Canada’s long-anticipated and dreaded Bill C-34 arrived on June 10 with the usual fanfare about protecting children.
We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.
Marc Miller, the Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture, tabled it.
Strip off the press release and what is left is a law that lets an appointed federal body order Canadians’ posts deleted across the country, decide which platforms can give an account to a 15-year-old, and tell AI chatbots to watch what you type.
It also bans Canadians under 16 from social media by charging the whole country for it, in the currency of everyone’s privacy.
The government calls it the Safe Social Media Act. Safe for whom is the question it would rather you not dwell on.
The law creates a Digital Safety Commission of Canada. Cabinet appoints its three to five members. The same body writes the rules, runs the inspections, hears the complaints, and hands out the fines, which is a regulator and a courtroom folded into one office that answers to no voter.
Everything hangs on a phrase the bill declines to nail down, “harmful content.” There are seven categories, among them “content used to bully a child” and “content that foments hatred.”
The drafters did take the trouble to say content is not hateful merely because it “discredits, humiliates, hurts or offends,” which is more care than these laws usually take.
It also changes very little because the people drawing the line day to day are the platforms, working from rules the Commission can rewrite whenever it wants. The edge of what a Canadian is allowed to say can shift without anyone in Parliament casting a vote.
So here is how a deletion goes. A platform decides it has “reasonable grounds to suspect” your post is child sexual abuse material or an intimate image shared without consent.
From that moment it has 24 hours to make the post inaccessible to every person in Canada. Down first, explained afterward. You can file representations and request a reconsideration, and your words stay gone the entire time you are waiting. Or someone skips you altogether and reports the post to the Commission, which can order it made “permanently inaccessible.” No judge appears anywhere in that sequence.
The definitions get bigger the longer you look at them. “Intimate content communicated without consent” now reaches AI images “likely to be mistaken for” a real recording of a person.
As a ban on revenge porn; reasonable, depending on how it’s implemented. But as written, those same words also cover a tasteless deepfake of a sitting politician, and the person sorting one from the other works for the company that gets fined either way.
Companies do not agonize over that distinction. They delete and move on.
Hellbound and Down 