Canada’s Bill C-22 Is a Repackaged Version of Last Year’s Surveillance Nightmare
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If you live in Canada or are impacted by this legislation, then you need to tell both your MP and the Minister of Public Safety of Canada to reject this legislation.
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The Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) published information about Bill C-22 here just over a week ago: https://ccla.org/privacy/coalition-to-mps-scrap-unprecedente...
The blanket metadata retention and encryption backdoor requirements of Bill C-22 are illegal in the European Union.
Multiple groups have made easy to use tools for sending your MP and (other members of government) an email about rejecting this terrible legislation in its current form:
* The Internet Society's tool: https://www.internetsociety.org/our-work/internet-policy/kee...
* OpenMedia's messaging tool: https://action.openmedia.org/page/188754/action/1
* ICLM's messaging tool: https://iclmg.ca/stop-c-22/
I'd also recommend emailing Minister of Public Safety of Canada (Gary Anandasangaree: gary.anand@parl.gc.ca), and the Minister of Justice (Sean Fraser: sean.fraser@parl.gc.ca).
lol, for what reason? the LPC always gets its way
In the past this occurred in the US as a result of having a totalitarian style Attorney General John Ashcroft in the early 2000's. Many new protocols and applications popped up around his time and his leveraging of the fears around 9/11. There were many articles written about his time in power if anyone was curious.
Look to the US, regardless of the two parties, most of the time they just keep building on the pervious groups work no matter what the messaging to the people was.
"They look after number one, you ain't even number two" - Frank Zappa
If this passes I suspect it will be much harder to monitor terrorist activities as terrorists will just move to self hosted or non technical solutions. That leaves us plebs to monitor and find excuses to make arrest quotas. People will need to be careful how they speak as anything that can be taken out of context will be taken out of context.
And you are right, such frameworks never go away even if they officially go away. There have been projects that have changed names so many times I can't even keep up with them. Total Information Awareness was renamed a few times. The lawful intercept code that was embedded in the firmware of all smart phones Carrier-IQ changed names a few times and last I checked it didn't even have a name any more which means people can't really talk about it.
"As of late April 2026, former FBI Director James Comey was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of threatening the life of President Donald Trump and transmitting a threat in interstate commerce. The charges stem from an Instagram photo of seashells arranged to say "8647," which prosecutors allege constitutes a threat of violence."
Most spy agencies find having to get a warrant from a judge for each target too cumbersome, so they tap into fiber cables and do unlawful intercept as well.
That is the official legal implementation but not really how it works. Large tech companies are incentivized to cooperate with governments and will do so without hesitation. Governments can make it nearly impossible to operate a business. Cooperation clears that hurdle. This is not some theory but directly from the horses mouths. I have spoken to all the executives at every company I have worked for and this is the general consensus in large companies.
Not when a company volunteers to perform the intercept without telling anyone. It's technically illegal and governments give the company immunity. Something is only a law to everyone if it is enforced on everyone. I did countless wiretaps in the 90's at the behest of my boss. Once in a while there would be a warrant and sometimes there wasn't. I've seen this behavior all throughout my former careers both in wireless and internet and that's even before we get into the equipment that dials out to clouds to create an ad-hoc bi-directional VPN into the data-center.
You vastly overestimate the technical abilities of random people who want to use non-state violence in pursuit of political change.
And there are so many minor important details in digital communication that an amateur is not likely to get it right every single time.
Canada is still trying to take away everyone's firearms and still trying to figure out how they will avoid turning many of their citizens into felons by October.
That is already true of Canada, as it is no longer possible to live like a Canadian [in the way they were hoping for] on immigrant wages.
>and still trying to figure out how they will avoid turning many of their citizens into criminals
The entire point of the gun bill is to do this. The purpose of a system is what it does.
Only need to get it through once. We have to defend against it repeatedly.
non-permanently-online activists on the other hand...
https://www.pivotlegal.org/city_of_vancouver_s_new_fifa_byla...
Practically no Vancouverite would read this page and take it seriously.
[0]: https://ccla.org/fr/intimite/coalition-to-mps-scrap-unpreced...
>(5) A core provider is not required to comply with a provision of a regulation >made under subsection (2), with respect to an electronic service, if compliance >with that provision would require the provider to introduce a systemic >vulnerability related to that service or prevent the provider from rectifying >such a vulnerability
The definition to me reads to me as very obviously blocking the government from demanding an encryption backdoor, especially since the Act allows for the company to challenge such an order in court.
>"systemic vulnerability means a vulnerability in the electronic protections of >an electronic service that creates a substantial risk that secure information >could be accessed by a person who does not have any right or authority to do >so. "
So what exactly is the problem with this definition?
I know doing that would be crazy, but Companies keep trying and trying until it is passed.
Tin Foil hat time: It almost looks like it is a way to funnel Political Contributions (bribes) to the politicians. The politicians fail the bill because they felt they did not get enough Contributions :)
The republicans would bring up a bill for everything they don’t like and ceremonially vote it down which would make it inaccessible to the next round of democratic leadership.
Since this bill is indefensible they simply don’t report on it much. They’d rather talk about the opposition than the party currently in power.
It's actually quite defensible from their perspective. They justify it with reason they decided wire tapping was reasonable for the past decades. It's just that they don't understand the risk and implication.
The problem might be that this doesn't even need investigation. It's too boring. Everything is said in the bill. They just lack technical literacy to realize the implication.
How is a backdoor not a systemic vulnerability?
Meanwhile personal computing is being savagely destroyed, as consumer channels to ram and storage disappear.
It's so bad. These people need to be punished. This is so so so unacceptable and the forces for state intrusion into all digital systems and pervasive survelliance have gotten so so so far in the past couple years.
Both (i) and (ii) have led the government to this dark place, thinking they're doing good.
You can summarize a lot of government actions of any spectrum with: "The road to hell is full of good intentions"
I don't either, I agree with that's how they sell it, the problem is that the marketing works and good intentioned people rally behind it, so the saying still applies.
I'll take the other end of the bet claiming that they think they are doing good. I am pretty sure they know what they are doing full well, and it ain't good.
That being said, C-22 goes way beyond what would be halfway reasonable to solve the main issues in a fair and rights-respecting way, and I have absolutely no sympathy for the reasoning and goals imported from the UK's Online Safety Act.
But factually I suspect we're almost as safe as we've ever been, so thankfully, their voices aren't too loud.
A significant participant in a lobby group with similar aims, Nathalie Provost, is actually a sitting MP in Quebec.
I've had some professional interactions with one person who works for the org, and she came across in a very negative way. I don't want to use pejoratives, and perhaps it's understandable that people who spend so much time on this issue become emotionally invested in it to an unhealthy level, but people so emotionally charged are not well-positioned to craft balanced, rights-respecting digital policy.
https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/9.7198040
C3P wants encryption backdoors, has been involved with lobbying for encryption in numerous other countries.
There's an exceptional amount of money to be had in creating the new digital feudal state.
Given that most everyday digital technology is in the hands of a few powerful monopolies they feel they have the opportunity to actually pull this off.
To me, I don't believe you can have one without the other, in particular since so much of this power grab requires the instruments of corporations in order to accomplish. If _either one_ of Google or Apple said "we're not implementing these draconian controls, sue us" it would be over. It is interesting they're willing to use this tactic when it comes to protecting their app stores or in-game purchase streams but not when it comes to clear undemocratic overreach.
To be clear I'm not suggesting this is a natural outcome of capitalism in general, just that, in the wake of extreme monopolization, the current crop of mega corporations have become insulated from competitive reality, and are therefore hopelessly corrupt. They're willingly allowing their technology stacks to be used by the government in this way in exchange for the opportunities it affords them and the lack of enforcement it creates.
That Commonwealth, of course, imports all the cultural ideas and outlooks Coastal Americans have with about a 5 year delay, usually with anti-Americanism as the excuse, at the expense of the local culture.
This is just what happens when you import American politics without the American system that restrains it to just being noise.
It means the solutions aren't technical, and nobody votes their way out of this. I've checked out because the demoralization campaign worked, and there is nothing to save. The outs are Alberta separation, US annexation, civil war, or MAID. There is no longer a political solution. If there were, these surveillance controls would not be necessary.
If Canada had any kind of national identity it would not have become what was recently described as a "south asian country controlled by China," in a conversation about its relationship to US national security. Outside faculty clubs pickle ball courts, and maybe dog daycare pickup runs, there is zero resistance to annexation. It would be the only time the US would ever be "greeted as liberators."
- PRC police stations in Canada: https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/trnsprnc/brfng-mtrls/prlm...
- Foreign interference in elections: https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=abo&dir=comp/m...
You have no serious people.
If anyone believes the real intent behind this authoritarian legislation is to protect the kids or crack down on organized crime or to keep the public safe, I have a bridge to sell you. This is an administration that did away with mandatory minimum sentences for serious crimes, considers pedophilia to be a minor offence, allow repeat violent offenders out on bail repeatedly, refuses to convict migrants if it might impact their chances of obtaining citizenship, has allowed thousands of terrorists to enter the country with minimal vetting, and openly tolerates election interference from China. Public safety is far, far down the list of their priorities. They are very thirsty to silence their online detractors, however.
https://old.reddit.com/r/canada/comments/1rrxqje/liberal_gov...
The r/Canada subreddit unfortunately does not allow articles that the mods deem to be "blog posts" or from organizations they don't consider to be news organizations.
Though the r/Canada community is still overwhelmingly against encryption backdoors, data retention, and mandatory age verification.
Back in the day Gopher required a fee to serve content. Where's Gopher now? They allowed it after seeing the web were eating their lunch like crazy because the web has neither fees nor bullshit licenses. Too late. These laws will suffer the same fate, the lobbies like it or not.
Minitel from the French, where in the 80's they were pioneers for a lot of things in Europe? Adieu, au reviour, bye, adios, killed by the web and open standards. No centralized idiocracy, no fees, no gateway, no nothing. It was Angelfire, Geocities or your duct-taped homesever with Slackware and Apache.
And today ISP's are trying to ban user hosting/sharing by either disabling some ports or enforcing NAT/CGNAT so they purchase premium plans, but even networks like Yggdrasil are throwing these parasites down and letting every citizen no matter where they are from to create their own sites and freely hosts them without asking anyone what to do with their freedom of speech.
The Nazis tried, they collapsed down from and outside. The Francoists tried the same. In the 60's even the die hard Falangists understood that with science and progress their 19th century bound regime was doomed. Even more with the landing on the Moon, there was a craze about the space, rockets, UFO... times just marched on. Ditto with Soviets and censorship. Good economy plans are useless if you don't allow your "camarades" to spend their resources on anything they like. You know, you could just implement... taxes, as Cubans are trying to do with small companies and co-operatives. Ditto with the Chinese, they learnt a lesson with the Mao famines and the Deng Xiaoping's openness.
But unless they open their regime a little on speech, you can have a great economic plan, for sure, but people burns out. Machines can work without getting tired according to bureaucracy, but humans can't.
You can perfectly set some laws making healthcare better; that works. But the moment you enter on personal lives, telecomms, privacy... you are playing with fire. The Communists don't understand this. Telecomms worked far better in Spain being deregulated and stating net neutrality (and user rights) as something good to be state supported/mandated, but not for the prices, which were really high for a state monolopy. Liberalization plumetted the prices down.
DItto with classical liberals, but for opposite reasons. Illnesses are too random to be managed by individuals. Worse: a pandemic can wipe your own state, economy and every business if you let the random Joe vaccine or isolate on their own. If they can't afford the costs, they will lie and in weeks it would be too late, your populace can't sustain your business, 1929 but mixed with George Romero.
Said this, if it's illegal to break packages by mail (snooping and intercepting it it's a serious crime in Spain with jail sentences or really high fines), your digital data must be under the same laws. Ah, yes, protect the children, the terrorists, yaddah, yaddah, for sure all the NSA spying with Echelon did prevent the Esptein and Dutroux cases among terror attacks in NYC, Madrid and London . F*ck off, please.
Terrorists can just use pens, paper and table bound encryptions or, you know, cheap $1 devices with cardboard-printed spinning wheels.
I think the topic itself is difficult for everyone involved - there will likely be a lot of uproar for many years as we get closer to finding this happy medium.
Yeah the problem is you'll never get a politician to say "OK, _this_ is what we've determined the 'happy medium' is and we're going to codify in law that it will never go beyond this point." It'll just keep inching further and further and anytime someone complains, just go back to step one and dish out some more "elder statesman" wisdom about having to find a "happy medium." Rinse and repeat. Worked on you, didn't it?