These parents lost their son after he was the target of an online scheme. Now they want change

A P.E.I. family says federal leaders are playing politics with children's lives after the Online Harms Act was shelved after parliament was prorogued.

Focused, but funny. Chatty, but a good listener. An old soul – just 17 years old. That was Harry Burke. “I looked up to my brother a lot because, well, he was my best friend,” said Ella Burke.

The grade 11 student at Souris Regional School joined Cadets, then the reserves, and aspired to attend the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ont. He was fiercely patriotic and wanted to make Canada better.

A message Harry received from a stranger who was posing as a teenage girl via Snapchat on April 24, 2023, changed everything.

It happened within about 12 hours

“This female was supposed to be from Nova Scotia. She wasn’t. And it wasn’t a female,” said Carl Burke, Harry’s father.

Harry and the person talked. Trust was gained. They exchanged intimate images. Soon after, they threatened to share Harry’s photos unless he sent money.

“They wanted a certain amount of money or else they’d send these pictures to his family or his friends, but I think the thing that really hit Harry hard was that he had a commanding officer when he joined the reserves, and they had threatened to send these to the commanding officer,” said Burke.

That night, Harry told his parents what had happened. The Burkes met as a family and agreed to call police in the morning. Harry seemed okay with the plan, his parents recalled.

Overnight, Harry died by suicide—less than 24 hours after the conversation started on Snapchat.

“I feel that, Harry, they were poking him throughout the evening,” Burke said.

A public safety crisis

Barbie Lavers, Harry’s mother, wants parents to know what sextortion is and realized how fast it can happen.

“Make sure that your children are comfortable to come to you if this happens,” she said.

RCMP have called sextortion a public safety crisis in Canada.

In 2023, RCMP in Prince Edward Island, received 63 reports of sextortion and between January to mid-November 2024, police received 34 reported cases. Police note the crime is highly underreported.

Jacques Marcoux, director of Research and Analytics at the Canadian Centre for Child Protection said last year its national tipline, cybertip.ca received about 10 to 15 reports of sextortion per day.

“Whatever statistic we have, or the police have, is a gross underestimation of what’s actually happening out there,” said Marcoux.

He points out the United Kingdom, European Union and Australia have comprehensive online safety regulations that impose obligations on service providers, including how quickly they must respond to complaints, whether there’s age verification.

“In the U.K., there’s an entire child design code that’s imposed on these companies to ensure that the services they make, the platforms they make available to their kids, can account for some of those risks and mitigate against them,” Marcoux said.

“If you’re in Canada, there is no such comprehensive law,” he said.

What about Canada?

Nearly two years after Harry’s death, the Burkes had hoped laws would’ve been created to protect children from the risks of online platforms.

Political parties agree Canada can do more to tackle harmful online content but argue over the best approach.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised to take on online harms during the 2019 election campaign, but a bill that took aim at online hate speech died on the order paper when he triggered an early election in 2021.

In February 2024, the Liberals introduced Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act.

The legislation proposed setting up a regulatory body that could compel social media platforms to outline their plans to reduce risks to users on their platforms. It would also force platforms to remove harmful content—such as child pornography, material that revictimizes a survivor or intimate images shared without consent.

The bill also targeted hate speech, prompting critics such as civil society organizations to warn it could restrict freedom of speech.

In September, Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner introduced a private member’s bill, Bill C-412, to modernize the existing law against criminal harassment and require online platforms to give parents tools to protect their children and introduce algorithms to verify a user’s age without a digital ID.

Amid a months-long gridlock in the House of Commons, progress on passing the Liberals’ Online Harms Act stalled.

Then, in an effort to see the portion other parties could support passed quicker, the government split up the legislation, separating some of the most controversial parts. Though, when Trudeau prorogued Parliament, the legislation died and would need to be re-introduced in the next session in order to advance.

“The politicians are playing politics with our children’s lives because they can’t work together to come up with a bill,” said Carl Burke. “They need to work together in unity with some solution.”

Carl Burke wants politicians to reflect.“Just imagine, they’re having dinner with their children and look across the table and then realize that beautiful child may not be there the next day,” said Burke.

Anna Lisa Lowenstein, spokesperson for Minister of Justice Arif Virani, said the Online Harms Act would ensure that online platforms are accountable for the harms that are created and amplified on their sites.“

The safety of Canadian children should not be a partisan issue. Unfortunately, the Online Harms Act faced staunch partisan opposition at every turn.”

Responding to this, Conservative MP and justice critic Larry Brock said that the Liberals control the legislative agenda and “can prioritise anything they want.”

“If Justin Trudeau and his Liberals sincerely cared about this, they would have introduced their legislation long ago and ensured it passed,” said Brock, who championed Rempel Garner’s private member’s bill.

‘You were just vulnerable’

Ella Burke said her brother wasn’t the only person targeted by the person who reached out to Harry. She said about a week before Harry was contacted, one of her friends’ boyfriends was contacted by the same person but he never added her back. “And two or three days after Harry had passed away, she added another boy from our community who was friends with Harry,” she said.

“My brother took his life over this person who was fake. This person who isn’t real but was real enough to make him feel these emotions in that moment that he was so scared that he was going to lose everything, the things that matter to him the most, he thought he was going to lose, so he panicked and it’s disgusting.”

The 17-year-old has a message for other teenagers.

“If someone’s contacting you to get pictures, it doesn’t make you dumb or stupid or whatever negative thoughts you’re trying to say about yourself. You were just vulnerable, and they knew that, and they took advantage of you,”

Snapchat responds

Tonya Johnson, the Communications lead for Snapchat in Canada, said sexual exploitation of any Snapchatter, especially a teen, is horrific, illegal and against their policies.

“No family should have to go through the pain of losing a loved on as a result,” Johnson said.

Johnson said Snapchat knows sextortion is a risk teens and adults face across a range of platforms and it has developed tools to combat it, such as new in-app warnings it added in June for if a teen receives a chat from someone who has been blocked or reported by others or is from a region where their network isn’t usually located.

“We work around the clock with law enforcement to support their investigations to help bring criminals to justice,” said Johnson.