Canadian Age Verification Bill Stalled in House of Commons

OTTAWA—A porn age verification requirement proposed and advanced through the Canadian Senate proceeds through the House of Commons without the support of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government and the coalition of MPs aligned to it. The proposal is Bill S-210. Known as the Protecting Young Persons from Exposure to Pornography Act, independent Sen. Julie Miville-Dechêne of Quebec managed to advance the bill through the Senate. Now, it's stuck before a committee undergoing further study. Sen. Miville-Dechêne expressed to the wire service Canadian Press that she cannot contemplate why 133 members of the Liberal party chose not to support the bill. The Liberal government says that S-210 overlaps with its own internal efforts to implement age verification and age-gating measures through regulation. “Never, never have I had any indication that in the [Liberal’s proposed] online harms bill there will be anything to protect children against those porn platforms,” said Miville-Dechêne. AVN reported previously that a very influential digital governance standards organization in Canada wants the national government to implement age verification for pornographic websites with biometrics. The Digital Governance Standards Institute submitted a proposal to the Canadian federal government to add a biometric provision in Bill S-210. A spokesperson for the Canadian Heritage minister, Pascale St-Onge, MP, said the bill is essentially a waste of time. “We share the goal of a safer internet experience for children and youth. However, this bill is fundamentally flawed,” the Heritage minister’s office told the Canadian Press in a statement earlier this week. Most adult industry firms, such as Montreal-based Aylo, support age verification but in the least invasive format possible. “Unfortunately, the way many jurisdictions worldwide have chosen to implement age verification is ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous,” said a spokesperson for Aylo, which is the parent company of adult tube site Pornhub, in an email to AVN. “Any regulations that require hundreds of thousands of adult sites to collect significant amounts of highly sensitive personal information is putting user safety in jeopardy," the spokesperson added. "Moreover, as experience has demonstrated, unless properly enforced, users will simply access non-compliant sites or find other methods of evading these laws." The spokesperson conceded the statement is similar to others they've made throughout this year, given the onslaught of similar legislation in jurisdictions in the United States, United Kingdom, and throughout the European Union (e.g., France and Spain).