Sharing non‑consensual ‘deepfake’ porn in Canada is now a crime. The law still fails the victims

To count as illegal “intimate imagery,” under Canadian law, a depiction has to be realistic enough to pass as a genuine photo or video, regardless of whether the individual is identifiable or has consented to its use. (Unsplash/Mohamed Nohassi) Sharing non‑consensual ‘deepfake’ porn in Canada is now a crime. The law still fails the victims Published: September 13, 2026 8.15am EDT Share article Print article In June 2026, the Canadian government passed a groundbreaking reform of the Criminal Code — the Protecting Victims Act (Bill C-16). This strengthened protections against gender-based violence and, for the first time, made it a crime to share sexual “deepfakes” of a person without their consent. That same month, Parliament amended the Elections Act to address political deepfakes in Bill C-25 and tabled the Safe Social Media Act (Bill C-34) — a major initiative looking to regulate social media and chatbot services. Despite these efforts, the issue of AI-generated, non-consensual intimate imagery remains inadequately addressed. The industry built around “nudifying” apps was valued at US$36 million per year in 2025. It has involved multiple large-scale scandals, such as the one in early 2026 when the social media platform X’s chatbot Grok generated up to 200 non-consensual sexualized deepfakes per minute, including 23,000 images that appeared to depict children. This is a rising form of abuse, and significant legal gaps remain. Correcting them is essential to protecting victims. The realism gap A new definition of “intimate imagery” emerged in the latest criminal reforms and in the proposed Safe Social Media Act. To count as illegal “intimate imagery,” a depiction has to be “likely to be mistaken for a visual recording of that person.” It has to be realistic enough to pass as a genuine photo or video. The Canadian Bar Association had already raised the issue this poses: when an image can easily be interpreted as synthetic, it can slip outside the law’s reach. Add elf ears to a person or set the scene in outer space, and the image’s distributor may have a ready-made legal defense, even though the victim’s face and the consent violation remain the same. This might even extend to AI-generated content that is labelled or watermarked as such. This conception mischaracterizes the harm of image-based abuse: people are not harmed because non-consensual sexualized deepfakes deceive viewers; they are harmed because their likeness is used in ways they…