There are a number of unusual things about Bill S-210, Protecting Young Persons from Exposure to Pornography Act, a bill making its way through Parliament.
A project of Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne, S-210 would set up a structure — the exact shape of which is up for discussion — designed to keep minors away from porn online.
Unusually, at least on paper, S-210 has a much better chance of making it into law than a private member's bill opposed by the governing party in Parliament ordinarily might. With the Liberals in a minority and all opposition parties in favour, it has a non-zero chance of becoming law.
It's not clear how the provisions of S-210 would be enforced without a fairly sweeping age verification system backed by high-quality ID. Federal opposition leader Pierre Poilievre has said that a Conservative government would bring in such a system.
"(Poilievre) is proposing that adults should instead give their ID and personal information to sketchy websites, or create a digital ID for adults to be able to browse the web the way they want to," Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in February.
For her part, Miville-Dechêne has argued that "accredited third parties" could run a verification system.
If you're thinking that these are the kinds of practical details that are supposed to be hashed out in committee, that would normally be true, but the scheduled Commons committee sessions where MPs were supposed to have studied it were filibustered.
"While the focus of MPs is on sites like Pornhub, the bill is not limited to pornography sites. Rather, it applies to any site or service that makes sexually explicit materials available. This could include search engines, social media sites such as Twitter, or chat forums such as Reddit, where access to explicit material is not hard to find," wrote law professor and digital privacy expert Michael Geist.
"All of these sites would be required to implement age verification technologies, which raises serious privacy concerns and potential face scanning requirements."
Part of the problem with debating the issue — other than that any system could be circumvented with a VPN — is that it is uniquely fraught; politicians, depending on how they vote, can either be cast as supporting seedy pornographers or opposing privacy and freedom.
Canada is not the only country to struggle with the issue; the UK abandoned an effort to age-gate porn in 2019, and is now trying again.
“The squeamishness associated with pornography has made it nearly impossible to have a mature discussion about the technical feasibility, trade-offs, and effectiveness of age verification mandates,” said Matthew Lesh of the British think-tank the Institute of Economic Affairs.
There are strong differences on the issue on age and gender, and less strongly on income:
There is room to question whether the Conservatives would in fact bring in a system of this kind if they came to power. (All political parties are coalitions, sometimes rather uncomfortable ones; this issue sharply contrasts the party's social conservative and libertarian wings.)
To start with, opposition to the idea is closely correlated to Conservative support:
More broadly, opposition correlates with some of the Conservatives' signature issues:
Moving away from a strictly political lens, views correlate with a reader's openness (or not) to experiences involving the body that involve some choice between pleasure and risk, and perhaps the possibility of stigma:
The difference in this case turns out not to be between dog people and cat people, but between dog people and cat people on the one hand, and people who don't have or want pets, on the other.
And people who are in favour of curbs on online porn are less open to letting cats roam outdoors:
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