Online Harms Bill Misses the Senior Fraud Crisis

Ottawa says online safety matters. Good. Then explain why the concrete fraud crisis hitting seniors is still waiting for a hard public duties-and-reimbursement ledger.

Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, was introduced on June 10, 2026. The official Canadian Heritage page says it would enact the Digital Safety Act and the Digital Safety Commission of Canada Act, imposing duties on regulated social-media and AI chatbot services and creating a new commission to enforce the framework.

The bill page lists real design and safety obligations: identify risks, adopt measures, use safety-focused and age-appropriate design, publish user guidelines, offer blocking and flagging tools, and submit public digital safety plans. It also says Ottawa intends to implement a 16-year-old minimum age requirement for social-media accounts, subject to possible exemptions where safeguards are sufficient.

Child protection is a legitimate goal. But the accountability gap is glaring. Canada already has a measurable online-harm crisis in fraud, and seniors are often paying the highest price. The Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre says it received more than 112,000 fraud reports in 2025 involving more than $704 million in reported losses. Michael Geist, citing the centre’s reporting, notes that people over 60 lost more per incident than any other age group, with average individual losses exceeding $21,000.

This is not an abstract “awareness” problem. Fraudsters use spoofed calls, fake emails, social-media ads, AI impersonation, phony websites and stolen identifiers. Finance Canada’s anti-fraud discussion paper says reported losses exceeded $704 million in 2025 and, because only an estimated 5 to 10 percent of incidents are reported, the true impact is likely far higher. The same paper acknowledges the structural problem: existing rules are fragmented, businesses generally are not required to proactively detect, disrupt, prevent and respond to fraud, and card protections do not cover every account-based transaction, such as wire transfers.

That admission should be the starting gun, not the end of another consultation cycle. Ottawa has proposed bank rules requiring fraud-prevention policies, express consent before enabling some electronic-funds-transfer capabilities, customer controls for limits and account features, and fraud reporting to the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada. Useful — but incomplete.

A conservative accountability standard is simple: protect victims, not bureaucracy. If Ottawa can design a new online-safety commission and age gate, it can publish a senior-fraud protection ledger with enforceable dates. The ledger should show bank duties, telecom spoof-call blocking duties, digital-platform ad-verification and takedown duties, reporting metrics, complaint timelines, reimbursement rules, penalties for non-compliance and victim outcomes.

Canadians do not need a government that announces safety while leaving families to discover the gaps after their savings disappear. They need a government that makes banks, telecoms and platforms prove they are stopping fraud where it actually happens — and paying when their preventable failures leave victims holding the bill.