The House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage conducted an extensive study on the effects of influencers and social media on children and adolescents over the past year and released its report in June. The committee, which will soon lead the review of Bill C-34, produced 13 recommendations including a legally enforceable duty of care, an independent regulator with monetary penalties, safety-by-design requirements, defined categories of harm, and the inclusion of AI chatbots and deepfakes. Given the overlap with the government’s social media bill, it is no surprise that the government endorsed many of the recommendations this week. There is an outlier, however: the committee considered two potential bans, one on targeted ads for kids and the other on underage access to social media. The committee recommended the ad ban and stopped short of the social media one, but the government reversed the approach, declining the ad ban while legislating the social media ban for under-16s.

The committee’s recommended ban calls on the government to “implement a ban on targeted ads as well as the collection and use of minors’ data.” It drew on testimony from Tiana Sharifi of the Center for Exploitation Education and a brief from Children First Canada, alongside a warning from UQAM’s Maude Bonenfant that data harvested in childhood can follow a person into applications for insurance, housing and work. The government declined to endorse the ban, the only one of the 13 recommendations it merely “acknowledges” rather than supports, pointing instead to existing and proposed privacy protections, with Bill C-36 treating children’s information as sensitive and applying a higher standard of consent. In other words, it supports a consent-based approach to ads that target kids, unlike the EU, which prohibits profiling-based advertising to minors in the Digital Services Act. Given the government’s emphasis on social media safety, it is notable that its response also states that “personalized algorithmic feeds based on user data play a crucial role in the addictive design of social media platforms.” Yet having identified the data-driven business model as a central driver of the harm, the government refused to adopt the recommendation that would have restricted it.

The government has proposed a social media ban for under-16s, which the committee did not recommend. Instead, the committee asked the government to monitor age-restriction policies elsewhere, assess their effectiveness, identify policy options, and publish its findings. While some witnesses and many parents supported age restrictions, the committee’s recommendation reflected much of the expert evidence: Holly Wood of Defend Dignity wrote that banning social media “doesn’t work and can actually make things worse by driving kids toward unregulated, dangerous spaces,” MediaSmarts’ Matthew Johnson warned that “excessive restriction can backfire,” Concordia’s Fenwick McKelvey cautioned that enforcement would require “a fairly invasive privacy or data collection regime,” and 12-year-old witness Zachary Fathally observed that “kids can find workarounds.” The government’s response supports the recommendation “in principle,” but it points to the Commission’s oversight of the ban it has already chosen and a statutory review three years after the Act takes effect.

The committee was concerned with the civil liberties implications of these policies, yet the government’s response to those concerns oddly does not engage with its ban decision:

This legislation is primarily about mitigating children’s exposure to harmful content, not censoring or removing lawful content. It is about making sure children’s safety is considered in how platforms are designed, rather than treated as an afterthought. It includes oversight, transparency, and accountability mechanisms to help ensure that measures taken to address harmful content are reasonable, evidence-based, and respectful of fundamental rights.

But the under-16 ban applies regardless of whether the content is lawful or harmful, and it targets every covered service, with potential exemptions years away and no criteria in place yet. And the bill establishes the under-16 threshold in legislation but leaves the specific safety-by-design requirements to future regulations.

The issues raised by Bill C-34 will not be new to the Heritage committee. Having just recommended a different approach to bans on both children’s privacy and social media access, the committee will now review a government bill that runs counter to its own findings. The forthcoming hearings into the bill will place the spotlight on whether the MPs still stand by their study or are now willing to cast it aside.