A slimmed-down, targeted Online Harms Act focusing entirely on child safety that forbids anyone under the age of 14 from accessing platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, X and TikTok is likely to be unopposed politically or by the public.Rick Rycroft/The Associated Press

Peter Menzies is a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

If regulating social media to protect children from online harms was a simple matter, the nation’s Culture and Identity Minister, Marc Miller, wouldn’t be vowing to “act swiftly” almost five years after the Liberals tabled their first effort at an online harms bill.

That initial legislation, titled Bill C-36, came two years after then-public safety minister Ralph Goodale first raised the issue. That triggered a year of public consultations before the government rolled out legislation that died when the 2021 election was called.

So, seven years after a problem was identified and legislative solutions were proposed, only to die, twice, on the order paper, the government is now promising to “act swiftly?” The shiny-faced seven-year-old child that Mr. Goodale might have first worried about is now a 14-year-old with whom having a conversation is almost impossible because their face is always staring at a phone.

There are multiple ways to explain the delay, but the most obvious is that the government’s previous efforts to address online harms attempted to do a lot more than........

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