Government plans to bring forward online harms bill, AI minister says
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/01/2026 (256 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
OTTAWA – The federal government is working on online harms legislation, Artificial Intelligence Minister Evan Solomon said Friday.
Solomon told reporters Culture Minister Marc Miller will bring the bill forward.
The bill would be separate from privacy legislation Solomon is expected to introduce, and from a justice bill the government tabled last year that includes elements criminalizing some deepfakes.
A spokesperson for Miller did not provide additional details about the bill when asked on Friday.
“We all want our children to be safe as they navigate the digital world, and platforms have an important role to play in meeting that challenge,” Hermine Landry said in an emailed statement.
“Our government intends to act swiftly to better protect Canadians, especially children, from online harm, and will have more details to share in due course.”
The Liberal government introduced an online harms act in 2024, which would have imposed new requirements on social media companies and created an online regulator.
The bill — which never became law — also would have put in place a 24-hour takedown provision for content that sexually victimizes a child and for intimate content shared without consent, including deepfakes.
Under Prime Minister Mark Carney, the Liberals signalled they would not bring the bill back in the same form, but would instead tackle aspects of online harms in other legislation.
Solomon said Friday his upcoming privacy bill could include the right to delete deepfakes.
“We will be modernizing our privacy laws, and there will be an element of making sure that we tackle deepfakes. And I’m very interested in things like the right to deletion, and we’re looking very closely at things like that in this piece of legislation,” he said.
Solomon made the comments in response to a question about sexualized deepfakes created by Elon Musk’s Grok that have proliferated on X in recent weeks, triggering a global backlash.
“There’ll be this suite of protections to make sure Canadians have that trust, and that Canadians are protected from some of the really horrible things that have happened online,” Solomon said.
Solomon did not answer whether the government will make changes to the justice bill to ensure the provisions criminalizing non-consensual intimate deepfakes cover those images shared on X.
Experts have warned the bill would not apply to most of the images proliferating on that platform.
Canadian advocacy groups for women and children said earlier this month those images demonstrate the need for an online regulator, and called for a new regulatory body that would function like the one the Liberal government proposed in 2024.
In November, a coalition of child advocates and medical organizations said the dangers children face online constitute a national emergency and called on the government to bring back the online harms bill.
Solomon’s comments follow a report in the Globe and Mail this week that said the upcoming online harms bill could include a social media ban for children under 14.
A day earlier, Miller did not answer when asked by reporters whether he was considering putting forward social media measures for children. “Just my 20-year-olds,” he joked.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 23, 2026.
