Five minutes, one letter, real leverage

Write your MP

MPs count constituent letters, and on new bills a few dozen can set a riding office's tone. The letter below asks your MP to keep C-34's duty of care and remove the age mandates — edit it, personalize it, make it yours. Letters in your own words carry the most weight.

Step 1 — Find your MP

No JavaScript, or prefer to look yourself? Use the official directory: Find your MP on ourcommons.ca.

Step 2 — Make the letter yours

Your name (inserted into the letter)

The letter — edit freely

Dear [MP name],

I am writing as your constituent in [riding] about Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act.

I want to be clear first about what I support. The bill's duty-of-care provisions are sound: requiring platforms to assess and mitigate risks to users, to provide blocking and flagging tools, to label synthetic content, and to remove child sexual abuse material and non-consensual intimate images quickly (sections 31 to 47 of the Digital Safety Act). Please help those parts pass.

But I urge you to press for substantial amendments — and, failing that, to vote against the bill — because of provisions that would make age checks a condition of ordinary online life:

1. Sections 26 to 29 would ban every Canadian under 16 from holding an account on cabinet-designated platforms, and to enforce it, require age verification or estimation of EVERY user, adults included. Australia has run this exact experiment since December 2025: surveys already show most banned teens still have access, while every adult pays the privacy cost. The Supreme Court has recognized that anonymity can be the foundation of a privacy interest (R. v. Spencer, 2014).

2. Sections 22 and 23 would require age verification on any regulated service an operator merely "suspects" provides access to pornographic content — wording broad enough to put general-purpose platforms, and all their adult users, behind ID checks.

3. Subsection 12(2) would let cabinet order platforms, by regulation, to build automated upload-scanning into their services — despite the bill's own promise of no proactive monitoring.

4. Roughly fifty key decisions — including which platforms the ban covers and what "adequate" verification means — are deferred to future regulations, leaving Parliament to vote on a law whose real content it cannot know.

These provisions sit badly with section 2(b) of the Charter, and with commitments Canada has made under the ICCPR and the Convention on the Rights of the Child — the same principles Canada rightly invoked through the Freedom Online Coalition when it condemned Iran's "safety"-justified internet shutdowns.

Canada can protect children online without checking everyone's papers at the door of the public square. Please keep the duty of care, and remove sections 22, 23 and 26 to 29 and subsection 12(2).

I would welcome your reply on how you intend to vote.

Respectfully,
[Your name]

"Open in my email app" requires finding your MP first. If the email that opens looks cut off (some mail apps truncate long links), use the copy buttons and paste into a fresh email instead. Postage-free paper mail also works: any MP, House of Commons, Ottawa ON K1A 0A6 — no stamp needed.

Do more

Write the minister. Bill C-34 was introduced by the Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture. Ministerial correspondence is tracked and tallied: Canadian Heritage (see "Contact us").
Ask to appear at committee. When C-34 reaches committee, any Canadian can submit a written brief — committees do read them. Watch the bill's status on LEGISinfo.
Support the organizations doing this full-time: the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and OpenMedia both have active C-34 campaigns.
Share this site — especially with people who support the bill. Our case is built for skeptical readers.