There is a new bill in front of Parliament about kids and social media. It is a good bill and it is aimed at the right target. It also will not do most of what parents are hoping it does. Here is the honest version, and what to do at home in the meantime.
It is not law. Nothing in it applies to any company or any family yet, and it still has to get through the House, a committee, the Senate and Royal Assent. After that come the regulations, which is where most of the detail actually lives.
Last checked 10 September 2026. This page is updated every time the bill moves.
The big change is who is responsible. Right now, keeping a child safe on a platform is treated as the parent's job. This bill puts a legal duty on the companies for the way they design and run their services. That is overdue and it is worth saying so clearly.
A minimum age of 16 for certain social media accounts, backed by age checks or age estimation. Those checks have to be privacy protective, so a company cannot hoover up your ID and keep it. Pornographic content is 18.
Services have to reduce how much users are exposed to seven named categories, including content that sexually victimises children, intimate images shared without consent, content encouraging self harm or suicide, cyberbullying, and AI generated harmful content.
This is the part almost nobody is talking about. A chatbot would have to stop the conversation and point a user to a real human if they talk about suicide or self harm. It could not pretend to be a person, and it could not use manipulative techniques to keep someone hooked.
Reasonable steps to label AI generated images, audio and video, deepfakes included, so that a person can tell what is real.
A new Digital Safety Commission of Canada, with three to five commissioners, would review the companies' safety plans, investigate and enforce. Fines go up to 3% of a company's worldwide revenue, or $10 million, whichever is bigger.
Companies would have to publish a digital safety plan explaining the risks on their service and what they do about them. Being made to write it down in public changes behaviour more than most people expect.
This is the part worth reading twice, because a headline about a new law is the kind of thing that quietly makes a household relax.
Direct messages and private messaging are specifically left out of the bill. That matters more than anything else on this page, because grooming, sextortion and the worst approaches to children do not happen in a public feed. They happen in a DM, in a private server, or in the chat inside a game.
No console, smart TV, tablet, laptop or home router is regulated by this bill. Nothing in it changes what a ten year old can reach from a bedroom tonight.
Companies are not required to check everything or remove everything. For most of the seven categories they only have to take sensible steps to reduce the risk. Only two kinds, child sexual abuse material and intimate images shared without consent, have to be made unreachable in Canada.
A 14 year old with no account of their own still watches the feed over a friend's shoulder, in a browser, or logged out. An age limit on signing up is not an age limit on seeing.
There is no duty to report to police in the bill. The new Commission would write guidelines about when a company should tell the RCMP. Guidelines, not an obligation.
A bill is not a law. This one was introduced in June 2026 and has a long way to go. Even after it passes, the rules that decide which companies it covers and how age checks work have to be written separately, and the Commission has to be built and staffed. Bills also die. Plenty do.
The short version: nothing changes for your family this year.
None of this is complicated and none of it takes an evening. The point is not to protect a child from everything, because you cannot, and anyone selling you that is selling you a feeling. The point is friction and time. Friction slows things down, and time is what lets you find out about something before it becomes a crisis.
Screen time and content restrictions, with a passcode your child does not have. Do this before you hand the device over. Adding rules to a phone a kid already thinks of as theirs is a much harder conversation.
The app is the product. The phone is just how it gets delivered. Look at what is installed, who can message your child inside each one, and turn off contact from strangers.
It isn't a force field, and I'll never tell you it is. What it does is real: the sites and apps you've blocked don't load on any device in the house, and bedtime is the router's job, not yours.
Write down, together, where the device charges overnight. Anywhere other than the bedroom. This is the single change most families feel within a week.
Phones, Nintendo Switch, Roblox, Fortnite and the router. Screenshots for every tap. Free, and no email address required.
That is your call and there are people campaigning hard on both sides of it. What I would say is this. Moving the duty onto the companies is the right idea, and it is the half of this problem that families genuinely cannot fix on their own. It is also not the half that reaches into a private message or into your living room. Both halves need somebody working on them, and the second one is ours.
Colin
Sources, both worth reading yourself: the government's own fact sheet on the Safe Social Media Act and the bill's live status on LEGISinfo. This page is written by a parent, not a lawyer, and it is a plain summary rather than legal advice. Safe Family Internet is a community initiative that started in Lake Country, BC. safefamilyinternet.ca · colin@safefamilyinternet.ca