Online harms debate pits real threats against elaborate fears

Announcing the government's new online harms legislation on Monday, Justice Minister Arif Virani led with the realities the bill is supposed to address.

After introducing two women who spoke about their own experiences with child abuse and harassment, Virani said his bill would create three «overarching obligations» for major online platforms: «a duty to protect children, a duty to act responsibly and the duty to remove the most egregious content.»

Specifically, Virani said, C-63 «targets the worst of what we see online, content that sexually victimizes children or revictimizes survivors, intimate content shared without consent, content that incites violence, extremism or terrorism, or foments hatred and content that is used to bully a child or induce a child to self-harm.»

Virani then made a point of underlining what he says the bill do.

«It does not undermine freedom of speech,» the minister said.

That statement almost certainly was aimed at Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who rejected the bill last week before getting a chance to read it.

Poilievre's pre-emptive criticism

Asked about the impending legislation last Wednesday — five days before it was tabled in the House of Commons — Poilievre described it as «Justin Trudeau's latest attack on freedom of expression,» part of a «woke authoritarian agenda» that would see Trudeau ban «unacceptable views.»

«Go down the list of things that Justin Trudeau disapproves of and you can imagine all of the things that will be criminalized,» Poilievre said.

The Conservative leader's predictions had something in common with his party's opposition to an earlier piece of legislation, the Online Streaming Act. The government introduced and passed that bill with the stated purpose of