The Senate of Canada building in Ottawa.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
Senators have voted to narrow the definition of pornography in a bill requiring age verification to access explicit sites online, so films and TV shows streamed on Netflix and other services that show nudity and sex scenes would not be affected.
A private member’s bill requiring that porn sites take steps to check that users are at least 18 years old is expected to clear the Senate next week when Parliament returns from its Easter break.
Under Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne’s private member’s bill, adult sites that make porn available to a “young person” could face a fine up to $250,000 for the first offence, and $500,000 for a second or subsequent offence.
The bill has yet to be considered by the House of Commons, where it would require an MP to sponsor it.
The Senate voted before the Easter break to enable the Federal Court to order internet service providers to block access to online porn sites that fail to comply.
The Red Chamber also voted to narrow the definition of pornography proposed in the bill.
Senator Paula Simons, who proposed the amendment updating the definition, said films and TV shows once considered softcore pornography are now regularly shown on mainstream streaming services such as Netflix and Prime Video.
She wanted to avoid TV shows or movies with nudity or sex scenes, such as Heated Rivalry, Game of Thrones or Bridgerton, being captured by the bill.
Under the previous definition, programs or films that show a woman’s breasts for a sexual purpose could have qualified as pornography. Ms. Simons said in an interview that the definition was “outmoded” and could affect a wide range of mainstream entertainment.
“It is not 1952. Naked breasts get shown all kind of places. You see them all the time on TV,” she said.
The revised definition removed the reference to depictions of female breasts. It also stated that material classed as pornographic must be intended to cause sexual excitement rather than, as defined previously, for a sexual purpose.
Ms. Simons’s amendment, which she said was intended to improve the bill, was approved. But Ms. Simons herself voted against the bill in its entirety, saying she has concerns it could affect personal privacy by requiring the presentation of personally identifying information to access porn sites.
She also expressed concern that it could deter LGBTQ people from accessing sites, including young people who are not open about their sexuality.
The bill leaves it up to the government to regulate how to verify or estimate age, to reflect developments in technology. It could include age-estimation technology, including by scanning a user’s face or hands.
But the bill says age estimation or verification should be operated by a third-party organization, and it requires protections for privacy and personal information. It would compel the organization to immediately destroy such identifiers.
The bill has been criticized by Ethical Capital Partners, a Canada-based private equity firm that owns Aylo, one of the world’s largest operators of pornographic sites, whose outlets include Pornhub.
It has argued that technology is currently not sophisticated enough to accurately verify or estimate everyone’s age. It also argues that requiring government identification to be presented raises privacy concerns.
The firm says it does not want children to access its sites but argues that the best age-verification method is through devices such as phones, and for websites to deny or permit access to age-restricted materials based on that.
Solomon Friedman, a partner in Ethical Capital Partners, said introducing parental controls on devices such as phones and laptops by default, and allowing them only to be lifted with age verification, is practically possible and would prevent children from accessing all porn sites. It would mean that the controls could not be skirted by using a virtual private network spoofing a user’s location to avoid a Canadian law, he said.
Since July of 2025, the Office of Communications, Britain’s regulator enforcing that country’s Online Safety Act, required porn sites to introduce “robust” age checks. That could include photo ID or credit-card checks, or methods using age-estimation technology.
Mr. Friedman said his firm’s sites had seen an 80-per-cent drop in their traffic in Britain since the age-checking rules were introduced. In the same period, he said, there was an increase in searches online for porn sites that did not comply with the age-checking rules, including some showing violent porn.
He said this showed that people with privacy concerns were evading the age checks by moving to non-compliant sites.
Ms. Miville-Dechêne said she hoped the government in its coming online harms bill would include measures to require age checks to access porn sites in Canada. She said the aim was to protect children and it did not matter whether age controls are brought in through a government or private member’s bill.