4 days ago
Who's responsible for online harms? Responsibility for troubled file floats between ministers
OTTAWA — As ministers settle into their new roles, discussions are underway about who is best suited to steer the government's efforts to legislate against online harms, cabinet minister Steven Guilbeault said on Tuesday.
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Questions have arisen about which minister and department would be best suited to handle the complicated issue after the Liberals' proposed Online Harms Act died in Parliament when Prime Minister Mark Carney triggered a federal election in March.
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'It's a good question,' said Guilbeault, who oversees the Canadian Heritage department, told reporters on his way into the Liberals' weekly cabinet meeting.
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Canadian Heritage had been the first department to develop and later introduce the Liberals' initial plan to combat the harms Canadian users experience online.
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That proposal, which was released in 2021, was met with widespread backlash over concerns about the requirement for social media companies to remove content within 24 hours after receiving a complaint.
Experts had warned the provision was overly broad and risked infringing on free expression, given that companies could remove legal content.
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The Liberals then struck an advisory group and got to work on figuring out a Plan B.
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Responsibility for the bill also shifted from Canadian Heritage to the Justice Department.
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In early 2024, former justice minister Arif Vriani introduced Bill C-63, which proposed to create a new digital safety regulator that would be tasked with ensuring social media giants took steps to reduce users' access to content, such as child sex abuse images and incite extremism and violence.
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That bill was also met with backlash over its proposal to introduce stiffer sentences for hate-related offences and reintroduce a controversial section to the Canadian Human Rights Act to allow people to bring forward complaints of hate speech, which civil liberties advocates and Parliamentarians said risked violating free speech.
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Virani spent months defending the need for the tougher Criminal Code measures to be included in the online safety bill, but last December announced the government was prepared to split the bill to help get it passed.
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In January, former prime minister Justin Trudeau announced his resignation and that Parliament would be suspended until March.
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Emily Laidlaw, a Canada Research Chair in cybersecurity law at the University of Calgary, who sat on the government's expert advisory group, said it was a mistake for the government to have combined different provisions into the same legislation and that by the time it announced the legislation would be split, 'it was too late.'
