John Bolton - June 15, 2026


LIBERAL Bill C-34 - Protecting Kids Or A Step Towards Gov't CENSORSHIP


Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

177.15

Word count

1,884

Sentence count

121

Harmful content

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Bill C-34 is a privacy bill that was introduced by the Liberal government, and I think it's a big mistake. I think there should be a ban on social media for children under 16 years old.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
00:00:00.000 Hi, it's John and welcome to the channel 504 a.m. Monday, June the 15th. I hope you're having a
00:00:08.160 great start to your Monday and your week as well with the big blue mug of coffee. It's a pleasure
00:00:12.640 to have you here today. And I've been sitting here for the last couple of hours doing research
00:00:18.680 and getting a video together, a short little clip I'm going to show you in just a minute,
00:00:23.800 to talk about something that really concerns me. In fact, I wasn't even sure I was going to do this
00:00:28.280 video 10 minutes ago. I thought about leaving it alone and not talking about it at all, but I'm
00:00:33.180 rather concerned about things. As you know, the liberal government has been trying to pass all
00:00:37.760 kinds of laws when it comes to limiting of free speech. I can't even keep track of all the C
00:00:43.240 numbers that we're dealing with. C22, C9, C2, C3. It's just, it's like they're flooding the zone
00:00:50.400 with these things all at once. Apparently they're going to introduce a privacy, a new privacy bill
00:00:56.140 this week. God knows what that's going to be about. But I'm concerned about a bill that was
00:01:00.220 introduced last week called Bill C-34. Now, what government likes to do in order to get things
00:01:06.940 passed through is they create these bills and then they wrap it up in protecting children. And
00:01:13.320 that's what Bill C-34 is about. And I've said here many, many times that I think X is a sewer.
00:01:19.700 I spend very little time on social media.
00:01:23.520 It's good for my mental health that I stay away from it.
00:01:26.360 The only reason I have an X account is really to post my videos.
00:01:30.660 I very seldom go there and I comment very little.
00:01:33.660 I don't like it.
00:01:34.620 I hate it. 0.99
00:01:35.520 I think it rots your brain.
00:01:38.820 And all the other social media does the same thing.
00:01:41.920 Little by little, your brain is being rotted by this stuff.
00:01:45.020 It's like doing drugs as far as I'm concerned.
00:01:47.220 You know, I've said many times, this is my cell phone, you know, this is one of the most
00:01:51.300 remarkable things ever created, but the world would be a better place if we didn't have these.
00:01:56.740 You know, I go bike riding. I'm out bike riding. I carry a phone with me for emergency purposes.
00:02:02.060 It's come in handy a number of times. Last August 9th, I crashed, was severely injured. I called my
00:02:07.500 wife on my phone. That's why I take it with me. But when I'm riding my bike, I have people walking
00:02:12.960 in front of me constantly. I call them phone zombies. They're staring at their phone. They
00:02:17.260 can't get away from these things. They're outside where there's birds and trees and beautiful blue
00:02:22.400 skies and clouds, and they're looking at their phone. So what is Bill C-34? Do you know anything
00:02:29.360 about this? I do. Let's go over to this story right here. A couple of stories from the National Post.
00:02:34.700 A quick clip in just a moment. Let me bring myself on screen. We can read this story from
00:02:40.440 the national post you know before i get to that just one second here i'm really torn because we
00:02:48.100 all want to protect children and if this the cell phone is rotting the brains of adults think of
00:02:54.400 what this is doing to children it's like drugs i think this is dangerous god loves steve jobs for
00:02:59.320 creating the first iphone and the first smartphone but this is a dangerous tool a very very useful
00:03:07.140 tool, but dangerous when it comes to kids. And I think there should be limits on social media.
00:03:12.280 Like I said, I think X is a sewer and kids are finding a lot worse stuff online than what you
00:03:17.820 can read on X. There's a saying, if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail
00:03:24.800 and the federal government of Canada is a hammer. And they're going to screw this thing up.
00:03:31.180 huge bureaucracy. It's going to mess things up and it's going to infringe on the rights of people
00:03:37.460 like myself. I'm 61 years of age. I do not need the government looking over my shoulder and
00:03:43.460 scanning my face every time I access some type of social media. And there's a very important part
00:03:49.860 of this that's been missing. It's brought up briefly in the story I'm about to read you from
00:03:54.520 the national post and in the clip i'm about to show you i've always said i believe in education
00:04:01.800 not legislation so let's take a look at this story quickly face again on screen here we go
00:04:09.100 excuse me big tech needs to come to the table to figure out social media ban
00:04:14.880 canada's heritage minister mark miller says he expects the usual suspects will be banned for
00:04:21.140 users under 16, listing off Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and X. Quick little bit of the story.
00:04:28.440 Heritage Minister Mark Miller says he expects the timeline for when the government will impose a
00:04:33.020 ban on social media for children under 16 to be rapid once its bill introducing an online safety
00:04:39.440 regime becomes law, which it likely will. Miller, who this week tabled Bill C-34, otherwise known
00:04:47.380 as Safe Social Media Act said he sees the proposed ban as a protective layer that responds both to
00:04:55.320 what science warns has been the impact of younger children spending time online and to the concern
00:05:00.720 of parents, although he acknowledges such a measure is not 100 percent permeable. This has
00:05:06.520 been the experience of Australia, which has had this law for about six months. A report from the
00:05:11.180 country's e-safety commissioner, the regulator tasked with implementing the policy flagged
00:05:16.360 as of March that a substantial proportion of Australians under 16 have been able to bypass
00:05:22.700 the ban and platforms age verification systems to keep their accounts or open new ones. Deciding
00:05:29.640 what age verification methods would be used in Canada would be left to future discussions between
00:05:35.300 the government and companies. The legislation outlines how the methods must be effective
00:05:40.100 and collect someone's personal information for no other reason than to verify their age.
00:05:47.260 So how do they do this in Australia?
00:05:49.240 Well, here's an article right here.
00:05:51.200 Australia banned under-16s from social media.
00:05:54.120 The world is split on whether to follow.
00:05:57.100 It took Cruz Condren about a week to lose his Snapchat account and a few seconds to get it back.
00:06:03.480 It asked me to verify my age by a camera, said the 14-year-old from the Gold Coast.
00:06:11.000 I just asked my mom to scan her face because she's over 18.
00:06:15.040 It just let me back on.
00:06:17.120 Six months after Australia became the first country to ban under-16s from social media,
00:06:22.440 Cruz's workaround performed with his mother's blessing is the kind of evidence now being
00:06:27.120 weighed in London, Brussels, and Ottawa as governments decide whether to copy Australia's
00:06:32.440 experiment or learn from its mistakes. They're going to come up with the rules to this after
00:06:37.300 passing the law. That concerns me. I want to protect kids, but there may be a better answer.
00:06:43.580 Over here in the National Post, there's this article right here, Protecting Kids or Deputizing
00:06:48.600 Censors, the Risks of Carney's Social Media Ban. Lawyer David Fraser outlines free speech and
00:06:55.960 privacy concerns with Bill C-34. He spoke with Rob Breckenridge from the National Post, a short
00:07:01.400 clip less than 90 seconds long. So as soon as this really comes into effect in the first stage,
00:07:07.820 kids are going to be off social media. But it also means that everybody who uses social media
00:07:11.920 is going to have to have their age verified, which has significant privacy implications that
00:07:17.180 I've been concerned about for some time. So the devil is always in the details. And one of the
00:07:23.140 things that I'm concerned about this bill in particular is that even though it is 91 pages
00:07:27.860 long all of the real details are yet to be determined either by government
00:07:32.780 regulation or by dictate by this digital commissioner there's also risk that some
00:07:38.120 platforms that you wouldn't necessarily think of as being social would remove
00:07:42.140 any of the social features that they have so that many newspaper websites
00:07:46.460 have comment sections that could in fact scope them in as social media sites
00:07:51.020 because they enable users to share content with other with other users and
00:07:55.580 And so you might see the discussion and debate on some of those sites just shut off.
00:08:00.340 You can post comments on my blog.
00:08:03.020 So that makes my blog a social media site.
00:08:05.980 If I had a duty to act responsibly with respect to the couple comments I get from time to time, I'm going to shut off comments.
00:08:12.540 And also, there's no mechanism in the bill, at least that I saw, that would allow a parent to say, yes, my 15-year-old child is mature enough and old enough that I believe that they should be able to have an Instagram account, for example.
00:08:29.440 Parent involvement is de minimis.
00:08:31.740 Now, among the safety things that companies are encouraged to do, according to whatever the Digital Safety Commissioner says, is kind of parental controls and things like that.
00:08:40.380 But the ultimate parental control is simply not there at all.
00:08:45.240 The government says, you're under 16.
00:08:48.900 You don't get to be on social media, period.
00:08:51.380 I'm sorry the clip was just a little over 90 seconds long,
00:08:54.880 but Mr. Fraser ends up talking about parents.
00:08:58.560 And by the way, the interview is about 16 minutes long.
00:09:01.800 Link in the description.
00:09:02.920 It's worth watching the whole thing.
00:09:04.740 But he talks about parents,
00:09:06.120 and that's the single word I put on my screen over here.
00:09:08.900 parents. Where are the parents? Where are you, mom and dad? If this is causing harm to your kids,
00:09:16.840 why do you allow your kids to have this? I don't want the federal government.
00:09:21.420 I do not trust the federal government. I do not want the federal government becoming the parent.
00:09:28.900 I do not want a nanny state. Mom and dad, education, not legislation. If this is harming
00:09:36.600 your children, take the phone away from your kids. And if you need to contact them, give them a flip
00:09:44.140 phone because you can do it that way. Now, he also talks about comment sections. Think how this
00:09:50.100 legislation will eventually just eliminate all discussion between adults. You like commenting
00:09:56.620 on YouTube videos? Lots of people will comment on this. Could be taken away. It's creeping censorship
00:10:03.100 by the federal government.
00:10:04.580 Again, the law gets passed.
00:10:06.820 The regulations are made after the law is passed.
00:10:09.600 I think this is dangerous.
00:10:11.140 I want to protect kids.
00:10:13.220 And this will be passed
00:10:14.380 because all of the parties will say
00:10:16.440 they want to protect kids
00:10:17.520 and they don't want to be the ones who stand out
00:10:19.880 and get blamed for harming children.
00:10:22.700 What do you think?
00:10:24.780 Let me know in the comments while you still can.
00:10:27.340 If you like this video, give me a thumbs up.
00:10:29.620 Subscribe to the channel.
00:10:30.980 Ring the bell for notifications.
00:10:32.640 I'll see you in the next one.
00:10:34.940 As soon as I upload this, I'm putting it on social media.