Hacker News Reader

Comment by aborsy | Hacker News Reader

Canada is liberal and a better option for hosting privacy projects than EU.

Every few months a bad proposal comes out of somewhere in EU. The details of this case don’t matter, the tendency is big government control.

View on HN

I'm not sure... they've added some pretty repressive language controls themselves already. Let alone proposed legislation.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/07/canadas-bill-c-2-opens...

The Canadian parliament can vote laws that break/infringe upon most of our charter rights with a simple majority, using the non-withstanding clause. The Quebec government has already used it and is signaling that it will use that clause even more often.

Again, that requires a simple parliament majority and courts aren't allowed to really do anything about a law once that clause is invoked. That makes for one of the worst places to be in for something like grapheneOS in the long term. You're just a single election away from a PM like Legault deciding that encryption is against "Canadian values" or something.

(They wouldn't even need that to restrict encryption, but it still makes us unique in the west since it's just a "routine" clause that can be invoked to suspend almost every possible legal challenge against a law outside of any emergency situation or extraordinary circumstance, and is used almost on a yearly basis nowadays )

> but it still makes us unique in the west since it's just a "routine" clause that can be invoked to suspend almost every possible legal challenge against a law

It is not unique in the West, or even specifically in those parts of the West that share the same head of state as Canada; in fact, Britain itself has a more extreme form of it given Parliamentary sovereignty.

It is unique in the sense that the charter itself has a clause that makes itself almost useless. And that provinces can also use it at will (that's really the main problem, as the federal government is way less likely to use it, and hasn't used it), and doing so short circuits any federal court oversight.

But I agree that parliamentary sovereignty is an even bigger can of worms.

There is no place in the world where there are not bad proposals all the time. Some places are worse than others, but everyplace has problems and needs to be watched.

EU is not a country. There are many different countries in the EU.

EU has reciprocal arrest warrants and other treaties to assist law enforcement.

Though not an equivalent, the US has extradition treaties and various international agreements for surrendering a fugitive to a foreign country

Reply on news.ycombinator.com