An old friend recently told me that his children’s biggest worry comes down to how they will raise their own children in a digital world dominated by social media.

The good news for that family and millions like them is that Ottawa is here to help. OK, maybe that’s not a phrase that inspires confidence, at least not while the deeply flawed Bill C-63, aka the Online Harms Act, continues its journey through Parliament. Second Reading resumed Monday. From there, the bill will go to committee, where amendments will be proposed and, if the government’s record on these matters is anything to go by, rejected. Following a similarly theatrical process in the Senate, the bill will become law, likely at some point in the winter.

The act is designed to appeal to those concerned for their children’s safety online, imposing a duty of care on platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok. In order to do that, it will create a new bureaucratic overlord, the Digital Safety Commission. The details of that body will apparently be developed exclusively by staff at Heritage Canada who, if their work on the Online Streaming Act and Online News Act is anything to go by, have an inadequate understanding of the internet and its intricacies.

Nevertheless, the protection of children from online harm is a noble pursuit and is being taken up by governments around the world. After years of avoiding the obvious, even school boards are catching up by banning the use of mobile devices in classrooms.

But the Online Harms Act is a totalitarian, freedom of expression-suppressing wolf in sheep’s clothing. The good parts about protecting children disguise its deeply troubling moves to expand the powers of the Human Rights Commission, chilling speech with the threat of $20,000 fines while enhancing Criminal Code hate speech laws by imposing life sentences and ordering house arrest in anticipation of what might be said.

There were also fears that the man responsible for the bill, Justice Minister Arif Virani, would try to impose time allocation to speed up passage of the bill but, so far, the troubling spectre of limiting debate on a bill with severe implications for freedom of speech has not materialized. Yet.

Nevertheless, Bill C-63 is problematic for opposition parties. How, after all, can they oppose the Online Harms Act and not be accused of therefore wishing to leave the nation’s children at the mercy of online predation?

Calgary MP and one-time Heritage critic Michelle Rempel Garner may have solved that problem, at least for the Conservatives. No sooner had Parliament resumed than she tabled a Private Members bill, Bill C-412, an Act to enact the Protection of Minors in the Digital Age Act and to amend the Criminal Code.

Its stated purpose:

to provide for a safe online environment for minors by requiring operators to take meaningful steps to protect them and address online risks to their health and well-being, including by putting their interests first and by ensuring that their personal data is not used in a manner that could compromise their privacy, health or well-being, such as by leading to the development of a negative self-image, loneliness or the inability to maintain relationships.

It, too, imposes a duty of care on the platforms, with fines of $25 million possible should they fail.

And, as Rempel Garner states in her Substack on the matter, it avoids the “Liberal’s dogmatic attachment to including a reinstatement of the highly controversial Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act.”

And: “rather than set up a costly $200M new bureaucracy that would move the conversation about online protections for children far into the future, and behind closed doors where tech lobbyists could manipulate the process, Bill C-412 proposes a clear, immediate legislated duty of care for online operators to keep kids safe.”

There have been some critical reviews of the bill, most of them centred around how platforms would be able to comply with a requirement that they must identify users “whom it knows or should reasonably know is a child”—something that raises the problematic spectre of digital IDs for the purpose of age verification. That, in Canada, is further complicated by the reality that not all provinces share the same age of majority.

It is significant, however, that Rempel Garner’s bill doesn’t impose a solution on this, leaving it up to the platforms to determine how they would manage this obligation. Given the public’s hostility to the concept of having to flash their driver’s license or other ID in order to watch an online movie, all indications are that the platforms will accept self-identification for age verification, supported by something called “age inference” derived from online behaviour.

YouTube, for instance, already requires users to be at least 13 years of age to sign up, allows for parental supervision of use from ages 13-17, and, if a user’s age is unknown, makes a default assumption that they are under 18.

There are always many devils in the details of legislation and there are legal minds likely to catch snags in Rempel Garner’s approach. How a new government would give the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) authority over the platforms if it also intends to repeal the Online Streaming Act is certainly one confusing factor. But, so far, even critics appear to acknowledge that whatever its shortcomings, Bill C-412 sure beats the alternative currently being debated in the House of Commons.

The Calgary Nose Hill MP has avoided the creation of a massive new bureaucracy, refused to expand the Human Rights Commission’s authority, and limited her amendments to the Criminal Code to the inclusion of Deep Fakes in its section covering the sharing of intimate images (something the Liberals inexplicably overlooked). She appears to have placed an emphasis on empowering victims and parents while giving platforms (all of which differ) flexibility in how they achieve their obligations.

As one source told me, her bill “demonstrates that legislation is possible without being authoritarian.”

Imagine that.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith announced on January 31 that her government would ban hormonal interventions for those under the age of 16 and gender transition surgeries under the age of 18. She recently reiterated that promise, though Alberta has yet to substantively act on this announcement. Geoff Russ weighed whether these policies were fair or went too far here in The Hub. I’d argue that not only is this the right policy approach but one that provincial governments around the country need to follow.

With every week that passes, new developments and stories illustrate the need for this policy change. For example, the National Post published a story of how an Ontario school called the Children’s Aid Society numerous times to report parents who didn’t support their grade five child’s gender transition and actively tried to hide their daughter’s social transition from the parents. And yet, the daughter’s transgender identity didn’t last. A medical transition would have been premature and ultimately a mistake.

It is important first to note that the goal of such gender-related hormonal and surgical interventions is to treat a very real problem. Gender dysphoria is a diagnosable clinical disorder, listed in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5-TR). Gender incongruence is the corresponding condition in the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11). The issue underlying these diagnoses is an incongruence between one’s biological sex and one’s self-identified gender. This incongruence can often lead to significant distress and even suicidal ideation.

Medical transitioning aims to alleviate this incongruence and the accompanying distress by transforming the body to match the mind. Puberty blockers prevent the development of undesired secondary sex characteristics. Opposite-sex hormones spur the development of the opposite secondary sex characteristics. Surgical interventions—vaginoplasties, mastectomies, and phalloplasties—remove sexual organs or create simulacra of sexual organs.

And yet, despite claims to the contrary, this treatment approach fails to solve the underlying problem. The independent Cass Review of the gender identity service in the United Kingdom found that there was no evidence to suggest that medical transitioning increased well-being. In fact, each of these medical interventions has a lengthy list of side effects that are well documented in the medical literature, including infertility, low bone density, and cardiovascular complications. As such, we know medical transitioning can harm well-being but there is little to no evidence that it can improve it.

A growing number of Western nations are reaching the same conclusions. Sweden, Finland, the United Kingdom, and a majority of American states have all drastically curtailed medical transitioning in recent years. While the lack of high-quality evidence to support medical transitioning holds true across the age spectrum, these jurisdictions have specifically focused on restricting these inventions for minors. Many more European countries, as presented in a new study by the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy, are articulating in legislation or regulation minimum ages, generally 16 or 18, for medical transitioning.

Yet here in Canada, every province (with the partial exception of Nova Scotia) fails to have minimum age requirements to access hormonal and surgical interventions. Government and media sources have reported that “bottom” surgery isn’t available to minors under the age of 18, though this author has yet to see any stated policy by a regulatory college or ministry of health that articulates such a policy. I filed a data request with the Canadian Institute of Health Information, however, and was able to verify that there have indeed been a handful of “bottom” surgeries performed on minors under the age of 18 in the past five years. Over three hundred teenage girls have had “top” surgeries, the youngest of whom was 14. Again, no minimum age for these procedures is specified.

When it comes to puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, there are also no legislative, regulatory, or policy age requirements. When it comes to these interventions, we don’t even know the extent of the problem. After repeated requests to CIHI, provincial ministries of health, and local health authorities, it seems that no medical body records the number of prescriptions for puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, much less the number of initial referrals to gender clinics for gender dysphoria.

One of the available sources is a 2016 study entitled “Trans Youth Can!” which documents exponential growth from perhaps 10 referrals for puberty blockers or gender-affirming hormones in 2004 to over 1000 referrals in 2016. That number today, eight years later, is likely far higher. In this area, Canada is an information vacuum.

And then there is the question of consent. Provincial and federal legislation requires minors to reach the age of majority to vote, get a tattoo, or even adopt a pet. If these decisions, which carry no irreversible implications to the long-term health and well-being of a human being, are reserved for the age of majority, how is it logically consistent to allow children and adolescents to legally consent to hormonal and surgical interventions?

Neuroscientists suggest that the human brain continues to develop until the age of 25. Social psychologists state that identities are particularly in flux during teenage years due to pubertal changes and peer influence. A growing number of people, like Michelle Zacchigna, who have medically transitioned have regretted their transition and detransitioned. And any parent will attest that the desires of their children are fickle.

This all suggests that the prudent policy would be to ban medical transitioning for minors.

A strong argument could be made that Canada should even go beyond minors and restrict the practice until prospective patients reach the age of 25 or review the practice for all adults, given the uncertainty of the long-term benefits of such a transition. Indeed, the U.K.’s Cass Review, which focused exclusively on pediatric gender services, has sparked a review of the adult gender services as well. We may or may not get to that point here in Canada too. But that is a different discussion to be had that reasonable people can disagree on, given its focus on the medical decisions of fully informed adults. With the issue of consent and the rapid rise of gender dysphoria among minors being focal points of this discussion, however, gender medicine for minors is certainly the arena where action is needed most urgently.

Until about a year ago, this issue might have been considered a third rail when it came to Canadian politics. As Hub contributor Dave Snow reported, the Canadian media was surprisingly silent when the groundbreaking Cass Review was released. The intellectual and political elites of the country have voiced how limiting medical transitioning would violate the rights of transgender youth.

But the Canadian public is onside with the idea that medical transitioning isn’t appropriate for minors. A Leger poll from February found that Canadians who oppose all gender reassignment surgeries for minors outnumbered those who support such surgeries without the need for parental consent by a margin of four to one. A nearly identical proportion oppose hormonal interventions for those under the age of 16. A Nanos poll a month later found that 42 percent of Canadians are uncomfortable with minors under the age of 18 accessing hormone therapy, while only 17 percent are comfortable with these interventions. These results are remarkably similar in provinces across Canada.

It is up to the provinces to act. Alberta has plans to introduce legislation this fall to limit medical transitions for minors. Other provinces need to follow suit. Various policy instruments could be on the table. Provinces could imitate Alberta and introduce comprehensive legislation on the topic. Ministries of health or justice could issue new regulations limiting medical transitioning to adults only. Premiers could choose not to fund hormonal or surgical interventions for minors in their public health plans. Or provincial colleges of physicians and surgeons could take a hard look at the evidence and growing international consensus and update their own clinical guidance.

Either way, medical transitioning for minors needs to be curtailed in Canada. The health and well-being of our children are at stake.