MONTREAL — A Quebec law comes into effect Wednesday that will give people quick access to legal recourse if someone shares intimate images or video of them without their consent.
It is a crime in Canada to publish, text or share intimate images or video of someone without consent.
But for most victims this does not always mean unlawfully shared images will get removed quickly.
The new Quebec law allows victims to fill out a form online or at a courthouse and obtain an order from a judge requiring the images or footage to be removed.
Mathieu Lévesque, parliamentary assistant to Justice Minister Simon Jolin-Barrette, said in a statement Wednesday that sharing intimate images without consent is a "scourge," particularly among teens.
Under the new law, it could take several hours or up to a few days for an application to be processed.
Previously, victims wanting to remove intimate images had to go through a complicated legal process that Lévesque described as "long and tedious."
"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 comes with stiff penalties — with fines up to $50,000 per day for a first offence or 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.
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.
The law covers "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.
The Quebec law, passed in December 2024, makes it the second province after British Columbia to pass legislation providing new options for someone to apply for a quick take down of non-consensual images.
In January 2024, B.C. brought in its own law, allowing citizens to go to its civil resolution tribunal to have images removed, make a damage claim or a claim for penalty if the person refuses to comply.
"It's very common for young people to have these images of themselves shared without their consent, and I think what's really important is that they know that there's something that they can do when this happens," said Kaitlynn Mendes, a sociology professor from Western University in London, Ont.
Other provinces have previously introduced broader intimate images and cyberbullying laws.
This includes 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.
Mendes said young people are deeply impacted by the sharing of these images, even if they are so-called deep fakes or manipulated images. "There's research that shows that the impact of (a fake) is the same as if it were a real image," she said.
One Montreal lawyer said Quebec sticking with a broad term of "person" possessing or having control of an image could create pitfalls for third-party internet companies — search engines, social media or any other hosting platform.
"This term is actually not defined in the law, and I think that's part of the problem because technically they use a very broad definition of a person," said Antoine Guilmain, a partner at Gowling WLG, an international law firm.
"At the end of the day, it could be any facilitator, essentially any intermediary between the two people who are connected to the intimate images."
He co-wrote a brief presented during Bill 73 hearings last year warning there could be issues for those companies. In B.C., so-called intermediaries are not liable if they have taken reasonable measures to address the illegal sharing of images as a third-party service provider.
"I think this is actually a positive step, Bill 73," Guilmain said. "The problem is some of the details are very confusing, and it's creating a new regime for revoking consent that is unique to intimate images."
This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 4, 2025.
Sidhartha Banerjee, The Canadian Press
