter that we were just debating in the previous section, which is the ban on social media accounts. My first question relates to the best practice that we have already seen as Australia has rolled out similar provisions. We have seen that most kids at the age of 16 still had accounts months later. Harm complaints did not meaningfully decline. In fact, teens turned to VPNs, shared family log-ins or simply lied about their age. The ban did not actually do anything.

With regard to this aspect of Bill C-34, the questions I would have are the following. If a teenager is pushed off a large platform that has a well-established trust, safety team and system, where do they go, because they are going to go somewhere, and has the government been seized with this question, particularly knowing that other jurisdictions have already had this experience? Are they going to smaller, unmoderated corners of the Internet where their parents cannot see them and has the government thought about whether this measure may push vulnerable kids somewhere darker on the Internet? How will the government measure to know whether this is working? The government has been silent on these issues.

This deserves much more scrutiny because of how the bill proposes that the ban would work. A platform could apply to the new commission that is proposed in the bill for an “exemption” if it shows “adequate safeguards”. Adequate by what standard, set by whom and when? The bill is silent on these things. If the largest platforms could win exemptions, is this a ban or is it a negotiation between a regulator, not elected officials, and big tech held outside of this chamber? I have a problem with that. If safeguards exist that are good enough to earn an exemption, why not write them in law for every platform today? These are questions the government has not answered, and I suspect that it is facing internal questions within its caucus on this issue as well.

Bill C-34 sets out the general types of services it would cover, social media, livestreaming, adult content platforms and AI chatbots, but the exact test for which specific services count as a regulated social media service is left to regulations to be written later. Parliament is being asked to pass a bill before knowing where that line falls. That decision would be made by cabinet, not by this House, so we are being asked to devolve that power. In fact, the ban itself would not be automatic through this law. It would only apply to the platforms that cabinet later chooses to name in regulation. We should probably be having that debate in Parliament.

Additionally, many types of the severe dangers children face online, like grooming and sextortion, happen on gaming platforms and chat services. Would those be covered under this bill? It does not seem like it. The government may say that cabinet can add new categories of services, but why is that being left to regulation? Why are we not having that debate now? I would like to know why the government is silent on this and if it is being silent for a reason. Is it because of lobbying or is it because existing safeguards are good enough or it does not think that it can make privacy work or because the bill is not technology agnostic? Those are all questions that the government should be able to answer.

The bill is also quiet on how age verification would be done. Those details would also be left to regulations, and that raises big questions for me. Will Canadians be asked, for example, to provide a driver's license to access social media? Australia's law specifically says that no one can be forced to hand over a government ID to prove their age, yet the bill is silent on that matter.

Bill C-34 is also silent on the use of third party vendors, which platforms often hire to run age verification checks. How would the government make sure that those vendors do not reuse that data, and how would an operator destroy that data while also keeping the records the bill requires to prove it complied? Protecting kids should never, ever require every adult to hand over their identity to the government, and the bill is silent on these matters.

Much scrutiny needs to be paid to the amount of regulatory power that the bill would hand over to a body that does not yet exist. Independent analysts have counted roughly 50 major decisions left to cabinet and the new commission after Parliament votes on the bill. Questions like which services are covered, what age verification is adequate, what counts as safe design, how complaints are judged and who gets an exemption remain unanswered.

These questions deserve answers, because these make up the substance of the law. When Parliament passes this frame but leaves the substance of what could amount to limitations on speech and privacy to regulation, we are opening the door to a process where well-resourced tech lobbyists and unelected bureaucrats would have a seat at the table and parliamentarians who are elected to make these decisions would not, and these are not minor decisions. The commission outlined in the bill would be the rule-maker, investigator, enforcer and judge. It would have a wide variety of powers that it could use to compel information, and its members would be appointed by cabinet, so these would essentially be political appointees. Also, until enough are appointed, the chairperson alone could make these decisions, and that deserves further scrutiny and debate as well.

Would these regulations come back to the House or a committee before they take effect? I do not think they would. I think that deserves scrutiny. The only review in the bill would be done by the minister, not by a committee of the House, and not until three years after it would take effect.

There are so many other questions. Where would a small operator go if it is fined? Why should unelected bureaucrats, rather than members accountable to Canadians, set the boundaries of online safety? There are ways that we could be having that discussion here today, but the government has again chosen to try to get us to devolve powers to regulators without answering some pretty fundamental questions around efficacy, like whether this would actually work and keep kids safe online and whether it would protect speech.

I have tried to stand in this place like Cassandra, for years, saying that we have a problem, and the government has been slow to act. As an individual member, I have spent years writing legislation. I tabled a revised bill, Bill C-216, which had a prescribed legislative duty of care for online operators. It is more tech-agnostic and also more clear in terms of what the powers are. It would also give more options to parents on how they curate their children's digital experience as they become digital citizens. Also, Bill C-216 is designed to keep pace with technologies like artificial intelligence, and I have questions about whether Bill C-34 can do that.

The last thing I will say is that my bill would clearly protect privacy. It would require operators to use age detection technology that they already use to target ads, with further privacy safeguards, rather than collecting IDs, and it would expressly prohibit using a digital ID.

I am wondering why the government took this approach, which has failed in previous legislation, and once again listened to bureaucrats. We know that parents need these safeguards, but given that the government has presented a bill that deserves so much scrutiny, I worry that it is going to lead to constitutional challenges down the road from regulations that perhaps have not been fully scrutinized here.

The government has a lot of explaining to do. There is a lot of detail that needs to be filled in by the government to ensure that kids are kept safe online and that Canadians' privacy and speech are protected.

[Steeve Lavoie, Liberal, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for her important speech on this bill, which is also important.

I listened carefully to her speech and I noticed that she repeated “why” a lot. I do not know how many times she repeated that word. That immediately made me think of the status quo. People often ask why we are not doing this or why we are not doing that. Some parents are saying that enough is enough with the status quo and that we need to move forward. Parents watching at home, who, like me, have seen how much things have changed in recent years, are concerned. They want the government to make decisions and move forward. Often, when we ask “why” too much, years go by and nothing gets done.

Does my colleague agree that the government should be able to help parents? Does she agree that this bill needs to move forward so we can develop guidelines to help parents properly raise their children?

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Madam Speaker, I will counter my colleague with this: Why did the government not use my bill, which I wrote as a private member, in spite of it having 800,000 bureaucrats who could have done the job for it years ago? Why is the government so insistent on putting detail-free bills in the House of Commons? Why does the government presuppose that, in order to protect kids online, Canadians have to go forward without answers to questions?

I put forward a bill almost three years ago that answered the questions I asked today. The government could have stolen that bill. I had hoped it would. I have said that many times. The reality is that the government did not, and we are sitting here today because it has put forward bad iterations of legislation that Canadians have opposed.

Canadians want their kids kept safe online. They know that the government has dragged its feet in putting forward legislation that does that. I think it is incumbent upon the government to answer questions on whether or not this bill will actually work and whether it will keep Canadians' speech and privacy safe online.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Madam Speaker, I understand the member believes that her private member's bill is perfect legislation, that there is absolutely nothing wrong with it and that it should have received royal assent by now. Having said that, I think it is a universally held belief among all members of Parliament of all political stripes that there is a need to take some action.

Yes, the bill does not provide all the details the member talked about in her comments, but today we are dealing with the principle of the legislation. Many of the questions she has posed will be answered once the bill gets to the committee stage. We are not going to incorporate all the things the member has put on the record in a piece of legislation and then present it. It would be a 1,500-page bill if we listened to the member's comments.

Does the member support the principle of having a commission?

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

I do not know about you, Madam Speaker, but I sure do not like it when a man tells me what I said when I did not say it. I am sure you would sympathize with that.

What I have said in the past is that my bill was a starting point three years ago, and it is not 1,500 pages; it is about 30 pages. It clearly outlines the duty of care that online operators would have.

What the Liberals and the minister are saying is that all of the hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats we have could not possibly have written a bill that tells Canadians exactly what the bill would do. They could not possibly have done that. They are asking Parliament to devolve the power we have to unelected bureaucrats who would be making these decisions at the table with tech giants. That is what they are asking for, and I am saying no.

The residents of Calgary Nose Hill want answers. I am asking these questions because it was entirely possible for the government to have a bill that had answers in it.

The member is wrong and he knows it. He has been around long enough. I will not have that man try to say that I said something that I did not. That is preposterous. However, I will demand answers on behalf of my constituents, because this matters and we have to get it right. If we do not answer these questions, we will not.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Madam Speaker, does the member, in principle, support the need to have a commission that would be able to ensure there are fines and that there is a higher sense of accountability on the Internet to protect the children of Canada?

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Madam Speaker, I am just going to look at the bill. The proposed commission would have sweeping powers with little accountability. It would serve as a super-regulator. It would act as rule-maker, investigator, enforcer and prosecutor, and have hearings in secret. I want to know what that means, and it deserves a lot of scrutiny. The government should have put that in the bill.

[Amarjeet Gill, Conservative, Brampton West, ON]

Madam Speaker, I am proud to rise today on behalf of the people of Brampton West to speak to Bill C-34, the safe social media act.

We all know that our children are our future. They are our greatest responsibility. They are counting on us to guide them, protect them and give them the tools to succeed, not just in our classrooms or in our communities, but in the digital world as well.

Protecting our children online is not optional; it is our responsibility. As Conservatives, we believe that protecting children and respecting fundamental freedoms must go hand in hand. That is why Bill C-34 deserves serious, thoughtful examination, not political slogans or another layer of bureaucracy, but real answers, real accountability and, most importantly, real protection for Canadian children.

Let me ask a simple question: Who is protecting our children when they go online? Is it parents? Is it technology companies? Is it the government? Are we leaving our children to navigate a digital world that even adults struggle to understand? These are the questions being asked by families in Brampton West and across Canada, as well as by teachers in our schools and grandparents worried about their grandchildren. Their concerns are legitimate because families want their children to grow up safe, healthy and confident.

Today, as we debate Bill C-34, I believe we must keep one principle at the centre of our discussion: Children deserve protection, parents deserve a meaningful voice and powerful technology companies must answer serious questions about the safety of their platforms.

The evidence of the dangers our children face online raises serious concerns. According to Statistics Canada, approximately one in four Canadian youth aged 12 to 17 has experienced cyber-bullying. In 2024, police reported 16,905 incidents of online child sexual exploitation. That represents an increase of 347% compared to 2014. Behind every statistic is a child: a son, a daughter or a student. Behind many of these children are parents who are worried, overwhelmed and searching for answers.

Technology has changed and childhood has changed, but our responsibility to protect children remains intact. We all recognize the benefits of technology. It supports education. It creates opportunity. It allows young Canadians to learn, innovate and succeed. However, what happens when the same technology becomes a source of exploitation, intimidation or emotional harm? What happens when a child becomes the target of cyber-bullying? What happens when an AI chatbot encourages harmful behaviour instead of directing a child toward help? Who takes responsibility when something goes terribly wrong?

Canadians remember the heartbreaking story of Amanda Todd, a young life lost after experiences of sextortion and cyber-bullying. Her story reminds us that what happens online can have devastating consequences in the real world. We owe it to children like Amanda to ask difficult questions and demand meaningful answers.

There is another serious concern: the way these digital platforms are designed. Autoplay videos, constant notifications and algorithms that recommend more and more content are features designed to keep users engaged, but are they designed with children's well-being in mind? When a teenager watches one troubling video, should an algorithm be allowed to recommend dozens more? When a child is struggling emotionally, should a platform prioritize engagement over safety? When companies have the technology to identify dangerous patterns, what responsibility should they have to intervene? Should the safety of children ever come second to corporate profits? These are questions Parliament must examine, and big tech companies must be prepared to answer them.

I also want to speak directly about parents. Parents are doing their best. They set rules, monitor devices and encourage responsible behaviour, but parents are facing a digital environment that changes almost every day, with new applications, new algorithms and new AI systems. How can a parent control an algorithm they cannot see? How can a parent stop a stranger from contacting their child through a platform they do not operate? How can parents protect their children when companies control the technology, the data and the design? Parents should never be left fighting billion-dollar technology companies on their own, but neither should government replace parents as the primary decision-makers for their children. This is an important distinction.

A recent survey found that 75% of Canadians support banning social media for children under age 16, yet 72% believe that parents should hold primary responsibility for regulating their children's social media use. What does that tell us? Canadians want stronger safeguards, but they also want parental authority respected. They want government to establish reasonable protections. They want technology companies to be held accountable.

The question is whether Bill C-34 would provide the right mechanisms to deliver on Canadians' demands. For example, the bill proposes age verification or age examination requirements, but how would those systems work? Would Canadians be required to upload government-issued ID? Would companies collect sensitive biometric information? Who would store the information, and where? Who would have access to it, and what would happen if that information is stolen?

There is also the question of effectiveness. Bill C-34 proposes restrictions on social media accounts for children under the age of 16, but what would happen if teenagers find ways around those restrictions? What would happen if they use VPNs? What would happen if they move to smaller, less regulated platforms? Could well-intentioned restrictions unintentionally push vulnerable children toward more dangerous environments? How would the government measure success? Would success means fewer accounts or fewer children being bullied, exploited and harmed?

We must also examine the role of AI. AI chatbots are becoming part of everyday life. Young people use them for homework, for information and sometimes for personal advice, but what safeguards exist when a vulnerable child turns to a chatbot during an emotional crisis? How would companies identify risk? How quickly would they have to respond? How would Parliament ensure that these protections keep pace with rapidly changing technology? These questions deserve clear answers.

Another issue is government accountability. Bill C-34 proposes a digital safety commission with significant regulatory and enforcement powers. How would its powers be limited? Who would oversee its decisions? What safeguards would prevent regulatory overreach? What opportunities would Canadians have to challenge decisions? How would Parliament ensure that unelected regulators remain accountable to the people? Effective legislation requires clear rules, clear responsibilities and meaningful oversight.

As we examine Bill C-34, I want to leave the House with a few final questions. Would we be putting the safety and well-being of children at the centre of our decisions? Would we be giving parents a meaningful role and practical tools to protect their families? Would we be asking the right questions of powerful technology companies about the risks created by their platforms? Would we be protecting the privacy, rights and freedoms of Canadians while addressing genuine online dangers? Last, would these measures being considered actually make children safer? These questions deserve careful study. They deserve evidence. They deserve input from parents, educators, experts and young people.

Let me conclude with this. Our children deserve more than promises, and Canadians deserve more than another government announcement. They deserve answers, accountability and results. Our responsibility is clear: Our children deserve safety, and our parents deserve a voice. It is time to protect our children, empower our parents, hold big tech accountable and respect Canadians' freedoms.

[Rechie Valdez, Liberal, Minister of Women and Gender Equality and Secretary of State (Small Business and Tourism)]

Madam Speaker, Daughter Project Canada is “working to end the sexual exploitation of children and youth through awareness, prevention and advocacy.” Its website states that one in 10 children in Canada is sexually victimized before they turn 18 years old. This is an urgent situation.

The member talks about how the platforms should be held accountable. Through this legislation, we would be standing up the digital safety act, and then of course the digital safety commission of Canada act, which would ensure that we are able to regulate these services. I would like the member to share his thoughts on that.

[Amarjeet Gill, Conservative, Brampton West, ON]

Madam Speaker, as I said in my speech, these are the concerns we need to consider very carefully, and we need to consider a full examination of the things we are going to put forward, because we know and understand that every child matters. It is very important for us, as Canadians and as parliamentarians, to bring forward laws that are going to help Canadians and to hold people accountable for such crimes.

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Madam Speaker, the minister asked my colleague a question about keeping kids safe online, yet we know there are platforms where a big bulk of the stats she mentioned occurred and that would not be covered under this bill, such as Roblox, for example, and other online gaming platforms. Conservatives delivered a bill that would have had much more robust coverage and be technology agnostic.

I wonder if my colleague understands why the government has put forward such a detail-free bill if it wants to keep kids safe online. Why would it leave all these regulations to be negotiated by rich tech company lobbyists and not by parliamentarians?

[Amarjeet Gill, Conservative, Brampton West, ON]

Madam Speaker, my colleague's questions are wonderful, because that is exactly what Parliament must examine. Technology companies have enormous resources. They control algorithms, platforms and user data, but are they investing enough in protecting children? If big tech companies can design algorithms to maximize profit, should they not be expected to design safeguards that prioritize children's safety? That is the question Canadians deserve to have answered. That is what we have to provide to all Canadian families and all children so we can better protect our children in the future.

[Steeve Lavoie, Liberal, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

Madam Speaker, many people are living in the past, but parents today are dealing with these issues in the present, and they need help now. What I heard from my colleague is that he has genuine concerns and legitimate questions about how to protect children and help parents do just that.

Will my colleague vote in favour of the bill so that we can move forward, address these issues, act swiftly and as soon as possible, and provide support to parents as they raise their children?

[Amarjeet Gill, Conservative, Brampton West, ON]

Madam Speaker, multiple times, I have said that the Conservative Party and I will support anything that is going to help Canadians. This is what we have shown in Parliament as well.

The problem I am seeing right now is that parental rights and government responsibility are two different things. To answer the member's question, parents must remain the primary decision-makers for their children, but how can they protect their children from algorithms they cannot see and technologies they cannot control? The government must support parents, not replace them.

[Danielle Martin, Liberal, University—Rosedale, ON]

Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time this evening with the member for Toronto—St. Paul's.

It is a privilege to rise this evening to participate in this important debate about Bill C-34, the safe social media act.

As a member of Parliament representing an urban riding where social media has had a profound impact on every aspect of city life, as the mother of a teenager who lived through the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic just as she should have been building her in-person community, and as a family doctor who cared for people whose lives were changed both for the better and for the worse by digital tools, I support this bill and want to thank the minister for the extensive and thoughtful work that has gone into its development.

The use of social media has completely transformed all our lives, and many platforms have played and will continue to play positive roles in our communities. For a person trying to connect with others affected by the same rare disease they struggle with, for a community seeking to organize in support of a charitable cause, or for a friend group trying to gather to discuss its next favourite book, social media platforms have offered ways for people to connect with one another and to build community.

However, we also all know that to leave platforms unregulated is to put our kids in harm's way. The activity on these platforms can teach young people to hate others. It can teach them to hate themselves. Platforms can offer a window for predators engaging in human trafficking and violence, and they can stunt the development of the very skill they are ostensibly designed to support: the skill of socializing with other human beings.

Leaving these platforms unregulated amounts to putting our children at risk. We owe it to our communities and to our children to demand better from platforms that enable harmful activities and use algorithms that jeopardize mental health. In communities across the country, parents are concerned about the impact of social media on their children's health and well-being. They are asking us to take action, and we have a responsibility to listen to them.

At its core, the purpose of Bill C-34 is to protect Canadians in online spaces. It would ensure that social media services and AI chatbots are safe by design. The major pieces proposed in the bill include a ban on social media for people under the age of 16 until a service can prove that it is safe, a new digital safety commission that would ensure that these platforms are held accountable and are working for Canadians, and the ability to remove harmful or victimizing content quickly.

While everyone came to the conversation with their own experiences and perspectives about what getting it right looks like, just as we are hearing in the House tonight, there were some very clear messages that I took home with me. First, we need to make sure that platforms are held accountable for the harms they enable. Second, we need research and evidence in order to understand whether our protections are working, and the generation of that evidence must be ongoing. Third, we need to make sure that, in protecting children, we do not take away access to the safe spaces and communities our young people depend on. I want to touch briefly on each of these.

With respect to harms, it is clear that social media platforms as currently used have negative impacts on the health, mental health and well-being of our children and youth, and there is a very wide range of evidence to support this statement. We have heard some of it in the debate today already. The Media Technology Monitor research report of 2023 reported that one in five teens has experienced bullying or harassment online. StatsCan, in 2023, found that anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation increase with more frequent use of online platforms.

As many parliamentarians have, I have really engaged with my community on the subject of making the online space safer for our kids. People feel very strongly about it, and they want to make their voices are heard. As part of that engagement process, over the summer, I held a round table on the proposed bill in my community of University—Rosedale, along with my colleague, the member for Taiaiako'n—Parkdale—High Park.

Participants in that round table included the leadership of organizations such as Kids Help Phone, experts from SickKids Hospital, academics, parents, local community organizations, and importantly, youth. We heard from dedicated professionals who work directly with children, from experts studying the impacts of social media and AI chatbots, and from people who understand how these platforms are designed and how they are operated. The feedback was clear: Canadians support this bill, and they want to make sure it is done right.

There are negative impacts on girls and women in particular from the unregulated use of deepfakes and sexual violence online. There is proof that these apps are enabling human trafficking and targeting vulnerable people. Social media apps are being used to track and target youth and kids for the purpose of committing violence and for the purpose of social exclusion. I think we have all heard these stories, and the experts at our round table spoke compellingly to these harms. The bill would establish the mechanisms for holding these services accountable.

As outlined in the bill, we would have three core duties for social media services. The duty to act responsibly would require regulated services to assess and mitigate risks linked to harmful content. The duty to protect children would require services to build age-appropriate safeguards into the design and operation of their products. The duty to make certain content inaccessible would require faster removal and action on the most serious victimizing content, such as child sexual exploitation material and intimate content that is communicated or posted without consent.

Further to that, because I know we have heard this evening that we need to have detail, we would have the ability to instruct services to regularly identify and assess certain risks, to mandate transparency in chatbot services and to require services to transparently inform the new digital safety commission of their policies for referring conversations to the RCMP and to emergency services in case of threats to seriously harm others. As a health care provider, that is one I feel particularly strongly about. There would be an obligation on the part of the services to publish a digital safety plan. If these services can prove that they are safe spaces, we can have a conversation. We can work together.

One of the things we need to recognize is that these harms do not always come from what we or our kids believe to be safe and innocent spaces. The online world is constantly changing, and this is one of the reasons why having a regulator is so important. We cannot legislate for every possible future. A platform that might look like a new place to have fun, play games or share pictures can suddenly become a place where young people are exposed to harmful content, contacted by strangers or targeted by people who want to take advantage of them.

During our round table, we heard concerns about platforms that may not be traditionally thought of as social media, including gaming platforms, where some of these same risks can exist. We need to look at how these platforms actually function, how they are used and what risks they create for children and youth. We cannot rely only on what a platform says it is designed to do. We need to look at what is actually happening to the people who use it when they are on these apps or these sites, and we need to be continuously keeping up with that technology, which is why passing legislation is only one part of this work.

We also need to understand whether the protections we put in place are actually making a difference. This was the second take-home from our round table, that we must invest in research to monitor the impacts of these measures and the ongoing identification of the gaps. We need to study what young people are experiencing online, ongoingly, and learn from other countries. In other words, our policies must be informed by evidence. We must contribute to that growing body of evidence in this field, which is quite new to the human experience.

This brings me to the last lesson I learned at our round table, which is, at its core, about not overcorrecting. I heard from Kids Help Phone that the online universe can, at times, be the only safe space for many kids and youth who have nowhere else to go. For a young person who has questions they cannot safely ask the adults in their life, for a child who is not safe in their own home, we need to be thoughtful about ensuring that we do not close the doors a child may knock on to ask for help.

Our aim must be to make digital spaces safer, without depriving vulnerable young people of the connections and resources they need.

Bill C-34 has emerged from the grassroots of our communities. As a government, it is our job to listen to parents, youth and experts, and to hold accountable powerful companies who have not seen it as their job to protect our kids. Bill C-34 is Canada's response to that reality, and I am proud to support it.

[Amarjeet Gill, Conservative, Brampton West, ON]

Madam Speaker, the hon. member mentioned mental health, anxiety and other harms that are happening to our kids and our children. Parents have the greatest responsibility for protecting their children, but parents cannot control hidden algorithms or the decisions high-tech billionaire companies are taking with regard to these platforms that are available to everyone.

How would Bill C-34 empower parents so that they can protect their children?

[Danielle Martin, Liberal, University—Rosedale, ON]

Madam Speaker, of course parents have primary responsibility for their children. We also know that parents are no match for these tech giants whose strategies are evolving every day. It is important that we have regulation of those companies and that we hold them accountable. There needs to be ongoing public education for children and youth, parents, teachers and caregivers, as well as the people who are coaching our kids in sports and beyond in our communities, so that we all know how to recognize the signs that a kid is in trouble, whether it is in the digital world or in the real life world, as we say.

[Lisa Hepfner, Liberal, Hamilton Mountain, ON]

Madam Speaker, I also held a couple of round tables on the safe social media act. Some of the people who participated in my round tables were public health medical professionals. I know that the member has a similar background. What they really zeroed in on was the mental health weight on young people today. They are seeing this play out in communities.

Perhaps the member would take a moment to expound on that a bit more. I know she touched on it already in her speech.

[Danielle Martin, Liberal, University—Rosedale, ON]

Madam Speaker, indeed, mental health is one of the major reasons this bill is so critical at this time. We certainly saw a massive spike in mental illness and distress among young people coming out of the pandemic and since then as social media has infiltrated people's lives. As I mentioned in my speech, many of these algorithms are feeding information to our kids that makes them hate others and, very worryingly, hate themselves. This is an area where we really need clear intervention.

I will also say, as I learned at our round table, it is important to recognize that there are circumstances in which the ability to have online access to good information and safe spaces can be life-saving for kids who are not safe at home. It is important that we have a balanced approach, which is why an expert regulator would be so critical in us getting this right as a country.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Madam Speaker, I have been struggling with Bill C-34 since it was first introduced. I think the minister is terrific. I know the intent of the bill is great, but it is a lot of blank space. One part that really worries me is clause 85, which I will read. It is short. It says, “The purpose of a penalty is to promote compliance with this Act and not to punish.”

In the case of criminal responsibility and people who have fallen on hard times, I do not think our criminal justice system should focus on punishment. In dealing with these corporations, I want to kill them. I would like to pull their corporate right. I am not acting as a policy wonk here. I am an enraged mother. I want to punish them. Why does this bill not suggest strict liability? Why does it not suggest that a CEO whose company engages in a proven harm, such as Amanda Todd's death, go to jail?

[Danielle Martin, Liberal, University—Rosedale, ON]

Madam Speaker, I think the member's enraged state reflects how many parents in this country feel. Of course we want to see tech giants held accountable. Particularly where catastrophic outcomes occur, there have to be appropriate consequences.

I do not know if we need to necessarily go as far as that, as killing the CEO, or whatever the member said, but the purpose of any regulation is—

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Alexandra Mendès), Alexandra Mendes]

There is a point of order from the hon. member for Saanich—Gulf Islands. I believe she wants to make a correction.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Madam Speaker, on a point of order, I would like to clarify that, in law, the term would be “involuntary dissolution”. A corporate entity is not a natural person, but it may get the powers of a natural person.

I am a pacifist. I do not want capital punishment for human beings. I want it for corporations.

[Danielle Martin, Liberal, University—Rosedale, ON]

Madam Speaker, I understand. All jest aside at this late hour of the evening, I think we all understood that the purpose of the member's question was to see corporations held accountable. That is what we all want.

The purpose of regulation is compliance. We have to be in a situation where companies are held to account and brought into compliance so that our kids can be safe online.