You would do anything
Countries around the world are passing laws to better protect children online — Canada isn’t one of them. Parents can’t do this alone. It’s time for government to hold tech companies accountable for the harm they cause our children.
Canada needs legislation that protects children online
Canada is one of the safest countries in the world for children — except if they’re online. Adults looking to harm children have unsupervised and direct access on online platforms 24-7, and the risk of harm is rising. In 2025, Cybertip.ca reports concerning luring increased by 24% compared to 2024.
Unlike offline, where governments have rules and regulations for companies that serve children, online guardrails simply do not exist. The responsibility and blame has entirely — and unfairly — been placed on parents.
Children now have devices wherever they go, making it impossible for parents to oversee all of their child's online activity. Canada urgently needs legislation that protects children online like we protect them offline.
C3P supports legislation that includes:
An empowered regulatory body
Survivors of child sexual abuse and exploitation material (CSAEM) and the non-consensual distribution of intimate images need to be able to report to a regulatory body that has the power to have the illegal imagery removed from the internet. The regulator should prioritize the protection of children and act responsibly and transparently.
In the last year, Cybertip.ca, Canada’s tipline to report the online sexual exploitation of children, received over 28,000 reports from the public.
Establishing a regulatory body will help hold tech accountable, support the needs of victims and survivors, and protect Canadian children online.
A social media age minimum
Online services like social media were rolled out to children without regulatory oversight or guardrails. Children are being obviously harmed on the platforms they have easy access to every day and while creating a barrier for under 16s to access social media won’t eliminate all the risks, it would at least delay exposure until young people are better equipped to navigate them. This measure would serve as an additional layer of protection to our children and youth.
One in three Canadian teenagers experience a form of online sexual violence commonly facilitated on social media platforms.1
Delaying access to social media reduces the window of vulnerability during formative years and gives families and schools more time to build digital literacy, resilience, and awareness of online risks.
Age verification measures
The structure of identity verification already exists within systems like the health sector, banks, or utility providers. Using these systems as examples, there are several age verification approaches Canada can take to prioritize both child safety and privacy — it doesn’t need to be one or the other.
Age verification is one of several tools that can help support children being better protected online and help prevent exposure to harmful material.
Proactive detection of CSAEM
There are existing tools, like Project Arachnid, that help electronic service providers proactively detect known CSAEM and prevent it from being uploaded on their service. Proactive detection helps prevent the distribution of images and videos of some survivors’ most vulnerable and horrific memories.
In 2025, Project Arachnid sent nearly 20 million notices to electronic service providers requesting them to take down known CSAEM from their platforms.
The technology to help prevent the upload and distribution of CSAEM already exists, electronic service providers just need to use it.
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- 1 Digitally Informed Youth. “Canadian teens & technology-facilitated sexual violence: Findings from a 2024 general population survey among Canadian teenagers.” September 2025. https://1332d589-88d9-46fd-b342-d3eba2ef6889.usrfiles.com/ugd/1332d5_afb963cde10d40c79272378951c5dfeb.pdf ↩