Bill C-34 Answers Child Safety With Identity Infrastructure · Ethan Plant

This is a long piece, so the short version is: Bill C-34 gets part of the problem right. Platforms should be held accountable for harmful design, weak safety systems, and failures to protect children. But sections 27 to 29 risk turning child safety into age-verification infrastructure for ordinary internet access. That architecture deserves explicit parliamentary debate, not future regulations and Commission guidance.

Children should be protected online.

That is such an obvious statement it feels stupid to write. Of course children should not be left to fend for themselves against harassment, sextortion, bullying, eating disorder pipelines, self-harm content, addictive design, synthetic sexual abuse material, non-consensual intimate imagery, and reccomendation systems that can take a normal moment of teenage vulnerability and turn it into a machine-fed spiral.

Of course platforms should not be allowed to build engagement engines for children, profit from them, and then act as though the consequences are an unfortunate mystery.

Of course, the answer is not "do nothing".

But obvious statements are where bad digital policy loves to hide. Because Bill C-34, Canada's approach to this problem, does not merely ask whether children should be protected online. It asks a different question: should access to major online spaces depend on age verification or age estimation? That is not really the same question, one is about child safety, the other is about infrastructure.

Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, identifies a real problem. It contains several ideas that point in the right direction. Then it introduces a minimum-age regime that risks turning child safety into generalized age assurance for online public life.

This is, once again, the same move Ottawa keeps making on digital policy. Start with a real harm. Describe it in language no one reasonable wants to oppose. Reach for a broad technical or legal framework. Push the hard implementation details into regulations, guidance, and future discretion. Then act surprised when people who understand how systems behave ask: "what exactly is being built?"

The details, apparently, are where democracy goes to die.

The second question is the one that matters

The public debate around C-34 will be framed around the surface-level question: Should children be protected online?

Yes. Obviously. That's easy. Next question.

The harder question is the second one, hiding in the details. Should Canadians have to pass through age-verification or age-estimation systems before participating in online spaces? That's the question C-34 quietly creates.

The government's own backgrounder says online services shape how people in Canada communicate, access information, and participate in civic and cultural life. That is correct. Social media is not just entertainment. It's not just TikTok dances, Instagram filters, Reddit arguments, influencer slop, and whatever fresh hell is happening on X this week. It's also where politicians make announcements, journalists find sources, emergency information spreads, public agencies communicate, unions mobilize, artists publish, local communities organize, marginalized people find each other, and ordinary Canadians participate in public life.

The modern public square is ugly. It's privately owned, algorithmically distorted, surveillance-funded, outrage-driven, and often terrible. It is still, perhaps unfortunately, a public square.

That is why the minimum-age provisions in C-34 are so serious. The government cannot describe online services as part of civic and cultural life, and then casually create a legal path to age-gate access to them. If access to social media is access to public discourse, then access controls on social media are access controls on public discourse.

That does not automatically make every restriction illegitimate. It does not mean children have an unlimited right to use every platform in every context. It does not mean platforms should be free to ignore harm. But it does mean that Parliament should treat this as a major change to how Canadians participate online.

Instead, C-34 treats it as a minor implementation detail.

The bill tries to do too much at once

The thing about Bill C-34, is it's not really one bill. It is a platform accountability bill, a child safety bill, an age-verification bill, a pornography access bill, an AI chatbot bill, and a Digital Safety Commission bill all stapled together under one title.

Some of those pieces deserve serious debate on their own. Some are defensible. Some are dangerous. Some are underdeveloped. Some may be salvageable with amendments. But combining all of them into one sprawling framework makes the entire bill harder to understand, harder to scrutinize, and harder to support. This matters because the platform accountability parts of the bill aren't inherently absurd. There is a real case for...