© Unsplash/ Sanket Mishra
For young people in Canada, the digital world is ingrained in almost all facets of everyday life. It’s where friendships form, careers begin to take shape, creativity finds an audience, and community is built. Yet while online life has become foundational, the systems meant to protect young people have not kept pace.
Out of that gap emerges the Youth Digital Rights Blueprint, a human rights–based framework developed through three years of national youth engagement. It is not a theoretical document. It is a response to lived experience, and a call for Canada to finally treat digital spaces as environments where rights, dignity, and safety matter.
In February, that call comes into sharper focus as youth from across the country gather, both in person in Ottawa and online, for the Youth Digital Rights Summit.
Why This Moment Matters
Canada currently has no national digital safety statute. With the expiry of Bill C-63 in 2024, young people are navigating escalating online harms without cohesive protections. Youth have been clear about what that means in practice: technology-facilitated violence, deepfakes, sextortion, racist and misogynistic gaming spaces, algorithm-driven misinformation, invasive data practices, and serious mental health impacts.
Just as critically, young people describe being excluded from the policymaking processes that shape the platforms they are expected to use. Consulted too late, or not at all, their voices are often treated as symbolic rather than structural.
The Blueprint reframes this reality. It asserts that youth are not just users of digital spaces, but rights-holders within them.
A Framework Grounded in Human Rights
At the heart of the Youth Digital Rights Blueprint are four pillars designed to guide federal digital policy:
Participation
Recognizes youth as co-architects of digital governance, calling for a National Youth Digital-Safety Advisory Council, permanent engagement strategies, and accessible public communication around legislation.
Protection
Focuses on safety by design, including a statutory duty of care for platforms, algorithmic transparency, bias audits, and clear oversight of gaming and peer-to-peer environments where harm often goes unchecked.
Remedy
Ensures young people can actually get help when harm happens online—without being retraumatised by the process. Youth are calling for longer windows to act, including extending harmful-content preservation requirements from one year to three years or more, so evidence isn’t lost before a case can move forward. They also want practical, funded supports: a Victim Support Fund, financed through platform penalties, to cover essentials like counselling, legal guidance, safety planning, and help with navigating takedown and reporting systems. Finally, youth are urging reforms to the Canadian Human Rights Commission so it can respond to digital harms more effectively—including clearer pathways for identity-based online harassment, more accessible complaint processes, and better capacity to address platform-enabled discrimination in real time.
Support
Centres education, mental health, and oversight—from a national digital literacy strategy to an independent digital safety commission and a dedicated child and youth advocate.
Together, these pillars form a roadmap for policy that reflects how young people actually live online.
From Blueprint to Action
The Youth Digital Rights Summit is designed to move this work forward. Over two days, participants will connect with lawmakers, legal and tech experts, and community organizers to share lived experiences, build policy skills, and help shape the implementation of the Blueprint.
No policy background is required. What matters is curiosity, care for community, and a willingness to learn and collaborate. Whether participants arrive as digital storytellers, justice advocates, gamers, or tech enthusiasts, their perspectives are essential.
A Call for Collective Leadership
Young people have already done the work of naming the harms and defining the solutions. What is needed now is federal leadership and genuine partnership.
Canada has an opportunity to build a digital future grounded in dignity, safety, and human rights, with youth not at the margins, but at the centre.
Are you ready to help shape that future?
Learn more and register for the Youth Digital Rights Summit at jhcentre.org/youth-summit-2026.
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The John Humphrey Centre for Peace and Human Rights (JHC) works to advance dignity, freedom, justice, and security through collaborative relationships and transformative education on peace and human rights.