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Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, is the latest building block to be added to the foundation of Canada’s forthcoming surveillance state.
If Bill C-34 is passed into law, it’s only a matter of time before the federal government knows the location, monitors the movement, and tracks the communications of every Canadian. Bill C-34, together with other federal laws, will provide the government with intimate knowledge of how and when we use social media, AI, and the internet generally.
The first building block of Canada’s surveillance state was the Online Streaming Act (Bill C-11), which expanded the power of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission beyond radio and television to include the internet as well. The CRTC now has unprecedented regulatory authority to monitor all online audiovisual content. The CRTC forces major streaming and social media platforms to manipulate their algorithms to push what the CRTC determines to be “Canadian.” YouTube, Netflix, and TikTok must now tweak their automated recommendation engines to showcase CRTC-designated “Canadian” content, thereby shifting what Canadians see when they log in. The CRTC’s power includes punishing those who fail to comply with its rules.
The Online News Act (Bill C-18) has stopped us from sharing news on Facebook and Instagram. Further, Google is now forced to pay $100 million towards subsidizing the federal government’s favourite media outlets, predictably excluding the independent media who fail to adopt and promote the government’s preferred narratives.
The Cybersecurity Act (Bill C-8) has given federal cabinet ministers the power to kick individual Canadians off the internet through secret orders, without judicial oversight. Ordinary citizens whose phone or internet services are ended by government might never see the evidence against them, or have a meaningful opportunity to defend themselves, just like the Canadians whose bank accounts were suddenly frozen in 2022.
Bill C-8 has given the federal government new powers to conduct warrantless searches, collect sensitive data without prior judicial authorization, and issue directives that compromise the security of encryption standards that millions of Canadians rely on. The bill now empowers the federal government to secretly order telecom providers “to do anything or refrain from doing anything,” with orders being used to impose surveillance obligations on private companies, and to weaken encryption standards. The government’s orders, enforced with penalties up to $500,000 for individuals and up to $15 million for companies, can last indefinitely, leaving both the public and Parliament in the dark.
The Combatting Hate Act (Bill C-9) has placed further restrictions on the free speech of Canadians. Orthodox rabbis, Catholic priests, evangelical pastors, and other religious leaders and adherents can now face criminal charges for publicly teaching what their sacred scriptures say about homosexuality, sex, and transgenderism.
The Lawful Access Act (Bill C-22) empowers government to require electronic service providers to install surveillance and interception capacity on their networks, and keep confidential user metadata (e.g., location, call duration, contacts) on file for six months. The Minister of Public Safety can now mandate that electronic service providers build capabilities to intercept or provide access to encrypted communications.
Signal, the encrypted messaging platform, has stated it would rather pull out of Canada entirely than be compelled to compromise its privacy promise of end-to-end encryption. Windscribe, the Toronto-headquartered virtual private network (VPN) provider, announced it will move its headquarters and take its taxes elsewhere to avoid having to comply with mandated backdoors and data retention rules. NordVPN refuses to compromise its privacy protections and is considering removing its servers and presence from Canadian jurisdiction.
The latest bill to help turn Canada into a surveillance state is C-34, the Safe Social Media Act. Citing the laudable goal of protecting children from social media and from pornography, Bill C-34 moves Canada closer towards centralized government-issued digital ID.
In December 2025, Australia passed a similar law to ban under-16 teens from using social media. By March 2026, the government publicly admitted that over two thirds of under-16 teens had continued to access and use social media, in spite of the law.
The only effective way to ensure that teens under 16 cannot access social media (and that minors under 18 cannot access pornography) is to force everyone to prove their age when logging on to Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, YouTube, etc. Age verification for children and teens means age verification for everyone. This, in turn, means facial scans, biometrics, and perhaps even the use of government-issued centralized ID. In other words: to protect children from social media and pornography, every Canadian must give up basic privacy and let government know each and every time that she or he uses social media. In this way, Bill C-34 takes us quickly and smoothly to the nightmare presented by George Orwell in his book “1984.”
If passed into law, Bill C-34 will create a new, massive, and extremely powerful Digital Safety Commission, with vast powers to regulate social media and create new rules. The Safe Social Media Act also gives the federal cabinet broad powers to create all sorts of regulations without any input from Parliament. Rules and regulations created by cabinet and by the Digital Safety Commission will be enforced with fines up to $10 million or 3 percent of a company’s gross global revenues.
Canadian children (and adults) are already protected from online harms by Canada’s Criminal Code, which prohibits online child pornography and online advocacy for violence and terrorism, to name just two examples of things that are already illegal both online and offline. Canada should focus on stronger and more consistent enforcement of these existing criminal laws, rather than creating a new and largely unaccountable entity in the form of the Digital Safety Commission.
Together, the Online Streaming Act, the Online News Act, the Cybersecurity Act, the Combatting Hate Act, the Lawful Access Act, and the Safe Social Media Act form the web of Canada’s surveillance state. Once this surveillance web is in place, Canadians become flies and the government becomes the spider.
John Carpay, B.A., LL.B. is president of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (jccf.ca).
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
