But as a data sovereignty race ignited, consensus on social media harms grew, and a horrific B.C. shooting thrust the potential dangers of AI into the national spotlight, the Carney government had to respond to a new reality: keeping children safe, getting Canadians to trust the technology, and cracking down on American tech giants in the midst of delicate trade negotiations.

The creation of a sweeping Digital Safety and Data Protection Commission that will fold online harms and consumer privacy issues into a single regulator, overseen by five people with vast decision-making powers.

No other country has done something quite like it. 

“This will be, I think, one of the first merged privacy and online safety regulators, which is both an opportunity to do something innovative, but also means there’s no precedent for it,” said Taylor Owen, the founding director of McGill University’s Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy.

The commission was first hinted at in the Carney government’s AI strategy released in early June, and officially unveiled as the backbone of two long-awaited bills introduced soon after.

One proposed law would launch the commission and task it with potentially banning young people from social media platforms, imposing safety standards on AI chatbots, and levying steep fines on big tech for failing to address harmful content and practices online.

The second bill would broaden the regulator by tasking it with overseeing modernized privacy rules governing how the private sector collects, uses and discloses Canadians’ information.

“Right now our entire digital experience is shaped by the companies that build the tools … any features inside that system are entirely derived from the interests of those companies, and we are subject to them. We can choose to use them or not, but that is our only point of agency over these systems that have a profound effect on our lives,” said Owen, who advised Ottawa on both its AI strategy and online safety bill.

“If we have a new regulator, we have alternative ways of shaping that digital environment and ensuring it’s safe.”

The most immediate question is whether the whole regime survives political headwinds to get off the ground.

The Trump administration has condemned any efforts to clamp down on American tech giants, prompting Carney, in one of his first acts as prime minister, to rescind Ottawa’s digital services tax on large companies generating revenues from Canadians.

Last month, the Liberals also ordered Canada’s broadcasting regulator to revisit another policy decision, which hiked the fees online streamers would have to pay to fund the creation of Canadian content.

But those policies bore the stamp of approval of former prime minister Justin Trudeau — not Carney. 

“It’s worth observing that the things that the government has been willing to negotiate have been things that the previous government negotiated,” said Owen.

“I’m not sure the prime minister does these big policy pushes lightly, and if they didn’t want to prioritize these digital bills, I’m not sure they would have tabled them.”

It bodes well, too, that the Carney government has put major emphasis on the parts of its strategy that has found cross-partisan support in Canada and beyond.

“I think the government was wise in a certain way to have the focus on kids,” said Florian Martin-Bariteau, the University of Ottawa’s research chair in technology and society. “In the U.S at the moment, from the left to the right, from Democrats to Republicans, they all want to protect the kids.”

Nevertheless, Trump’s mercurial nature lurks in some minds.

“I’d be curious as to what happens if one morning, Donald Trump wakes up and posts on Truth Social that Canada’s trying to censor the internet,” said Vivek Krishnamurthy, an associate professor at the University of Colorado Law School, who also weighed in on Canada’s safety legislation. 

Krishnamurthy said he was “surprised” both bills were introduced now, instead of at a time when Canada-U.S. trade talks were on more stable ground.

Artificial Intelligence Minister Evan Solomon, who spearheaded the AI strategy and privacy bill, has a response to that.

“Our responsibility is to Canadians, and to make sure that we protect kids, and protect privacy, and protect personal information. That’s what we’re going to do,” Solomon told the Star.

“We’re obviously looking and listening to stakeholders and listening to different groups who have views on this, but we have a responsibility to legislate.”

That responsibility is already racing against the clock.

The ambitious regime can only become reality when the commission and its rules are fully in force. That could take years, all while tech companies and their products continue to engulf the globe.

The digital safety bill must become law first — a likely scenario in a majority Parliament, although Senate scrutiny may slow it down. The commission is slated to launch 18 months after that, while even more time will be needed to draft regulations and see them come into effect. The privacy bill must also pass before the regulator can expand its powers.

“I think they should be pushing to speed up that timeline. I think that they need to. I mean, this threat landscape is evolving so quickly, we don’t even know what the world’s going to look like at that point,” said Emily Laidlaw, a Canada Research Chair in Cybersecurity Law at the University of Calgary, and another expert who advised the government on its strategy.

Much of the timeline tension revolves around a centrepiece of the digital safety bill: banning children under age 16 from accessing social media platforms like Facebook and X if those platforms fail to abide by a yet undetermined list of safety standards. (Meta, X and artificial intelligence giant OpenAI did not respond to the Star’s requests for comment for this story.)

It remains unclear which platforms will be included and whether the ban — which has only had middling success in Australia — comes into effect before platforms learn which standards they must follow.

Laidlaw said the murky timeline means kids could be kicked on and off social media, weakening the policy and continuing to expose youth to dangers.

The lengthy timelines are also at odds with the Carney government’s stated goal of rapidly advancing AI education and adoption, but backstopping that push with safety standards to boost trust in the tools.

“I don’t understand how the government can say, ‘This is a top priority of our AI strategy, and we need to move quickly on privacy. We need it for AI sovereignty purposes, we need it for data sovereignty purposes. We need that to ensure that there’s effective trust,’” said Michael Geist, a Canada Research Chair in internet and e-commerce law at the University of Ottawa.

“Do they not recognize how fast the space is moving? They risk irrelevance in terms of developing effective policies to establish that trust, because by the time they put it into place, all the horses are out of the barn.”

For Solomon’s part, the Carney government is simply continuing a job Trudeau had already started.

If it takes time to put it all in motion, “that’s OK,” the minister said.

Solomon said that without assuming the bills will pass, work being done now to sketch out the “architecture” of the commission behind the scenes.

“I mean, these are the choices we’re going to have to make if we want to have some type of regulatory function … we’re going to have to spend the time and the investment to set up a regulator. They do this in every other jurisdiction. We don’t have a regulator with enforcement power,” Solomon said.

Many observers agree that Canada urgently needs a regulator with the ability to force tech companies to bend to its rules by issuing orders, and hitting them with financial penalties if they don’t.

But there is much less agreement about everything else that falls under this commission’s mandate, particularly Ottawa’s decision to combine safety and privacy, which has not been done elsewhere and could dilute the regulator’s ability to address two complex files.

“This potentially going to be a single entity that does everything from, ‘How does your bank deal with your personal information?’ to ‘Are OpenAI’s policies to deal with self harm appropriate?’” Krishnamurthy said.

Both critics and supporters of the proposed regulator have also questioned aspects of its structure that could create headaches for Carney further down the line.

The contentious online streaming tax decision Carney asked the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission to review earlier in June, for example, wasn’t baked into the Trudeau-era law behind the fee hike. It came from regulations the law allowed the CRTC to decide on its own later. 

Ottawa’s two new bills do the same, leaving dozens of decisions — ranging from setting standards, to deciding the consequences, to forcing compliance — up to the new regulator.

“We’ve seen this movie before,” Geist said. “I think good legislation requires some amount of heavy lifting to get into some of the details, not at the expense of having some flexibility as things change, but it can’t be that so many of the specifics are left for some sort of some future determination.”