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Canada Has a New Law to Stop Deepfake Nudes. Will It Work?

Penalties under Bill C-16, coming into effect this month, include up to 10 years in prison

JUSTICE / SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2026

Canada Has a New Law to Stop Deepfake Nudes. Will It Work?

Penalties under Bill C-16, coming into effect this month, include up to 10 years in prison

BY ELIZABETH SARGEANT

ILLUSTRATION BY VARTIKA SHARMA

Published 6:30, JULY 8, 2026

In January of 2025, Lucy and her boyfriend, Steve, were waiting at his house for their friend Bobby. They planned to drive to a roller rink outside Toronto and ring in Steve’s eighteenth birthday (I’m using pseudonyms to protect their privacy). Then Lucy’s phone rang: it was Bobby’s girlfriend. She had gone through his phone and discovered sexual photos of multiple girls from their friend group. One was of Lucy, eighteen at the time. She believes Bobby scrolled through Steve’s Instagram page, found a picture of her, and then ran it through a nudifier—a tool that uses artificial intelligence to digitally remove a person’s clothing from a picture, creating a synthetic nude image that isn’t real but designed to pass as one.

“My boyfriend was his best friend. I felt really betrayed and dehumanized,” Lucy says.

When young people come across non-consensual AI-generated content depicting them, they may not contact a lawyer or the police. Instead, they often turn to the internet, searching for advice. For Lucy, that search started on Reddit. As the original picture used in the AI image was from when she was seventeen, she reasoned, it could be considered child sex abuse material (also known as CSAM). This could possibly make it a criminal act. But the image was still “fake.” The nude body in it, although attached to a real photo of her face, was not explicitly hers. It wasn’t clear to her whether Bobby’s creation and possession of such an image would be considered a crime.

Lucy then moved on to online legal sites, browsing other forums for answers. And while she didn’t find any outright “Yes, this is illegal” or “No, it’s not,” she did discover posts from other young women also looking for solutions. “I saw a couple [posts] where this happened where their boyfriend would do this to them. Sometimes their brother’s friend. I was like Okay, I’m not going insane. This is the real way [I’m] feeling.”

The posts Lucy saw seemed to reveal a pattern. The images are often created by someone within the victim’s social circle and are tied to dynamics of control, power, and humiliation, rather than just sexual desire.

According to a statement from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, “over 90 percent of deepfakes available online are non-consensual pornographic clips of women.” As of October 2022, there were over 57 million Google search results for “deepfake porn” globally. A 2024 report from the United Nations shined an especially harsh light on Canadians’ use of generative AI. A survey of law enforcement across Canada, the United Kingdom, Portugal, and Nigeria found that Canada is seeing the widest range and highest volume of AI-generated CSAM.

To combat this scourge, the federal government last December set out to make significant amendments to the Criminal Code. It introduced Bill C-16, the Protecting Victims Act, which, among other provisions, aimed to make the distribution of such images a punishable offence. The murky legal landscape that Lucy navigated is now poised to change, with the bill—which carries a maximum penalty of up to ten years in prison—having received royal assent in June and coming into force this month.

I imagine news of the new law would come as relief to the countless Canadians affected by sexual deepfakes. When I began reporting this story late last year, I found innumerable social media posts from women who were desperate for a legal recourse.

On a Reddit forum, R/LegalAdviceCanada, a user named Andie wrote that someone sent her an AI-generated photo of her naked: “The guy that sent it to me said he found it on Reddit. But, I’m pretty sure he made it and I’m hoping it’s not been posted online. . . . After telling him I was going to the authorities he blocked me. I don’t know if this would be considered revenge porn? Or if this is even illegal at this point? But it feels bad.”

Responses poured in, with two users suggesting Andie pursue legal action. Others cited the ambiguity of the Criminal Code. After some research of her own, Andie responded that she was not aware of any legal precedent in her situation: “I have contacted my local police........

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