Across much of the western world, governments are beginning to recognize the harmful effects of pornography, particularly on young people.  

In the United States, 24 states have passed age-verification legislation, requiring viewers of pornography to verify that they are over the age of 18. Most of these states have also called pornography a public health crisis because of the range of negative impacts it has on society. A bill in the U.S. Senate is seeking to implement age-verification requirements across the country. 

The United Kingdom and France have also passed age-verification requirements that are coming into effect this year. Because of France’s age-verification law, Pornhub, one of the largest pornography websites in the world, blocked access to its website in France rather than comply with age-verification. Pornhub similarly blocked access to its site in 17 U.S. states in response to their age-verification laws. In a society where pornography has been easily accessible to anyone at any age, such laws are reducing ease of access to pornography.  

Before the last federal election, Senator Julie Miville-Dechene introduced Bill S-210, which would have implemented age-verification standards in Canada. You can read more about ARPA’s support for Bill S-210 here. Bill S-210 passed the Senate and only had 3rd reading left in the House of Commons, but the bill died on the order paper when the 2025 federal election was called. At 2nd reading in the House of Commons, the bill had received unanimous support from Conservative, Bloc Quebecois, NDP, and Green MPs, as well as over a dozen Liberals.  

Now that Parliament is sitting again, Senator Miville-Dechene reintroduced a slightly revised bill, Bill S-209. The Bill has already passed 2nd reading in the Senate and will be studied in Committee.  

Bill S-209 

Bill S-209 is an important initiative to protect children from pornography. The bill’s purpose is “to protect public health and public safety and, in particular, to 

(a) protect the mental health of young persons by restricting their access to pornographic material; 

(b)  protect Canadians — in particular, young persons and women — from the harmful effects of the exposure of young persons to pornographic material, including demeaning material and material depicting sexual violence; and 

(c) deter organizations that make pornographic material available on the Internet for commercial purposes from allowing young persons to access that material.” 

Bill S-209 would require companies to verify that a person is over the age of 18 before they can view pornography online.  Currently, in Canada, children can easily access pornography online without verifying their age. Bill S-209 would require effective age-verification, which refers to using physical or digital identity documents to verify age, or age-estimation technology, such as facial scans or other biometric or behavioural scans. Specific, effective methods would be determined by a government regulatory body following the bill’s passage.  

If an organization fails to verify age and allows a young person to access pornography, it may be subject to fines of $250,000 for a first offence, or $500,000 for subsequent offences. If a site fails to comply with the regulations, the government agency in charge of enforcing the law can apply to a court to have the site blocked in Canada.  

Moving Forward 

The previous version of this legislation came close to becoming law and it’s great to see another attempt early in this new Parliament. Despite support on both sides of the political spectrum, the bill will face criticism from those who fear government regulation of the internet or worry about privacy concerns. But this law is an important step in combatting pornography in Canada.  

Today, online pornography is not only much more extreme, but also much easier to obtain and view secretly than it once was.  The intent of age-verification laws is to protect children from accessing pornography. But if it has the added impact of making it more difficult for adults to access pornography and thus reducing overall consumption and addiction, or if it results in sites like Pornhub blocking access in Canada, it will be an added benefit. 

Of course, parents need to understand the impact of pornography and how to protect their children from it as well. But parents cannot hold pornography companies accountable with the force of the law like governments can. While more can be done to combat pornography, Bill S-209 is an important place to start.  

As this bill moves through the Senate, send an EasyMail to your senators, asking them to better protect children from pornography and to support Bill S-209.  

ARPA Canada has a new policy report on pornography that seeks to answer the question: What can (and should) governments do about pornography?

The pornography industry is one of the most prominent drivers of sex trafficking. Pornography is also often used to groom women and children into further sexual exploitation. Porn sites often include videos and images of violent pornography and pornographic content featuring minors. Pornography is often uploaded without the consent of those depicted, and it is nearly impossible to have such content permanently removed from the internet.   

Pornography is inherently dehumanizing, treating people (especially women and girls) as objects and seeing their worth in their ability to satisfy sexual desires. Pornography objectifies and degrades human beings made in the image of God. It is also forbidden by the seventh commandment, which encompasses looking at a woman lustfully (Matthew 5:28).

Pornography is so pervasive that the website Pornhub alone receives roughly 4 million unique user visits per day in Canada, or about 10% of the entire Canadian population. Pornography use is highly addictive, often destroying relationships and changing users’ attitudes and beliefs about sex. It is a scourge on our society and should be combatted.

Restricting Pornography

The Canadian Criminal Code does not explicitly mention pornography except in the context of child pornography. However, it does prohibit obscenity, defined as “any publication a dominant characteristic of which is the undue exploitation of sex, or of sex and any one or more of the following subjects, namely, crime, horror, cruelty and violence.” According to the law, much of the pornography that circulates online today would be considered obscene. But the law is poorly enforced.

There have been attempts in recent years to better restrict pornography in Canada. Bill C-270, introduced in the House of Commons in 2022, seeks to prohibit the creation of pornographic material for a commercial purpose without verifying the age and consent of those shown. It also seeks to create an offence for failing to remove videos or images for which consent has been withdrawn.

In 2021, Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne introduced Bill S-210, which seeks to prevent sexually explicit material from being made available to young people on the internet. It would do so by requiring pornography companies or internet service providers to reliably verify the age of potential users.

Other jurisdictions, including the United Kingdom, Australia, and France, have been implementing age-verification processes due to the high numbers of children who are being exposed to pornography. Canada should follow their lead.

Updated Policy Report

ARPA Canada recently published a revised and updated Respectfully Submitted policy report on pornography. In this report, we consider practical ways that the government can (and should) limit pornography in Canada. This report was first published in 2017 and has now been updated to reflect political and legal developments in Canada and other countries.

Canadian MPs and Senators are considering how they should restrict pornography, at least in certain areas. We encourage you to read through the report and connect with your representatives to encourage them to read it as well. Please contact us at [email protected] if you have any feedback, suggestions for improvement, or other questions on the report.

– A new private member’s Bill C-367 addressing hate speech;

– The Senate bill S-210 on pornography is up for a vote in the House of Commons; https://staging.arpacanada.ca/articles/pornography-as-a-public-health-threat-2/

– A request for prayer as the Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying puts together its recommendations;

– A message from Andre Schutten as he moves on to a new chapter.

Pornography consumption is a major public health issue in Canada. Scientific studies have associated watching pornography with:

Health policy analysts sometimes talk about the “social cost” of unhealthy behaviours, especially drinking and smoking. The idea of “social cost” is that a person’s poor health choice costs society as much, if not more, than it costs that person, in terms of increased health care costs and risks to others, such as from impaired driving. Consuming pornography has social costs as well in terms of loneliness, anxiety, sexual dysfunction, and even sexually abusive and degrading behaviours.

The impact of porn on the Canadian population is apparent even without the scientific studies. Consider the number of people trying to quit porn and the number of relationships damaged by it. Churches and private groups all over Canada run 12-step programs and support groups for those genuinely addicted to pornography.

Canada’s “Home-Grown” Abuse Industry

Canadians on average are not occasional porn watchers. Canada ranks seventh in the world for visits to Pornhub and the average Canadian spends ten minutes a day on that one site, not to mention all the other pornographic websites. 

Pornhub’s parent company, MindGeek, is a Canadian company located in Montréal. MindGeek is a pornography powerhouse. It owns eleven other profitable pornography websites. Just for some perspective, several of MindGeek’s websites have more visits than Netflix.

MindGeek, like most commercial pornographic websites, profits heavily from exploitation, particularly the exploitation of women and children. In 2020 the New York Times published an investigative journalism piece that detailed the astonishing amount of rape, assault, and underage material on Pornhub, as well as the lengths it had gone to deny any problem existed. ARPA Canada has been advocating for better public policy on this issue for years. You can read about our work here, here, and here. That New York Times article led to the House of Commons’ Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy, and Ethics producing a report in 2021 that recommended that the government of Canada:

At the time, the Prime Minister promised to pass legislation that requires “online platforms to remove all illegal content.” His government introduced a bill to implement the Standing Committee’s fourth recommendation – but that bill, and another bill addressing this issue in the Senate, died with the 2021 election. Since then, it seems the topic is no longer such a political cause célèbre and the government dropped it.

It’s Not Over Yet

Thankfully, some MPs and Senators are unwilling to leave Canada’s porn problem unaddressed. Bill S-210, the Protecting Young Persons from Exposure to Pornography Act will, if passed, require any organization hosting sexually explicit material online to implement meaningful age verification. The Senate has passed the bill. It is now up to elected MPs to pass it into law.  Doing so would represent a huge step forward in curbing Canada’s porn habit. Please ask your MP to support this bill.

Send an EasyMail!

(At the bottom of this article is a call to action: Please write an EasyMail to your senators asking them to act to protect young people from exposure to pornography)

Our Government’s Lopsided Public Health Priorities

Did you know that our federal government has a system that monitors how many people in Canada may or may not have Mad Cow Disease? Well, they do. It’s called the Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease Surveillance System, or CJDSS for short.

When someone gets a disease even somewhat like Mad Cow, their doctor reports the patient to provincial and federal health authorities. That patient then enters the CJDSS. The CJDSS doctors and scientists complete a full medical review of the patient and interview their family. They might even use DNA sequencing. It all seems pretty high-tech.

This monitoring system started in 1998 after a Mad Cow outbreak in the United Kingdom, where 178 people died after eating infected beef. Canada had its own “Mad Cow Crisis” from 2003 to 2005 when a black angus cow from northern Alberta tested positive for the bacteria that causes Mad Cow. Forty countries worldwide banned Canadian cattle from arriving on their shores.

During that time, the value of Canada’s beef market went from 4.1 billion dollars to “nearly zero” according to Statistics Canada. The good news is that Mad Cow Disease and other similar diseases are extremely rare. The Alzheimer Society of Canada reports that doctors make only “about one or two diagnoses per million people each year” of the most common Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

The takeaway here? Even rare health conditions matter to the authorities.

Our federal government is dedicated to public health.

Except when it isn’t.

Pornography as a Public Health Issue

One public health issue our governments are seemingly unwilling to recognize and deal with is Canada’s porn habit. Pornography consumption in Canada can easily be described as a public health issue. After all, scientific studies have associated watching pornography with:

Health policy analysts sometimes talk about the “social cost” of people who take voluntary health risks. Typically, they are talking about personal decisions to drink or smoke. The basic idea of “social cost” is that your poor health choice costs society as much, if not more, than it costs you, in terms of increased demands on health care, potentially dangerous driving, etc. It’s easy to see that watching pornography has social costs as well – a lonely, anxious, dissatisfied, sexually abusive population is going to be costly.

The thing is, you don’t have to read an academic report to see porn’s effect on the Canadian population. All you need to do is look around at the number of people trying to quit. Churches and private groups all over Canada run 12-step programs and support groups for those genuinely addicted to pornography.

Canada’s “Home-Grown” Abuse Industry

It’s not like Canadians are occasional porn watchers. No, Canada ranks seventh in the world for visits to Pornhub alone. The average Canadian spends ten minutes a day on Pornhub, not to mention all the other websites where you can access sexually explicit material. It’s also worth noting that Pornhub’s parent company, MindGeek, is a Canadian company located in Montréal. MindGeek is a pornography powerhouse. It owns eleven other commercially successful pornography websites. Just for some perspective, several of MindGeek’s websites have more global visits than Netflix.

MindGeek, like most commercial pornographic websites, profits heavily from exploitation, particularly the exploitation of women and children. In 2020 the New York Times published an investigative journalism piece that detailed the astonishing amount of rape, assault, and underage material on Pornhub, as well as the lengths it had gone to deny any problem existed. ARPA Canada was heavily involved in covering and advocating for change on this issue. You can read about our work here, here, and here. The news article led to the House of Commons’ Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy, and Ethics producing a report that recommended that the government of Canada:

At the time, the Prime Minister promised to pass legislation that requires “online platforms to remove all illegal content.” His government did introduce legislation that implemented the Standing Committee’s fourth recommendation – but that bill, and another bill addressing this issue in the Senate, died with the 2021 election.

Since then, the ruling Liberals have not tried to reintroduce the amendments to the Mandatory Reporting Act. It seems that now that the topic is no longer the political cause célèbre, our officials have dropped it.

It’s Not Over Yet

Thankfully, there are those unwilling to let Canada’s porn problem slip silently back to the former status quo. Right now, in the Senate, there is a bill called Bill S-210, the Protecting Young Persons from Exposure to Pornography Act. The bill would require any organization hosting sexually explicit material online to implement age verification. The idea is that anyone wanting to get on a porn website would have to go through an online process verifying their age. This would be a real process, not just checking a box that says you are 18 or over. Instead, a third-party system would verify your age using a person’s government data and then delete the data after verifying. Doing so would represent a huge step forward in curbing Canada’s porn habit.

What Can You Do?

Now that the Senate is sitting again, Bill S-210 is likely due for its “third reading.” We would love to see this Bill pass the Senate and move to the House of Commons. One thing you can do to help is to write an EasyMail asking your senators to back the bill and protect young people from exposure to pornography.