Adopt Bill S-210
Petitioners ask the House to adopt Bill S-210 to require online age verification for commercial sexually explicit material to prevent young persons' access. The government responds it will reintroduce online harms legislation to protect children.
Why we would sign this petition
- It would mandate age checks on commercial porn, directly reducing young persons’ ability to access explicit material.
- The petition frames the change as addressing public-health and safety harms tied to youth exposure, such as addiction and attitudes that normalize harassment.
- It cites available age-verification technology that can allegedly verify age without breaching privacy, implying the measure is technically feasible.
Why we wouldn’t sign this petition
- Requiring age checks may create privacy and data-security risks if age data are collected or stored, risking breaches or misuse.
- Mandatory blocking or verification can over-restrict lawful adult access and raise free-expression and access-to-information trade-offs.
- The government intends broader online-harms legislation; adopting S‑210 separately could duplicate rules or complicate a unified regulatory approach.
The summary and both sets of reasons are AI-generated from the petition and given equal weight. Claims are the petitioners’ own; consult the official record for the full text.
Official petition
Petition to the House of Commons in Parliament Assembled WE, THE UNDERSIGNED RESIDENTS OF CANADA, draw the attention of the House to the following: Whereas sexually explicit material - including demeaning material and material depicting sexual violence - can be easily accessed on the Internet by young persons; Whereas a significant proportion of the sexually explicit material accessed online is made available on the Internet for commercial purposes and is not protected by any effective age-verification method; Whereas the consumption of sexually explicit material by young persons is associated with a range of serious harms, including the development of pornography addiction, the reinforcement of gender stereotypes and the development of attitudes favourable to harassment and violence - including sexual harassment and sexual violence - particularly against women; Whereas Parliament recognizes that the harmful effect of the increasing accessibility of sexually explicit material online for young persons is an important public health and public safety concern; Whereas online age-verification technology is increasingly sophisticated and can now effectively ascertain the age of users without breaching their privacy rights; Whereas anyone making sexually explicit material available on the Internet for commercial purposes has a responsibility to ensure that it is not accessed by young persons; and Whereas online age-verification was the primary recommendation made by stakeholders during a 2017 study by the Standing Committee on Health. THEREFORE your petitioners call upon the House of Commons to adopt Bill S-210, Protecting Young Persons from Exposure to Pornography Act.
Government response
Response by the Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture and Minister responsible for Official Languages Signed by (Minister or Parliamentary Secretary): The Honourable Steven Guilbeault The Government would like to thank the petitioners for expressing their concerns regarding the protection of young people online, especially with regard to the exposure to pornographic material. This is an important issue. The Government previously tabled online harms legislation, which recognized the need to better protect children online. Although the proposed legislation died on the Order Paper in January 2025, the government’s commitments to protect children and address online harms remain. Government legislation proposed to create the Online Harms Act, which aimed to promote online safety by reducing exposure to harmful content on social media services, with a special emphasis on protecting children. The Online Harms Act would have imposed three statutory duties that establish minimum standards that services must meet to ensure the safety of Canadians online: Duty to Act Responsibly Duty to Protect Children Duty to Make Certain Content Inaccessible The Duty to Act Responsibly would have established a standard of conduct that social media services must follow to ensure the safety of users on their platforms and to create more transparency and accountability about how they deal with harmful content. The Duty to Protect Children would have required social media services to provide protections for children online including the integration of age-appropriate design features on their platforms and to be more transparent by reporting on the specific measures that they are taking to protect children. Design features could have included things like defaults for parental controls, default settings related to warning labels for children, or safe search settings for a service’s internal search function. They could also have included design features to limit children’s exposure to harmful content, including explicit adult content, cyberbullying content, and content that incites self-harm. The Duty to Make Certain Content Inaccessible would have required social media services to expeditiously remove two categories of content from their services: Content that sexually victimizes a child or revictimizes a survivor, and Intimate content communicated without consent. The Act also would have created a new Digital Safety Commission of Canada to oversee and enforce the Act; a Digital Safety Ombudsperson of Canada to advocate for and support victims and a Digital Safety Office of Canada to support both administratively. Part of the Digital Safety Commission’s mandate would have been to enforce the removal of content that sexually victimizes a child or revictimizes a survivor and intimate content communicated without consent; and to promote societal resilience to harms online and set new standards for online safety by providing guidance to services on how to mitigate risk, perform research, work with stakeholders, and develop educational resources for the public, including children and parents. Overall, the Digital Safety Commission would have been able to enact guidelines and regulations under the three duties, which would allow the legislation to be adaptable and to grow over time as the landscape of harmful content affecting children changes. The government remains committed to protecting children in future digital policy endeavors and intends to reintroduce legislation to that effect in the 45th legislature.