A first look at Bill C-34 , Canada’s new Safe Social Media Act, and how the under-16 ban might work
The federal government introduced Bill C-34 yesterday, its third attempt at online harms legislation after the failure to pass Bill C-63 last year.
Most of the media coverage has focused on the ban on social media accounts for children under 16, giving rise to the question of how this will work in practice. Will we all now need to provide platforms with proof that we’re over 16? And what will this entail?
It’s not entirely clear yet. One of the main takeaways of the bill is that details around how the ban will work, along with many duties and obligations the bill imposes, are left to regulations to be passed in the future — or to self-regulation — leaving many things unclear. But the general thrust of where we’re headed is coming into view.
Jun 5, 2026
Light on specifics, “AI for All” points to a future of limited state impact on the course of AI in Canada — which may be a good thing
Coverage of Prime Minister Carney’s unveiling yesterday of Canada’s long-awaited national AI strategy, “AI for All,” is dominating this morning’s news cycle. You’ve probably already heard the details by now — aiming to build trust in AI, foster literacy, uptake, sovereign compute, and so on.
The document itself , some 50 pages, offers a vivid snapshot of where Canada is at with AI: who’s using it, building it, resisting it, where, when, and how. Well worth reading if you’re curious. In a sentence, Canada is committing to spending $2.3 billion over the next five years, hoping to dramatically increase industry adoption, create a quarter-million new jobs, boost AI development in the private sector, and bolster our domestic infrastructure for AI.
The three critical responses I’ve heard so far are that it’s light on specifics needed to assess whether many of its goals are achievable, such as increasing transparency in AI. It fails to address job-loss risk . And it fails to read the room , urging that we charge ahead with AI adoption with minimal regulation when “an overwhelming majority, 68 per cent, want AI to be regulated heavily, even if it slows down adoption of the technology.” (Even Anthropic this morning is calling , once again, for a slowdown so that “society” can catch up.)
Reading “AI for All,” I made two observations.
May 28, 2026
Why the shift toward on-device AI puts Ottawa’s $925M data centre bet in question
In my last post, I looked at the case for Canada’s AI data centre build-out. The main argument is that we need to build these centres to remain competitive in an economy transforming around AI and to keep our data sovereign. If the government doesn’t intervene to subsidize them, Canadians will lack “access to the compute they need,” and the centres would be built and controlled by US companies.
In this post, I want to set aside the data sovereignty issue and outline an argument that isn’t receiving much airplay at the moment in debates about the need for new data centres. It goes to the heart of whether we need to build new centres to enjoy the full benefits of AI.
The counter-argument is that access to the compute we need to enjoy many if not most of the benefits of AI is rapidly becoming much less expensive and will soon be accessible at a far lower cost economically and environmentally.
The future of AI, the argument goes, is not one in which the models we interface with most often are situated in the cloud and reliant upon large, energy-hungry data centres. Instead, it’s one in which most of the processing is done on board our personal devices, like our phones or laptops, on a company’s local server, or a rack of servers at a university or an internet service provider.
And this isn’t a matter of pure speculation. The evidence pointing in this direction is mounting. Though, to be clear, we will still need larger models and data centres for some things. The question is how many.
May 26, 2026
The economic benefits are modest, the environmental claims are unverified, and the strain on grids and water is real
On Sunday, hundreds of people marched through the streets of Vancouver to protest two new AI data centres Telus is building in the city — which has just announced water restrictions with more expected in June.
Ottawa has pledged some $925 million over five years to build “sovereign AI data centres” across the country, and this month it named Telus as the first builder, to expand one facility in Kamloops and develop the two new ones in Vancouver. The case for a build-out rests on a belief that Canada needs more domestic compute or it will stay dependent on foreign infrastructure for something vital. But the case is weaker than it looks, and rests in part on an assumption about the future of AI that may turn out to be false.
AI Minister Evan Solomon says the goal is to ensure that “Canadian innovators, researchers and businesses have access to the compute they need,” while keeping “Canadian data… on Canadian soil.” We need far more domestic processing capacity to stay competitive as AI transforms the economy, and if we fail to build it ourselves, Canadians will become more dependent on foreign entities for some of our most critical infrastructure.
There are reasons to question whether the current rush to subsidize and build these centres is good policy. The economic benefits seem limited once the centres are built. They place a further strain on electricity and water systems that are already stressed. And many of the environmental claims the companies make can’t be easily verified.
More crucially, the push to build a network of large, power-hungry AI data centres assumes that most of the AI we will be using in the years to come will still rely for the most part on large models we access in the cloud. I’ll offer reasons to be sceptical of this in my next post. This one lays out the build-out itself, and how much about it is still unsettled.
May 21, 2026
With major tech companies threatening to leave Canada and US lawmakers weighing in, the government is signalling it will amend the bill. But the constitutional questions won’t end there.
Opposition to Bill C-22 , the lawful access bill currently in second reading before Parliament, has intensified sharply in recent days.
More than a dozen major companies — Apple, Meta, Signal, and several VPN providers among them — have raised concerns about key provisions, with some threatening to withdraw services from the Canadian market if the bill passes as drafted.
Two members of the US Congress have written to the Public Safety Minister warning that certain powers could compromise the privacy of American citizens and national security.
Civil liberties groups and privacy experts have published open letters and op-eds , and the dissent on social media has been equally loud.
Meanwhile, the RCMP and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service have been on a media blitz bemoaning Canada’s lack of a lawful access regime and making the case for why the bill needs to pass.
The proposed legislation covers a range of new lawful access powers, but the two provisions drawing the strongest response are those dealing with encryption and bulk metadata preservation. Critics fear the bill would permit secret ministerial orders compelling companies to introduce vulnerabilities into their systems, and mandate the retention of metadata that would capture nearly every Canadian’s movements for up to a year, without any individualized suspicion.
I teach and write on section 8 of the Charter, which protects against unreasonable search or seizure, and the concerns about encryption and metadata raise serious constitutional questions.
Before getting to those, it’s worth taking stock of where the bill stands politically and what changes are likely before it reaches third reading.