Online harms bill coming as soon as next week, will focus on safety: Trudeau

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is promising that his government’s upcoming bill to legislate against online harms will focus on making the internet safer for minors, while not censoring it for the rest of Canadians.

Speaking in Edmonton, Trudeau announced the Liberals will table the long-promised legislation as soon as next week, adding in French that it could come in several weeks.

Members of Parliament are currently on a break week. The House of Commons is scheduled to resume on Monday for one week, then not again until mid-March.

Trudeau characterized the legislation as having been difficult to write because of the need to strike the right balance between protecting Canadians’ freedom of expression and instituting measures to better protect children.

He vowed the bill would be “very specifically focused on protecting kids and not on censoring the internet.”

“Kids are vulnerable online to hatred, to violence, to being bullied, to seeing and being affected by terrible things online,” said Trudeau.

“We need to do a better job as a society of protecting our kids online the way we protect them in schoolyards, in our communities, in our homes across the country.”

Trudeau first promised the measure during the 2019 federal election campaign, but a bill targeting online hate speech died on the order paper when he triggered an early election in 2021.

He then promised to retable the bill within the first 100 days of his new mandate, but failed to do so.

Trudeau’s government presented a proposal that year outlining the approach it planned to take to legislate against five categories of online harms: content that incited violence, the non-consensual sharing of intimate images, child exploitation, hate speech and terrorist content.

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