Age verification and police reporting obligations on AI will come with a cost
The summer break has given us more time to assess the flurry of bills tabled in Parliament in the final weeks of June relating to privacy, AI, and the internet. One of them, the Safe Social Media Act, in Bill C-34 , has been much in the news in recent weeks, with questions about how the ban on children under 16 holding social media accounts will work and whether it’s constitutional.
I’ve weighed in on whether a ban would infringe young people’s freedom of expression under the Charter, and how the bill’s various obligations on AI providers might change how we interact with chatbots.
Here I address another question people have been asking: how will Bill C-34 affect our privacy? Can age verification be made effective without forcing all of us to divulge and put at risk sensitive information? And would obligations on AI providers to notify police about certain chats make AI less private?
In both cases, we can look to other countries where similar measures have been imposed for evidence of how they affect privacy. We don’t have to speculate.
In short, we can’t have effective age verification or police reporting in AI without harming rights to privacy and expression. The promise of safer social media and AI in C-34 will either have to be broken or bought at too high a cost.
Jun 19, 2026
The House has passed the lawful access bill with amendments, still leaving crucial issues in question
The committee tasked with Bill C-22 worked past midnight Wednesday to meet the government’s goal of completing third reading of the bill before the House took its summer break, which begins today. The government curtailed clause-by-clause review of the bill for this purpose, resulting in the committee’s adopting only a few amendments, and without much discussion or public disclosure.
I highlight two changes worth noting that touch on issues that generated the most criticism during the committee hearings: the bill’s potential impact on encryption and its metadata retention provisions.
The first set is being touted as a step forward, but it may not be.
Jun 16, 2026
It will regulate the content of our conversations, but also the bonds we forge
Among the many dangers we often hear about in coverage of AI, some of the most concerning involve cases where a chatbot encourages a person to commit suicide or aids in the commission of a violent offence. Other, less extreme cases of harm involve people developing unhealthy psychological relationships with chatbots, relying on them for erroneous medical or legal advice.
Bill C-34, Canada’s new Safe Social Media Act , tabled last week, imposes a new set of duties on the AI companies behind ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini that may push them to do more to prevent these various harms. While most of the coverage of the bill has so far focused on the social media ban for those under 16, another important aspect is that it represents Canada’s first attempt to regulate the behaviour of conversational AI systems themselves.
The bill will seek to minimize harmful outputs, but more broadly, it will regulate the kinds of relationships these systems are allowed to form with users.
Jun 11, 2026
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.