Video February 10, 2026

Online Age Verification Poses Serious Dangers: What are our alternatives?

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Governments are increasingly requiring age verification for access to certain online content. In the name of protecting children online, systems for age verification create dangerous new forms of surveillance, censorship, and exclusion. Every system requires users to hand over sensitive personal information linking their offline identity to their online activity — valuable data easily leaked, hacked, or misused.

Join Evan Light in his conversation with David Greene, Senior Counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, about the dangers and what should be done.

This conversation occurred on Feb. 10, 2026 and was co-sponsored by Edmonton Public Library, PEN Canada, Toronto Public Library, and Vancouver Public Library.

While We Watch the U.S., Canada’s Democracy Is Quietly Eroding

With the precipitous decline of democracy in the United States, it is all too easy to ignore that Canada’s democracy is in decline as well. We ignore the signs at our peril.

Hold the Line: How Alberta public libraries should respond to Bill 28

On May 13, the Alberta government passed Bill 28 which amends the Libraries Act to grant the Minister of Municipal Affairs, currently Dan Williams, authority over “management, administration or operation” of every public library in the province. The Bill gives the Minister unprecedented power to issue “any order that the Minister considers appropriate.”

Would Banning Children from Social Media and AI Be Constitutional?

Probably not, for reasons that point to the limits of what Canada can do here. Recently, governments in Manitoba and Ontario have signaled their support for a ban on social media for children under 16 years of age, and last month, the federal Liberals passed a resolution to this effect at a party convention. Manitoba’s premier Wab Kinew and the national Liberal Party are also keen to ban youth access to “all AI chatbots and other potentially harmful forms of AI interaction.”