The House of Commons has passed the Online Harms Act after months of contentious debate, creating new legal obligations for social media platforms to remove harmful content and establishing a Digital Safety Commissioner to enforce compliance. The bill passed 185-142 on a recorded vote, with support from the governing Liberals and the NDP, and opposition from the Conservatives and the Bloc Québécois.
The legislation requires social media platforms with more than one million Canadian users to remove content depicting child sexual exploitation within 24 hours of detection, and to address other categories of harmful content — including hate speech, incitement to violence, and intimate images shared without consent — within a "reasonable" timeframe to be defined by regulation.
A New Regulator
Central to the bill is the creation of the Digital Safety Commissioner, an independent officer who will have the power to order platforms to remove content, impose administrative monetary penalties of up to $25 million for non-compliance, and conduct investigations into systemic failures. The Commissioner will also be responsible for publishing an annual report on the state of online safety in Canada.
Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge called the bill "a necessary step to protect Canadians — especially children — from the worst harms of the digital world." She acknowledged that the legislation had been significantly amended during committee study, including the removal of a controversial provision that would have allowed individuals to file complaints about lawful but harmful speech.
Critics Sound the Alarm
Conservative MP Rachael Thomas, the party's digital affairs critic, called the bill "a dangerous overreach that will chill free expression online." Thomas argued that giving a government-appointed commissioner the power to order content removal creates an unacceptable risk of political interference. "Who defines harmful content? That is the question this government refuses to answer clearly," Thomas said during debate.
Civil liberties organizations have expressed similar concerns. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association said it supports the child safety provisions but warned that the broader content regulation framework lacks sufficient safeguards. The bill now moves to the Senate for study. Legal experts say court challenges are virtually certain once the legislation takes effect, with arguments likely to centre on whether the content removal obligations are consistent with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.