Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne Suffers Complete Meltdown in Profanity, Disinformation Filled Rant Against The Globe and Mail

The Globe and Mail published an opinion piece criticizing Bill S-210. In response, senator Julie Miville-Dechêne had a complete meltdown over it.

Yesterday, we covered how the Canadian government has fallen back into their old ways of attacking anyone critical of their legislative approach. In that case, they dismissed all criticism towards Bill C-63, the Online Harms bill, as little more than “clickbait“. The incident proved, yet again, that the government just can’t handle criticism of any kind and will default to throwing a temper tantrum in response.

If you find yourself honestly believing that this problem is exclusive to the Liberal side of the aisle, you are very very wrong on that assumption. Bill S-210, Canada’s so-called “age verification” bill is the Conservative backed internet censorship bill that was written by the fever dreams of senator Julie Miville-Dechêne and the companies that are likely bribing lobbying her in the hopes of scoring a massive long running payday out of it all.

To be clear, Bill S-210 is a bad bill. As we found in our analysis, the legislation suffers from numerous critically flawed problems. This includes unclear definitions on “explicit” material, no limits on which website is scoped into the legislation, mass internet censorship by the government, no response to circumventing technology, requirements to hoover up huge quantities of personal information of every Canadian, and unenforceable privacy protections where there is no repercussions for refusing to comply with the vague “destruction” requirements. In short, it’s a badly written bill that is likely to be unconstitutional.

The Globe and Mail Op-Ed

Recently, the Globe and Mail published an opinion piece raising several of these concerns. The article mentions how protecting children from pornographic material, but says that the proposed solution is not exactly going to help:

There is merit to that concern, but the proposed solution glosses over enormous – some insurmountable – technical difficulties and privacy concerns.

There are a host of critical issues not been spelled out in the bill: How, if at all, a minor’s age could be verified; what agency would enforce the rules; and, most critically, how regulators would determine what is sexually explicit material.

Ms. Miville-Dechêne says there are several viable options for age verification. But critics, including University of Ottawa professor Michael Geist, question that assertion, noting that other countries have struggled to implement similar regimes.

Current face-recognition technology, for instance, would fail at its main test – distinguishing between a 17-year-old and an 18-year-old. The Conservatives, meanwhile, support the bill but oppose the idea of a digital ID.

The comments here are actually very accurate. There have been several court rulings on age verification and similar laws in the US that ruled that these efforts are, in fact, unconstitutional. This is because it violates America’s first amendment. French regulator, the CNIL, examined several age verification schemes and found that none of them pass muster. Another example is the Australian government (of all people) finding that age verification schemes are unworkable security nightmares.

Simply put, age verification systems that exist today are not secure, do a poor job at actually verifying people’s ages, and such schemes are legally problematic in countries that protect freedom of expression.

What’s more, research does conclude that facial recognition software struggles hard with identifying people’s ages. So, one can easily find evidence to back up these comments.

The comments from the Globe continue with this:

Even if those technological hurdles can be overcome, there is a bigger problem: any geographically based limitations are easily bypassed through the use of virtual private networks. That fact alone could render useless any attempt at age verification.

This is, again, accurate. Once a VPN (Virtual Private Network) is used, the system envisioned by Bill S-210 is rendered completely worthless. I’ll even throw in the use of the TOR network as another method that can easily bi-pass such restrictions. What’s more, it is known that people have set up their own personal VPN service in another country where internet restrictions are few and far between. The legislation simply has no response to this. What’s more, the backers of the bill simply rely on the argument that children are too stupid to understand this newfangled technology in the first place to actually use it. I’m going to tell you right now that this is a really REALLY bad assumption to make.

The Globe also had this to say:

And then there are the conceptual limits of the bill. What about private groups on platforms such as Reddit or Discord that don’t look like the usual providers of online content?

And what will happen with sexually explicit material appearing on X (formerly Twitter) or through a Google search? Ms. Miville-Dechêne says such organizations would only need to apply age verification to the sexually explicit portion of their site. Just how Google would go about that task is, to say the least, murky.

The bill is also vague on what mechanism would be used to enforce its rules. Perhaps it could become part of the writ of the Digital Safety Commission that the Liberals have proposed in their Online Harms Act. Or would that be the job of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission?

Again, I see nothing wrong with these comments. The text of the bill contains no limits on who is in and who is out of the bill. It just says that internet websites must abide by these laws, period. No matter how many times the bills supporters claim otherwise, the text of the bill simply never backed up the claims that the legislation is only aimed at adult websites.

What’s more, we are taking who defines “explicit” material out of the hands of a private entity like Google and placing it directly in the hands of busy body government officials who may very well conclude that information on, say, gender affirming care is “explicit” and demand such information be removed from the internet entirely. Age verification laws already have a long history of being a cover for right wing ideology driven individuals to rid the internet of anything related to the LGBTQ+ community and this legislation is unlikely to be an exception to that.

One more thing worth highlighting here is this:

Those are all practical objections to Bill S-210, but there is a philosophical problem as well. At the heart of Ms. Miville-Dechêne’s bill is the assumption that Parliament, not parents, should take the lead in keeping pornography away from minors.

But if there are values to be imparted – a healthy view of sex, for instance – a child’s parents should be the first, and ideally the last, stop.

This ultimately strikes at the heart of the problem. Is it right for the government to impose their values on children, pushing parents aside in the process? There’s numerous arguments that reasonably point to “no” in this matter. What’s more, education has long been considered the best tool to protect children against alleged harms of pornographic material. That is with very good reason as no other method has even come close to doing a better job in this area. The legislation itself is basically the lawmakers way of saying that parents are incapable of doing their jobs across the board. It’s a position that is, quite frankly, downright insulting to parents everywhere.

So, in reading this article, I really couldn’t find anything particularly wrong here. The author accurately highlighted the numerous problems of the bill, understood how technology works, and found that there are a lot of very serious issues with the bill as the law intersects with technology. I did my own fact-checking here and the points raised checks out as well. So, what more could you ask, right?

Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne Goes into Complete Meltdown

Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne, for her part, didn’t take too kindly to these very reasonable criticisms of her bill. the thin skinned senator took to X/Twitter to hurl expletives towards the Globe and Mail in a series of images. This was accompanied with a text version of her rant. The senator seemingly defended children by screaming at the Globe and Mail to “look out the fucking window which I’m sure children everywhere needed to read.

The text relies on the debunked “FAQ” which was packed full is misinformation and demonstrably false claims. Many of those claims were repeated in her rant in an apparent effort to repeat the same lie over and over again until it supposedly rings true.

Part of their response reads as follows:

The article contains five fundamental flaws.

FIRST: The Globe writes:

Ms. Miville-Dechêne says there are several viable options for age verification. But critics, including University of Ottawa professor Michael Geist, question that assertion, noting that other countries have struggled to implement similar regimes. Current face-recognition technology, for instance, would fail at its main test – distinguishing between a 17-year-old and an 18-year-old.

This is a perfect illustration of a famous journalism maxim: If someone says it’s raining and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out the f*cking window and find out which is true.

Now, obviously, this response to the quote isn’t actually a counterpoint to what was said. All that is is a temper tantrum being thrown by the senator and her team.

The rant also went into some pretty ridiculous thought exercises in the process:

If the Globe had looked out the window, it might have found that:

• The German Commission for Youth Media Protection has already approved close to 100 age-verification concepts;
• Following the adoption of the UK Online Safety Bill – which includes mandatory age-verification to access online pornography – the UK Communications regulator recently identified six broad categories of age-verification methods that it considers could be “highly effective”;
• In France, where mandatory age verification to access online porn has been the law for a few years already, the CNIL is currently refining a new, “double anonymous” age-verification method that would be both highly effective and highly protective of privacy; and
• In its brief to the Senate, the Age Verification Providers Association (AVPA) testified that “Online age verification technology already exists; it is effective and already checking thousands of users a day for purchases as diverse as knives, fireworks, alcohol and betting. (…) Age verification can be designed to protect completely the identity of the users, by separating the age verification process from the age restricted websites which apply it, and by not retaining any personal identity data after checks have been completed.”

You can’t help but give the senator a giant facepalm with all of that. The heart of the problem here is that there is no technology that is sufficient at accomplishing what is set out in the legislation. For the German example, just because it was approved doesn’t necessarily mean that they actually work. For all we know, the German Commission could’ve approved a potato to handle age verification. With the aforementioned other instances where countries have been finding the technology highly questionable whether on a privacy, legal, or effective front, the first point screams cherry picking of information.

With regards to the second point about the UK Online Safety Bill, if you classify the Online Safety Bill as any kind of gold standard, it’s time to re-evaluate your position. The UK Online Safety Bill has been routinely cited by civil rights organizations as a fatally flawed bill for a huge variety of reasons. While there are numerous reasons why that bill is so controversial, one aspect was, specifically, about its age verification requirements. In that regard, the Open Rights Group had this to say about it:

The Online Safety Bill requires sites that allow user generated content, such as Facebook, Tik Tok, and even Wikipedia, to prevent children from seeing content the government has defined as ‘harmful’. This could present platforms with the choice of sanitising their sites so that all content is considered suitable for children or asking users to verify their ages through government-issued documents or by using biometric data, such as face scans, to estimate ages.

James Baker, campaigns manager for Open Rights Group said:

“The Online Safety Bill could present websites like Wikipedia, Tik Tok and Twitter with the choice of blocking content to ensure their platforms are suitable for children or forcing users to verify their age. The first would lead to a huge restriction in the content we can all see, create and share. The second would pose a threat to our privacy and security.

“Keeping children safe online is a worthy goal but we need to ensure that we do not restrict children’s right to information by banning them from large swathes of the internet, or expose them to intrusive age assurance.

Age verification

Tech platforms may be compelled to introduce age verification, which usually involves confirming a user matches with government issued identification, or age assurance, which typically estimates the age or age range of a user based on their appearance. The briefing notes that “every age verification method has significant flaws”. France’s National Commission on Informatics and Liberty (CNIL) published a detailed analysis of current age verification and assurance methods. It found that no method has the following three important elements: “sufficiently reliable verification, complete coverage of the population, and respect for the protection of individuals’ data and privacy and their security.”

Last week, the Australian federal government rejected similar proposals over concerns about privacy.

The fact that the senator is using the Online Safety Bill to defend her legislation shows comically poor judgment on the senators part.

With regard to the third point, the comments grossly misrepresent what CNIL actually had to say. Over top of the aforementioned finding that the CNIL found no method that both respected user privacy as well as offered an effective solution to verify people’s ages, the mentioned “double anonymous” was a theory that the regulator proposed, not an existing technology.

With regard to the last point about the Age Verification Providers Association (AVPA) saying that their age verification systems work, that honestly should be laughed at on the face of it. Of course an organization who is building this dubious technology will say that their technology works. Why wouldn’t they say that? After all, they stand to rake in millions if this law passes, so of course they will say anything to ensure such a law is passed. The organization is arguably one of, if not, the least credible voices in this debate in the first place, yet the senator trots their talking points like it is the strongest point she has. The fact that this talking point was even used shows remarkably poor judgment on the senators part.

Rant Fails to Address the Technological Concerns of Age Verification Technology

From there, the senator apparently had this to say:

Furthermore, it is disingenuous to state that the “main test” of age verification is “distinguishing between a 17-year-old and an 18-year-old”. The purpose of the law, and any approved age-verification method, is to prevent children – and especially younger children – from freely accessing adult content.

That response doesn’t even address the concern raised. The concern raised was that the facial recognition software would have a hard time distinguishing between a 17 year old and an 18 year old. This goes back to the fatal problem of the bill where it envisions a technology that doesn’t exist. That technology being an age verification system that reliably verifies a persons age while, at the same time, maintaining the users privacy and addressing all concerns about free speech. This speaks to the fact that supporters of the legislation simply have no viable counterarguments in their efforts to defend the legislation.

Remarkably, the senator then relied heavily on a sales brochure from the organization representing these age verification creators:

According to the AVPA, “for a jurisdiction with legal age restriction of 18, and a threshold set to 25 years, the latest technology’s current mean error rate is 0.15%.” This means that automated systems are capable of distinguishing between users under 18 and those over 25 with 99.85% accuracy. For users who appear to be between 18 and 25, a second verification may be necessary – just like we do everyday for 18- to 25-year-olds trying to access alcohol, cigarettes, and pornography in the real world.

The assurance falls completely flat because it relies heavily on an organization who is financially motivated to see this legislation pass.

The senator then proceeded to mislead everyone with this:

Like all processes approved under Bill S-210, this verification method would have to be reliable; maintain user privacy; collect and use personal information solely for age-verification purposes; destroy any personal information once the verification is completed; and generally comply with best practices.

This is demonstrably misleading designed to deceive the reader. There are no provisions in the legislation that prescribe penalties for not protecting people’s privacy here. Even worse, existing privacy laws in Canada also contain no provisions that allow government to issue fines against companies who violate people’s privacy. Simply put, the laughably weak privacy provisions in the legislation are completely unenforceable. The comment that they must comply with “best practices” is meaningless because there’s no such thing as “best practices” in the first place.

No Response to Technological Means to Circumvent the Law

The senator then had this to say:

SECOND: The Globe writes:

Even if those technological hurdles can be overcome, there is a bigger problem: any geographically based limitations are easily bypassed through the use of virtual private networks. That fact alone could render useless any attempt at age verification.

The argument here is that Bill S-210 is useless because there might be ways to circumvent the law.

It’s true that some individuals may be able to evade age verification through VPNs and other devices. But the relevant question is: how prevalent do we think this would be in the case of the children we are trying to protect? In the UK, a 2017 report by Ofcom found that only 6% of 12-15 year-olds had in fact bypassed restrictions placed on access to online porn. It’s safe to assume that children under 12 are even less capable and interested in doing so. I’m not personally concerned about 30-year-olds using VPNs to avoid age verification.

This is a repeat of the assertion made in the debunked “FAQ” which says that, yes, VPN’s can circumvent such age gating, but kids are too stupid to figure that out, so therefore, it’s no big deal. I mean, wow, just wow. The entire point is the fact that this is a poorly conceived bill because it doesn’t even consider the technological realities of today. The senator responds by shrugging and saying, “yeah, my law is ineffective, so what?” The fact that the senator is relying on the idea that it might be effective for some people means it’s a worthwhile cause to push this law in the first place. The senator should be giving her head a shake at that.

The senator then goes completely off the deep end with this:

In Canada, teenagers succeed in acquiring alcohol, tobacco, and illegal substances every day, despite the legal prohibitions in effect. Is the Globe suggesting that we should abolish these laws and regulations because some manage to bypass them? Or does the possibly-circumventable-and-therefore-useless logic only apply online?

First of all, this is a false equivalence. The law makes no distinction between adult websites and every other website. Laws governing the sale of tobacco cover stores that actually sell tobacco. It is only at the point of sale that verification of someone’s age is confirmed.

In order to make the comparison between this and the law, we must completely re-envision how such tobacco laws are enforced. Instead, every building everywhere, regardless of its purpose must be age gated on the mere possibility that there might be tobacco in there. Want to visit a Gamestop? Age gate. Want to visit a friends house? Age gate. Need to use an out house in the middle of nowhere? Age gate. Every website everywhere must have an age gate on the mere possibility that a minor could somehow be exposed to material deemed “explicit” or otherwise face harsh penalties. We, as a society, don’t apply that logic to tobacco sales and we certainly have no reason to treat the internet any differently here.

Second, the Globe never said that if a law is imperfect, then it should be abolished. What the piece argued was that the proposed legislation is fundamentally flawed and would do little to solve the problems it seeks out to solve in the first place.

Ultimately, that paragraph alone is disinformation in two ways. First, it intentionally misrepresents the effects of Bill S-210 in order to deceive. Second, it completely misrepresents the arguments that were made in the Globe piece. By extension, it also misrepresents what the criticisms actually are in the first place.

The Rant Turns to Social Media

The rant then turns to this:

THIRD: The Globe writes:

And then there are the conceptual limits of the bill. What about private groups on platforms such as Reddit or Discord that don’t look like the usual providers of online content? And what will happen with sexually explicit material appearing on X (formerly Twitter) or through a Google search? Ms. Miville-Dechêne says such organizations would only need to apply age verification to the sexually explicit portion of their site. Just how Google would go about that task is, to say the least, murky.

Bill S-210 does not target specific sites or platforms. It focuses only on sexually explicit material, as defined in the Criminal Code. At section 6(1), the bill specifically provides that age-verification methods must be implemented to limit access “to the sexually explicit material”. So, for example, if a website contains 20% of porn content and 80% of non-porn content, age verification would only be mandatory for the 20% portion. This is how we deal with alcohol, tobacco, gambling, and porn in the real world, and it’s only logical to apply the same approach online. This is also how the UK has dealt with the issue in its Online Safety Bill (see section 81(2)) which had the good sense of mandating age verification to access online porn, contrary to the bill introduced by the Canadian government.

So, essentially, the senator disputes the point by… confirming the point being made. If you want, the text of the bill is clear on this front:

5 Any organization that, for commercial purposes, makes available sexually explicit material on the Internet to a young person is guilty

So, hilariously, the senator is right. The law doesn’t target one particular website. It targets everyone. If you are running ads of any kind (like 90% of all websites out there) or ask for donations (like a small subset of websites), you are roped into this legislation. There’s no waffling, no nuances to read in to, or any of that. This is plain as day. Supporters of this legislation have long argued that this legislation only targets adult websites. The senator, herself, inadvertently debunked that myth herself here which is something I find completely hilarious.

What’s more, the points the senator raised here, again, don’t address the concerns raised in the Globe piece. The concern raised by the Globe was how a platform would moderate that content in the first place. After all, platforms like Facebook and YouTube rely on user generated content. It’s not even close to a store (as the senator loves to compare it to). Users are uploading content onto platforms to the tune of millions of posts every day (volume varies from platform to platform). The senator assumes that all content is already neatly defined when, in fact, it is not because new content is posted every day.

Not only that, but a key concern is who defines “explicit” content in the first place. This is a concern raised by the Globe. Is it the CRTC? Is it another governmental body? Who knows? The bill isn’t really that clear on that. that isn’t even getting into where the line is drawn between “educational” material and “explicit” material. If an organization, for instance, has information on the sexual health of gay men, for instance, someone is, guaranteed, going to refer to that as “explicit” material. Supporters of the legislation may argue that the “educational” defence will apply here, but those making the complaint will argue that such material is clearly in the category of content for “a sexual purpose”. In that case, the legislation falls apart in that scenario.

One Last Swing (And a Miss)

The senator then decided to grasp at straws:

FIFTH: The Globe writes:

Those are all practical objections to Bill S-210, but there is a philosophical problem as well. At the heart of Ms. Miville-Dechêne’s bill is the assumption that Parliament, not parents, should take the lead in keeping pornography away from minors. But if there are values to be imparted – a healthy view of sex, for instance – a child’s parents should be the first, and ideally the last, stop.

Ah, finally, the cat is out of the bag. Seeing how thin the “practical objections” really are, the Globe concludes with the only true argument it has: ideology. In this case, an almost religious belief in the tyranny of government and in the exclusive omnipotence of parents.

This response displays an extraordinarily amount of projection. It’s actually the senator who has this religious belief that porn is somehow corrupting the youth of the nation. This sort of thing has never happened before in human history (because dirty magazines, late night television, and graffiti clearly has never existed) and it is up to the senator to heroically save the nations children by passing this law envisioning technology that has never been conceived of before. Somehow, that will make everything all better and stop children from turning into sexual maniacs… or something.

As demonstrated throughout the senators rants, her team relied on talking points of dubious origins, strained talking points, deception, misrepresentation of the facts, or outright fabrications to sell her legislation. It’s a bill that the senator herself has now admitted to be ineffective.

The senator then takes one last swing by pretending that she is part of a consensus:

Thankfully, anti-age verification philosophers seem to be in the minority in Canada and elsewhere. In its brief to the Senate, the International Centre on Sexual Exploitation writes: “Public opinion surveys from other democratic countries have found that the majority of adults support implementing age verification to protect children from pornography exposure. For example, 2019 research in the United Kingdom found that 83% of parents agreed that there should be robust age verification controls in place to stop children from viewing pornography online. 2021 research from Australia found that 78% of adults supported age verification to prevent childhood pornography exposure.”

This, for obvious reasons, is an outright lie. The general consensus is that this legislation is an unconstitutional mess. You don’t have to take my word, or the word of Michael Geist for it. You can also take it from experts like Emily Laidlaw, David Fraser, or even Open Media.

There is, in fact, consensus on Bill S-210. That consensus is that it’s a bad bill and the senator should feel bad for pushing such a terrible piece of legislation in the first place.

Conclusions

The senator, at the outset, argued that the Globe should look out the window and see what is going on. Her problem is that this is precisely what the piece did in the first place. The Globe opened a window, looked outside, and saw that Bill S-210 is a terrible bill that has been condemned from many corners of civil society. In conclusion, everyone is finding that it is the senator that is the one lying.

As for the senator in question, her effort to refute the Globe resulted in a failure:

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