From $50K per day to 18 months in jail: Quebec intimate image sharing law comes into effect
A new Quebec law now allows people to quickly obtain a court order to remove intimate images shared online.
As of Wednesday, the new legislation allows victims to fill out a form online or at a courthouse and obtain an order from a judge requiring that the images or footage be taken down.
In a statement, Justice Minister Simon Jolin-Barrette’s parliamentary assistant, Mathieu Lévesque, said that sharing intimate images without consent is a “scourge,” particularly among teens.
While it is criminal in Canada to publish, text or share intimate images or video of someone without consent, for many victims this does not always mean unlawfully shared images will get removed quickly, until now.
Under the new law, it could take several hours or up to a few days for an application to be processed. Before, victims who wanted the content removed had to go through a “long and tedious” legal process, Lévesque said.
“When an intimate image is shared without consent, it’s a race against time — the more the image circulates, the more devastating the damage caused can be,” Lévesque said. “So we had to find a way to stop the sharing and force the destruction of the image quickly.”
Failure to comply can lead to harsh penalties, including fines of up to $50,000 per day for a first offence or up to 18 months in jail.
Offenders can be ordered to stop sharing the image or footage, have it destroyed, or de-index a hyperlink to the image or video.
Cybersecurity expert, Eric Parent, told Global News in an interview on Thursday that he applauds the new “streamlined process to make the request.”
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Parent said the law not only covers the perpetrator, but anyone who would have downloaded the content.
“So if somebody shares it on a private group chat, everybody who has downloaded the images would be included.“
Parent says having this type of law put in place demonstrates “the importance of good digital hygiene and being a good internet citizen.”
It also demonstrates the amount of cases where victims were left to fend for themselves, according to Parent. “And with this new law, we’re tightening that to make it a little bit easier for them to defend their digital rights. It will serve to educate everybody on how to behave accordingly with maturity and respect on the internet.”
Victims advocacy groups like CALACS De L’Ouest De l’île are also welcoming the new legislation.
Intervention worker Zev Saltiel spoke to Global on Wednesday and said organizations like CALACS are looking forward to seeing the legislation in practice.
“Bills like this are actually quite helpful. We oftentimes are quite hesitant, thinking they might not always be as effective, or are too broad or not broad enough,” Saltiel said. “This one actually seems so far pretty okay.”
The legislation says fines collected through offences will be directed towards services that support victims and survivors of these crimes, something Saltiel said he thinks is excellent news. “(It’s important that) that money goes to people who are doing the work.”
“This law makes it explicit that sharing non-consensual images is not only a criminal offense, but is also something that is pursuable in civil courts for financial or emotional damages,” Zev added.
An intimate image is defined as any image, altered or not, that shows a person nude or partially nude and where a reasonable expectation of privacy would prevail. This includes any form of nudity, including altered with AI or photoshop.
The law goes as far as covering “any visual or sound recording or live broadcast” and covers content that is published, sold, communicated or advertised.
If a person represented in an image is deceased, a close relative may file the application for a court order. People aged 14 or older can file the application themselves or give their consent to another person to file on their behalf.
Second province to pass a bill protecting victims of non-consensual image sharing
Quebec is the second province after British Columbia to pass legislation protecting victims of non-consensual image sharing.
Other provinces have previously introduced broader intimate images and cyberbullying laws.
They include Nova Scotia, which introduced the Intimate Images and Cyber-protection Act in 2018 in the wake of the 2013 death of 17-year-old bullying victim Rehtaeh Parsons.
In Manitoba, the Non-Consensual Distribution of Intimate Images Act, passed in 2024, gave victims civil remedies and addressed the distribution of fake intimate images created by the use of technology. It was the first province to legislate on the matter in 2015 when it introduced the Intimate Images Protection Act.
— with files from The Canadian Press
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