Canada's proposed Online Harms Act (Bill C-63) and platforms like Reddit

On 26 February 2024 the Canadian government introduced Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act, in the 44th Parliament. The bill proposed a comprehensive regulatory regime for social-media operators — a category that would encompass platforms such as Reddit — built around new statutory duties to address harmful online content and overseen by new institutions: a Digital Safety Commission of Canada, a Digital Safety Ombudsperson, and a Digital Safety Office.

The legislation focused on seven categories of harmful content, including child sexual abuse material, intimate images shared without consent (including deepfakes), content that sexually victimises a child or revictimises a survivor, content used to bully a child, content that induces a child to harm themselves, content that foments hatred, and content that incites violence or violent extremism or terrorism. Operators would be obliged to mitigate the risk that users are exposed to such content, to put in place tools and processes, and to submit digital safety plans to the regulator.

Notably, the bill's drafters emphasised that it would not require platforms to proactively monitor or scan all user content as a general rule, though specific obligations around the most serious categories — particularly child sexual abuse material — contemplated stronger duties. Supporters framed the regime as bringing Canada into line with the European Union's Digital Services Act and the United Kingdom's Online Safety Act, while critics raised concerns about scope, enforcement powers, and the bill's separate provisions touching hate-speech definitions.

For Reddit, the bill was significant as proposed regulation rather than as any enforcement action: there was no Canadian proceeding against Reddit under C-63. The platform, like other large operators, would have fallen within the regime's scope had it been enacted, exposing it to digital-safety-plan requirements and the oversight of the proposed commission. The bill thus represented the kind of structural regulatory pressure Reddit increasingly faced across multiple jurisdictions, distinct from content-specific or data-protection actions.

Ultimately the bill did not become law in that Parliament. When Parliament was prorogued and then dissolved, Bill C-63 lapsed without being enacted, a common fate for legislation that has not completed passage before a parliamentary session ends. Its introduction nonetheless documented the direction of Canadian policy and the expanding global expectation that platforms such as Reddit assume formal, regulator-supervised duties of care over the content they host — even where, as in Canada, the specific statute stalled.