A Senate bill being marketed as a child protection law could make Canada look far more like modern Iran or Afghanistan.
Bill S-210, the “Protecting Young Persons from Exposure to Pornography Act,” designed by Independent Senator Julie Miville-Dechene and sponsored in the House of Commons by Conservative MP Karen Vecchio, appears to be written to do anything but. Should the bill become law, any Canadian who wants to look at whatever the government ends up defining as pornography would be required to submit some sort of digital signature — include a photo of their face — to the provider to prove they’re over age 18. Providers who do not comply with this could face fines up of $250,000 for a first offence to $500,000 for repeat offences.
Similarly, proof of age would be required for search engines and social media sites. Anyone who dared to show skin on their website or allow users to post their own content would have to make their case to the CRTC for some sort of exception.
I don’t think you need to be a technology expert or even a smut consumer to see what’s wrong with this. Huge swaths of the Canadian economy, largely not pornographic, rely on the internet and this would put gigabytes of red tape in front of that. The Northwest Territories and Nunavut, which basically now use the internet for everything from commerce to communications among staff would be thrown into a mess of paperwork to do their job. And God forbid if someone clicks one of those links and accidentally ends up posting porn to a public forum.
Not only would this cripple the non-pornographic part of Canada, the likelihood of the law achieving its named purpose is effectively nil. In every family household I’m aware of, “teenager” is synonymous with “tech support.” No one is going to outsmart youth at technology, especially not baby-boomer legislators. When I was a teenager, our school used an ironically named piece of software called “Foolproof,” which basically restricted what the user could do with the system to prevent us from going to harmful websites. Having hours of time sitting bored in class, we quickly discovered holding the shift key when the computer was starting up brought up a boot menu, then we could log in as administrators, delete Foolproof and off we went. And that was back in the 1990s before we had things like streaming, virtual private networks and torrents.
A more modern example: one of my ongoing personal interests is “jailbreaking” technology. This is the process of taking your phone, gaming system or other “smart” device and installing third-party software that enables you to access parts of the system you’re not supposed to, effectively making it function like a classic computer. A quick look at online tutorials on how to do this will quickly reveal it’s largely teenagers who are figuring out how hack their devices. If Sony, Microsoft, Google and Apple can’t stop teenagers what hope does Ottawa have?
Anyway, the bill passed second reading in December and is currently before committee.
Now, before you start shaking your fist at Justin Trudeau for this, know that he’s completely opposed to the bill. The bill did have support from 14 Liberal backbenchers, but the other 133 Liberals, including NWT MP Michael McLeod, were the only party to vote against it. Between this and harassing transgendered Canadians, conservatives seem to have an unhealthy obsession with monitoring people’s private lives and what people do with their bodies, so their unanimous support for this is not surprising. You might remember they even tried this exact thing before during the Stephen Harper years, when Vic Toews famously said, “You’re either with us or the child molesters” as he pushed legislation that would have allowed the government to read your emails. It would appear they feel so comfortable with current polls they’re not even waiting for an election mandate to start trying again.
But what really has me shocked by this particular bill is the unanimous support of the Bloc Quebecois and New Democratic Party, both of which typically hold bodily autonomy and sexual freedom as two of their founding principles. I guess it goes to show the authoritarian extremes that obsessing over “owning the libs” can push people.
If you’re worried about what your child is looking at on the internet, the best solutions are to not buy them a smartphone and support education on how to recognize and avoid dangerous situations. Getting the government involved is only going to make the situation worse.
I’m 100 per cent certain before colonists showed up, parents did not comb the land for every dangerous mushroom, berry or animal to sanitize a place their kids could play. They taught their kids what was dangerous, why it was dangerous and how to spot it before it became dangerous. From the volume of youth hunters we showcase every year, it appears kids are still able to learn this way. Having smart kids will protect them from the perils of smart technology far better than the government possibly could.
Clearly, Bill S-210 is a load of muskox excrement and should be killed immediately. The Liberals’ party whip needs to do their job and the rest of us need to get on the phone with our MPs.