Canada Bill C-34 (Safe Social Media Act)
What it does
Introduced June 10, 2026, C-34 requires regulated social media services to prevent under-16s from holding accounts, with the measures, and even the list of covered services, left to future regulations. It creates the Digital Safety Commission of Canada to approve platforms' digital safety plans, investigate complaints, and levy penalties, and its framework reaches chatbot services. It carries forward the platform-regulation half of the dead Online Harms Act; the speech-offense half became the Combatting Hate Act. Second reading resumes when Parliament returns in September.
Why it matters
Canada is joining the under-16 wave with the same arithmetic as Australia and the US states: excluding minors requires sorting every user by age. The covered services and the required measures will be written by regulators after the debate is over, the pattern Britain's schools act just set.
Our take
The ban gets the headlines and the Commission gets the power: a standing federal regulator over social media, with the hard rules arriving later as regulations. September's debate is the moment to pin down what the statute itself forbids, because whatever is left to the regulator is decided without another vote.
Timeline
- June 10, 2026First reading (Commons)
Previous versions
- 44th Parliament
Related bills
Our coverage: all age-verification stories · Status checked July 20, 2026