Oh My God - The Thing’s Still Alive!

The Undead Spectre of Bill S-209

Just when it seemed Parliament might finally let a flawed idea die a natural death, Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne has returned with a new version of her perennial personal crusade: legislation to impose mandatory age-verification for online pornography.

Now rebranded as Bill S-209, the latest instalment in this long-running saga follows in the well-worn footsteps of its predecessors – Bills S-203 and S-210 – each built on the same shaky foundation: the belief that restricting access will solve a complex social problem. ‘While the Bill now has a few technical edits and a fresh coat of policy paint, the core logic remains unchanged – and it’s no more effective than it was the last two times around.

Like its earlier versions, Bill S-209 relies on the rhetoric of urgency and child protection, while sidestepping the deeper questions: Does this strategy work? What rights does it compromise? And who benefits from embedding a third-party identity-checking industry into the fabric of Canadian internet regulation?

Who Doesn’t Like A Little Legislative Necromancy?

Let’s start with the history. Miville-Dechêne’s work began in 2020 with Bill S-203, which died with the dissolution of Parliament. It re-emerged, undead-style, as Bill S-210, managing to lurch its way through the Senate and (almost) through the House before succumbing once more to “death by election call”. But instead of letting the poor thing rest, Miville-Dechêne has resuscitated it yet again in the form of Bill S-209.

Bill S-209, like its predecessors, is based on the notion that access equals harm – that if minors can access pornography, then harm is the inevitable result. Never mind that the empirical evidence on the harm is inconclusive, at best. Or that six centuries of trying to restrict access to “immoral” materials have yielded little beyond moral panic and overreach.

The Same Old Failed Strategy

My Masters thesis focused on this legislation. I argued that the heart of its legislative strategy is access restriction – a blunt instrument used unsuccessfully by the church and state for centuries. The formula is simple: (a) declare the material dangerous, immoral, or harmful; and (b) try to block access to it – particularly from the young and the “impressionable.” That’s the whole stratagy, the entire playbook. And Bill S-209 follows it carefully.

But here’s the thing: access restriction has never worked. From the moment Gutenberg’s printing press upended the Catholic Church’s monopoly on information, authorities have tried (and failed) to stop the flow of content they deemed objectionable – heretical texts, obscene literature, immoral photographs, and now, pornographic pixels.

The Church created the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1559, launched papal Inquisitions over hundreds of years, and established bureaucracies like the Congregation of the Index to police the flow of “dangerous” books. The British Parliament passed the Obscene Publications Act in 1857 which enshrined the infamous Hicklin Test, judging the acceptability of material based on whether it could deprave and corrupt the “weak-minded”. The United States gave us Anthony Comstock, who in 1873 crusaded with such puritanical zeal that contraceptive pamphlets and anatomy textbooks were deemed immoral and caught in his dragnet.

Each effort was a high-pitched performance of righteous control. Each one failed.

And yet, Bill S-209 is offered up as if Senator Miville-Deschêne has stumbled upon something new – as though age-verification filters and biometric scans are the long-lost secret to successfully banning content that six hundred years of effort could not suppress.

What do we have to show for these centuries of censorship? A pornography industry that now outpaces Hollywood in output and global reach. Massive mainstream platforms receiving billions of visits per month. Youth exposure levels so consistent across jurisdictions that researchers now describe it as a “normative experience.” Rates which one Rapid Evidence Assessment (Horvath et. al) determined, on the strength of more than 2,300 reviewed articles, to range between 43% and 100% of 13 - 17 year olds. That’s not just a policy failure … it’s a complete collapse of the strategy.

Worse, the tools available to evade today’s restrictions – VPNs, Tor browsers, DNS hopping – are orders of magnitude more sophisticated than smuggling paperbacks in brown paper bags. In 2021, Thurman and Obster found that 69% of British teens had either used a VPN to circumvent access controls or knew how effective they were in facilitating circumvention – and that was four years ago, before the U.K.’s Online Harms Act gave them even more reason to try.

The lesson should be obvious by now: you cannot legislate a technical solution to a moral panic. Especially not when your chosen mechanism – access denial – has been thoroughly discredited by both history and evidence.

And yet, here we are. Again.

Rather than face the hard, complex work of education, media literacy, and parental empowerment, Bill S-209 falls back on the same magical thinking that has driven centuries of censorship: if we just block the material hard enough, the problem will go away.

Spoiler: it won’t. It never has. And unless we change the strategy, it never will.

A False Choice, Again

Part of what allowed Bill S-210 to advance was a dangerous bit of rhetorical blackmail: if you oppose this bill, you must support giving kids access to porn. It’s the same tactic being used now. And it’s intellectually bankrupt.

This framing forces politicians - many of whom are already allergic to nuance - into a corner. Vote “no” on Bill S-209 and face the wrath of socially conservative posts. Vote “yes” and signal your virtue, even if the bill you’re backing is flawed, ineffective, overbroad, and possibly unconstitutional. That’s not exactly the “deliberative democracy” that we’re hoping for.

So What’s the Answer?

The real problem isn’t that minors are watching pornography. It’s that we refuse to develop intelligent, multi-layered solutions that involve education, parental tools, accessible filtering technology, and meaningful digital literacy programs. Instead, we get bills like S-209 - performative policy theatre with a security/industrial tech flavour.

If we’re serious about protecting youth, we should stop outsourcing the hard thinking to companies that sell surveillance tools and start asking better questions. Like: What role should parents play? What tools can empower them? How can we address the broader social factors at play?

Because legislation like Bill S-209 isn’t about solving the problem. It’s about looking like we’re solving the problem.

Conclusion: Bury it.

Bill S-209 is the latest in a long line of bad legislative ideas dressed up as moral imperatives. It’s marginally better than Bill S-210 in form, but not in function. It still depends on technologies that don’t work reliably, still raises enormous privacy concerns, still confuses legal adult content with illegal or harmful content, and still hands enforcement power to regulators to block websites for Canadians.

If Parliament wants to look busy while doing something constitutionally fraught and technologically dubious, then by all means, let Bill S-209 advance. But if we want smart, rights-respecting legislation that actually helps protect children online, it’s time to finally bury this bill — once and for all.