OTTAWA — As the federal government looks to criminalize the distribution of sexualized ‘deepfakes’, advocates are calling for it to go even further and provide a way to order that these images be removed.
It comes as the parliamentary justice committee is set to wrap its study this week on Bill C-16, the Liberals latest piece of criminal justice legislation that, among other measures intended to combat gender-based violence, proposes to change the country’s laws against the non-consensual sharing of intimate images to include a “visual representation.”
This language is designed to capture what police, victims’ groups and school boards have been warning for years has been the proliferation of sexual images created by generative artificial intelligence.
“They’re missing the point when it comes to victimization and removal,” said Michelle Abel, a vice-president at the National Council of Women of Canada and founder of a non-profit focused on combatting the exploitation of women and children, said of the government bill.
She points to a law signed into effect last March by U.S. President Donald Trump known as the Take It Down Act. A bi-partisan effort, later championed by First Lady Melania Trump, it targets sexual images shared without a person’s consent, including AI-generated images known as “deepfakes,” and includes the provision that social media giants must remove such content once reported within 48-hours.
“We need something more immediate like our U.S. counterpart,” Abel says.
Different provinces have made changes to existing laws that allow victims of non-consensual image sharing known as “revenge porn,” to include those created and altered by AI. Those measures allow victims to launch civil lawsuits against those who share intimate images of them without their permission.
In B.C., the province also introduced a service where victims can assess their options, including how to get personal images removed, which could be ordered through a civil resolution tribunal.
Still, Suzie Dunn, an associate professor at Dalhousie University whose expertise includes deepfakes, says that process can take weeks or even months before an order is issued.
“Timing is critical in getting images removed as swiftly as possible,” she said.
“They proliferated, they’ve been downloaded, they’ve been shared. It’s very difficult to contain an image once it’s been released.”
That is why Dunn, whose research includes gender-based violence that is facilitated through technology, says the federal government ought to prioritize reintroducing a bill that specifically targets online harms by creating measures that hold platforms accountable for dealing with such images once they are reported.
She said some websites are more responsive to removal requests, with another complicating factor being operators that exist outside of Canada.
Dunn pointed to a case in B.C. from last year
where X challenged a removal order from B.C.’s tribunal
regarding a woman who wanted an altered intimate image of herself removed, after the company blocked it from being viewed within Canada.
“This is why I think that platform regulation is actually going to be one of the more effective laws compared to civil and criminal law, which just deals with these individual instances,” she said.
Canada last proposed requiring companies to remove such images within a 24-hour reporting window under its last attempt to legislate against online harms in Bill C-63, which died when Parliament was prorogued in January 2025. That takedown order would have also applied to child sex abuse materials.
A spokeswoman for Canadian Heritage Minister Marc Miller, tasked with shepherding a future version of the bill through Parliament, pointed to a group of experts convened to advise the minister on his efforts were considering the issue.
“Emerging issues such as synthetic imagery are among those being currently considered by the expert advisory group. We will have more details to share in due course,” Hermine Landry wrote in a statement.
Neither the minister or his office have provided timelines as to when a new bill may be introduced.
Justice Minister Sean Fraser also told National Post in an interview last month that getting these images removed was “something that we need to address.”
Conservative MP Michelle Rempel-Garner who, along with her party opposed the former online harms bill, warning its plan to create a digital regulator amounted to bureaucracy and panned its proposed justice reforms as censorship, has tried advancing her own private member’s bills targeted at online safety, including the distribution of sexual deepfakes.
Her latest proposal, introduced last year, also included legislating a duty of care for operators. She says that targeting these images could have long ago been done through a standalone update to the Criminal Code.
“This is something I feel like I’ve just been repeating ad nauseum for three years,” she told National Post in an interview.
“It’s very odd to me that the government hasn’t acted when there’s clearly a need for it to do so.”
Suzanne Zaccour, director of legal affairs for the National Association of Women and the Law, testified before the justice committee that the main thing victims want “is a remedy to remove the photo from the internet … the online harms kind of remedy.”
The association, along with other advocacy and legal groups submitted briefs and testified to the committee about the need to expand the government’s proposed definition for what constituted as being a “visual representation” and also called for the government criminalize their creation, not just distribution.
In a written brief, the Canadian Bar Association said the proposed wording in the bill requiring that these images are “likely to be mistaken” for real images could lead to deepfakes not being captured should they be set in unrealistic enough scenarios, providing the example of someone posed naked or in a sex act with an imaginary animal.
Kwame Bonsu, a Department of Justice spokesman said the minister was watching the committee’s work and has “expressed an openness to considering changes that strengthen government legislation, consistent with the legislation’s policy objectives and the Charter.”
National Post
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