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North America Regional Hub: Canada Webinar Series — Canada’s Approach to Online Harms Policy

Publication Date:

22/04/2026

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Event Reports

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Canada Webinar SeriesNorth America Regional HubOnline HarmsOnline Safety

— 9 minutes reading time

This report provides a summary of discussions during the webinar and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Strong Cities Network Management Unit, Strong Cities members, event sponsors or participants.

Summary

On 22 April 2026, the Strong Cities Network North America Regional Hub hosted a webinar examining Canada’s evolving approach to online harms policy and what emerging federal regulation could mean for municipalities and the communities they serve. The session connected national policy debates with the local realities of harassment, misinformation, hate, polarisation and declining trust.

Experts from McGill University’s Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy, The Dais at Toronto Metropolitan University and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), which hosts Strong Cities, discussed the anticipated direction of renewed federal online harms legislation, highlighted Canadians’ experiences of online harms and attitudes toward regulation, and drew lessons from implementation of analogous regulatory frameworks in the European Union (EU Digital Services Act) and the United Kingdom (UK Online Safety Act). Speakers underscored that platform regulation is only one part of a wider prevention and response system: municipalities, schools, libraries, employers, unions and community organisations all have important roles in translating federal policy into practical protection, trusted information and democratic resilience. 

Update (August 2026): Since this webinar took place, the Government of Canada has introduced the Safe Social Media Act (Bill C-34). 

Speakers

• Taylor Owen, Beaverbrook Chair in Media, Ethics and Communications, and Founding Director of the Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy, McGill University 
• André Côté, Executive Director, The Dais, Toronto Metropolitan University 
• Henry Tuck, Senior Director of Digital Policy, Institute for Strategic Dialogue

Key Takeaways

• Canadians use social media extensively while placing very low trust in major platforms. Survey evidence presented by the Dais showed that harms are concentrated among youth and marginalised communities. At the same time, approximately 70% of Canadians support government action even where regulation may involve trade-offs with freedom of expression. Support is higher for specific measures such as removing and reporting child sexual abuse material, labelling deepfakes and providing parental controls. 
• Municipalities are not peripheral to online safety. Harassment, doxing and personal attacks targeting public officials, polarised council discourse, misinformation affecting public trust and public health, and cyber-enabled scams and ransomware all manifest locally. Municipalities also work closely with trusted civic institutions, particularly public libraries and schools, that can reach residents with practical digital and civic literacy resources. 
• Experience in the EU and UK shows that adopting legislation is only the beginning. Regulators need sufficient capacity, clear prioritisation and time to build enforcement precedent. Implementation in the EU and UK has also been complicated by jurisdictional challenges and varying levels of cooperation from social media/technology companies.
• Municipalities and public-facing services have an important role in connecting online-safety regulation with the communities it is intended to protect. They can help residents understand information made available through regulatory transparency and access protections such as appeal rights. They can also help ensure that community experiences inform the continuing development and implementation of online-safety policy. 

Key Themes

1. Canada’s Evolving Online Harms Policy Landscape 

Taylor Owen noted that the federal government had committed to re-table a revised version of the online harms bill following the previous Bill C-63 proposal and had reconvened its expert advisory panel. He said the government had stated that it would not include the most contentious elements of Bill C-63: proposed amendments to the Canadian Human Rights Act and Criminal Code that had shifted the debate away from platform regulation and toward questions of hate speech and lawful expression. 

Owen also outlined several issues then under consideration, including some form of restriction on children’s access to social media, stronger statutory duties relating specifically to children, the possible inclusion of chatbots within the scope of regulation, and processes for adding new harms or services in the future. He noted that members of the expert panel had proposed a temporary moratorium—under which companies would need to demonstrate compliance with the legislation—as an alternative to a blanket social-media ban for children. He also cautioned that, while including chatbots may make intuitive sense, doing so would substantially change the nature of the regulatory obligations and require parts of the framework to be redrafted. 

2. Canadian Experiences, Trust and Municipal Implications

André Côté presented findings from The Dais’s Survey of Online Harms in Canada, a longitudinal survey conducted since 2018. Social-media use is widespread across age groups and highest among young people. Canadians increasingly rely on social platforms for news that informs their civic participation, with Facebook and YouTube remaining particularly significant sources. Côté noted that young people are especially reliant on these platforms and highlighted the challenges created by Meta’s continuing restriction of journalistic news content in Canada. 

High levels of use coexist with very low trust in several major platforms and technology companies, including Facebook, X, TikTok and OpenAI. Canadians continue to report experiencing harassment, intimate-image sharing, misinformation, hate speech and violent content online, with these experiences particularly concentrated among young people and marginalised groups. Côté also presented survey findings showing higher reported exposure to hate speech among LGBTQ+ people, people living with disabilities and newcomers. At the same time, approximately 70% of Canadians supported government action to reduce online harms even when a potential trade-off with freedom of expression was identified. Support was higher for specific measures, including requirements relating to child sexual abuse material, deepfake labelling and parental controls. 

Côté contrasted low trust in online platforms with comparatively high trust in community and civic institutions. Public libraries were among the most trusted institutions measured, followed by schools, while employers also received relatively high levels of trust. He suggested that these trusted institutions can provide effective channels for civic and digital literacy initiatives. 

At the municipal level, Côté identified several ways in which online harms intersect with local democracy, governance and service delivery. These included harassment, doxing and personal attacks targeting public officials and municipal staff; polarised discourse within city councils; misinformation that erodes public trust in government; and online harms affecting public health, environmental issues and public safety. He also pointed to challenges involving K–12 education, which are experienced locally even where education falls outside municipal jurisdiction, as well as cyber-enabled scams and ransomware. Potential municipal and community responses include strengthening local democratic resilience, providing civic and digital literacy training for officials and the wider public and enhancing cyber defences.

Côté described one training programme, Canadian Democracy at Work, a free initiative offering short, video-based learning on misinformation and disinformation, AI and deepfakes, and the Canadian political system. The programme is designed to reach working-age Canadians through trusted institutions such as employers, labour unions and libraries. It has been piloted with organisations including TELUS, Interac, the Toronto Public Library and several labour unions. Côté noted that libraries had been especially receptive and could use a train-the-trainer approach to equip their own staff to deliver the programme. 

3. Lessons from the European Union and United Kingdom 

Henry Tuck compared the EU Digital Services Act (DSA) and the UK Online Safety Act (OSA), whose legislative processes began around 2019. Both regimes preserve existing limits on platforms’ liability for user-generated content while imposing additional online-safety responsibilities. The DSA covers a broader range of online intermediaries, with its strongest obligations applying to very large platforms and search engines. The OSA focuses on user-to-user services, search services and adult-content sites, with Ofcom serving as the central regulator. 

Both regimes require action on illegal content and include obligations relating to risk assessments, transparency and platform governance. The DSA also addresses broader systemic risks affecting areas such as civic discourse, elections, public health and children, while the OSA’s approach to lawful but harmful content focuses primarily on risks to children. The two systems differ in design: the UK model is more prescriptive and therefore clearer in some areas but considerably more complex, while the EU model is more streamlined but leaves greater room for interpretation. 

Implementation has highlighted several shared challenges. The scale of the regulatory task has required regulators to prioritise the most serious risks, while platforms based outside the EU or UK can be difficult to identify, contact and bring into compliance. Companies have also varied in their willingness to cooperate with regulators. Tuck cautioned that public and political expectations of rapid change do not always align with the slower work of regulatory implementation and enforcement. 

Dukić framed these harms as an extension of challenges municipalities already face, rather than an entirely separate category. Local practitioners have long dealt with radicalisation, hate and manipulation online; AI can accelerate those dynamics, make them more persuasive and complicate prevention. He argued that cities will need greater investment in prevention, including approaches that address extremism and hate before harm escalates, while also recognising that AI can be used constructively when risks are understood. 

4. The Role of Municipalities and Communities 

The speakers agreed that municipalities have a role to play in shaping only safety outcomes. Côté encouraged municipalities, school boards and other community institutions to advocate constructively for broad safety outcomes and implementation that reflects local experience. Owen emphasised that municipalities are closest to the people affected by online harms and can ensure those voices are heard both while legislation is being developed and after it is passed, when citizen participation in regulatory processes becomes critical. Tuck suggested viewing these regulatory frameworks as toolboxes. Transparency requirements can generate information that helps people make more informed choices about the platforms they use, while user protections such as appeal rights provide avenues for redress. Local governments and other public-facing services can help make this information and these rights more accessible to residents. This intermediary role is particularly important in ensuring that regulatory information consistently reaches the public in a usable form, which has been a challenge in both the EU and UK.

Additional Resources

• Survey of Online Harms in Canada, the Dais 
• Canadian Democracy at Work, the Dais 
• Digital Services Act, European Union 
• Online Safety Act and Ofcom guidance, United Kingdom 
• North America Regional Hub: Enhancing Local Efforts to Address Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence (TFGBV) and Misogyny as Drivers of Social Polarisation and Violence, Strong Cities Network (January 2026) 
• North America Regional Hub: Practical Recommendations for Canadian Municipalities Facing Anti-Government Hate and Harassment, Strong Cities Network (January 2026) 
• A Ten-Step Roadmap for Enhancing City-Led Support for Community-Based Programmes to Address Hate and Extremism, Strong Cities Network (February 2025) 
• Countering Hate Speech in Times of Crisis: Considerations for Mayors and Local Governments, Strong Cities Network (December 2024)

Contact Information 

For more information on this event or Strong Cities North America programming, please contact the North America Regional Hub at [email protected].

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