Petition to Withdraw Canada's Bill C-22 | Hacker News Reader

Petition to Withdraw Canada's Bill C-22

ourcommons.ca

500 pointshmokiguess157 comments

While deeply unlikely to change anything it really is important as much noise is made about this as possible.

On top of this will be C-34 which is just full no privacy anymore territory https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2026/06/everything-all-at-once-b...

The gov do all this and then will act surprised as Canada's tech sector finds it even harder to create any consumer facing businesses leaving all the value being captured by the Americans. Surprised pikachus all round.

> then will act surprised as Canada's tech sector finds it even harder to create any consumer facing businesses...

That's not why an indigenous Canadian tech industry is non-existent.

Heck, China, Israel, India, South Korea, and Taiwan all have larger tech industries than Canada and have much stricter internet speech requirements (and in Israel and Taiwan's case are much smaller than Canada population wise).

Canadian tech is nonexistent because every Canadian pension fund, family office, and bank prefers to invest in American equities over Canadian equities.

A lot of the Indian tech industry is really just the tech industry from other countries being outsourced to there.

Sure foreign players do play a role, yet it still has the 4th largest VC dealflow [0] in the world ($9.3B) at 2x the size of Canada's entire market which highlights a significantly larger market. And unlike Canadian startups, most Indian startups IPO domestically [1] thus building a self-sustaining capital market

[0] - https://dealroom.co/guides/global

[1] - https://internationalbanker.com/finance/india-is-undergoing-...

I didn't realize the VC market was that strong there. A lot of the stuff I read on here had previously pointed to it being a tough startup market.

Tough as in a lot of competition. A lot of market segments dominated by Chinese manufactures have a relentless stream of Indian Startups nipping at their heels, is what I understand.

Chinese players don't compete with Indian companies as both China and India have blocked access to either's market. For example, Chinese digital exports remained banned in India and even Chinese players in India like SAIC and Xiaomi have been de facto Indianized via forced ownership changes, similar to what China used to do when it was in India's shoes in the 2000s when competing against the US.

When people on HN talk about the difficulty in the Indian startup scene, it about whether to raise in India or raise in the US and then operate in India.

The issues in Indian startup scene are myriad and not just raising. For one the lack of govt support and extreme corruption at anything govt related hinders the startups penetrating market. There other reality is a two tier system of founders where people belonging to certain premier institutes are assumed to be better at startup than others. This stems from the fact that most Indian VCs are mass holders and investment bankers with nil to little exposure to operating a tech company. Capital is probably a secondary order factor if you consider these issues.

Not everything though. There are huge unicorns that serve the Indian market in India.

Describes Canada too!

> Canadian tech is nonexistent because every Canadian pension fund, family office, and bank prefers to invest in American equities over Canadian equities.

Off-topic but I suspect it's also that oil and gas and real estate are the "easy" money in Canada and that's where investment goes. Canadian investors are risk adverse because they can be. That and there's a colonial-descended cultural bias towards credentials and established players.

But yeah, I'm furiously writing code for a product living off my savings, and would love to get investment to build a startup off of it, but every time I sniff around the Canadian "investor" scene it becomes clear to me that they'd have no time for somebody like me.

> it's also that oil and gas and real estate are the "easy" money in Canada and that's where investment goes

Partially. The money made in ONG and Construction is then re-invested in American equities. And even provincial pension like Ontario Teachers and La Caisse funds prefer investing in American equities instead because their only incentive is pension solvency.

The issue is Canada is simply a tiny country with an extremely loose confederation in a world that is returning to a "winner takes all" mindset dependent on hard unification.

More tactically, using a Yozma-style approach to subsidize Canadian VC would help sow the seeds for a truly self sustaining ecosystem.

> it becomes clear to me that they'd have no time for somebody like me

Because they don't and never will. Anyone who has potential gets frustrated and leaves (ofc I've poached a couple as well).

Canada definitely has a "first buyer problem" which makes it hard to get liftoff. A great many Canadian startups end up going to the US to get funding to get around this issue.

I have a (admittedly unevidenced) hypothesis that the US took off from other economies after ‘08 because real estate became a spectacularly shit investment overnight and investors had to invest in productive things for returns. Investors in Canada kept passing the same pieces of land between each other for no benefit to society. My pipe dream is that Canada grows the balls to annhilate property values

They kept selling residential property to foreign money launderers. In the US that activity is confined to major metros where it impacts the more distributed population density less significantly.

Don't worry, we have our own domestic money launderers as well. And whenever the gov't tries to close loopholes they riot. (Also half the gov't MPs are landlords, so ...)

Even if real estate were to implode, Canada has a pretty much permanent sickness on account of being a "rip n' ship" resource exporter over everything else. Since confederation.

It lends itself to a rentier capitalist model, and to oligarchies, and to a stagnant conservative investment class that just wants to coast off their proximity to resources.

Real estate coasting is arguably even worse, but not by much.

Notably the United States is actually trying to make this worse with their tariffs on us. Alberta oil and gas is tariff free while our value added manufacturing sectors are highly tariffed.

It makes no sense to try to kill Quebec's aluminum sector since it's the most logical place to smelt aluminum on the whole continent, but they're trying to, anyways.

American here, it makes me want to pull my hair out the way Trump confuses tariffs on inputs with tariffs on things we make here in the States. We have a ton of big (as in: employing tons of well-paid people) industries here that need to buy metals and comparatively few people employed in mining and smelting.

A 5-year-old could correctly answer that we should then NOT try to make metals cost more because that screws our big industries while helping almost no Americans. But somehow our tariff policy is set by people with less sense than a small child.

I mean, he's not acting in your interests, he's acting on his own (and his buddies), and for other purposes.

Also if your goal is to eventually annex Alberta and destroy the Canadian state more generally, you'd do this kind of thing. Esp when the premier of Alberta comes down to Mar-a-Lago right after your elected, to kiss your ass.

Same as bombing Iran with no plan for an exit does nothing good for either Iranian or American citizens, but it does good things for the price of oil and therefore your friends in the resource sector.

Oh look, Trump just announced another maybe-ceasefire and the stock market skyrocketed. Hope all his friends got their buy / sell opportunities in before market close!

It's all just awful.

> I have a (admittedly unevidenced) hypothesis that the US took off from other economies after ‘08 because real estate became a spectacularly shit investment overnight and investors had to invest in productive things for returns.

There was also the Z/VLIRP to smooth things along.

On the other hand, poetry rhymes, and one could similarly draw a line from now-increasing interest rates to the tech layoffs, forced RTO (to help improve on some spreadsheet the property value they want to leverage) and general corporate-IT sector malaise.

I think the point is that when zero % interest rates came along in 2008, Canadian investors piled their money into real estate -- because we hadn't suffered the same crash as the US and it was still a reasonable investment that was humming along at at least 6-7% a year (and often way way higher) in gains.

But in the US that was a "shit investment overnight" and it took many years to recover. So if you were looking for a place to park money, you maybe put it into more productive sectors, or tech, etc.

(Another factor is that for a few years around 2011, 2012 the Canadian dollar somehow hit parity with the USD. As a result many Canadians piled in hardcore into the US market and saw big gains from that when USD/CAD went back to its normal ratio)

>> But yeah, I'm furiously writing code for a product living off my savings,

Probably not relevant to thus thread, and hopefully redundant to you, but writing the code is the easy part.

If you have not already done so figure out your market and start marketing to them. Get deposits, build a mailing list of interested parties, build a presence where your customers hang out.

Marketing is the hard part. Get that done first before writing code. Most ideas fail not because of bad product but because there's no market, it's too hard to reach the market, or you're solving a problem no one will spend money on.

Before depleting all your savings, learn from all the threads in the "ask" section. Code counts for nothing without hod marketing. And marketing is the hard part, the code part is easy.

As an aside, the startup which has a market and marketing sorted out is a lot more attractive to investors.

Yes, all good advice. In reality what I need is probably a cofounder.

If you plan to let someone else lead the marketing (ie a co-founder) then stop coding now and make that your only task.

Because your co-founder will almost certainly have input as to what you code. Indeed your current project may not be suitable at all.

Seriously, until you gave all this sorted out you are really just on holiday, and when your savings run out you'll be back looking for a job. And in this job market that may not be fun.

This is the hard part of starting a business. If you want a fun holiday then by all means continue coding. If you so much as open an IDE or run a compiler this week then at least admit to yourself that's what this is.

If you really want to start a business then do the hard part while you have time. Find a market. Or a person. Until the market is found don't bother writing code. You are wasting time (which is in limited supply.)

I know this sounds harsh, but I'm hoping you hear it. Perhaps you will. If not, you'll be following in the footsteps of the 95% who failed. Which doesn't make you a bad person.

I'll close by saying that maybe you've romanticized what a startup is. Hint- it's not coding. That's maybe 10% of it. And you code what the customer wants not what you want. If what you really want is to code your hearts desire, then get a day job to pay the bills and code for fun after hours.

Until you are ready to accept that the "code doesn't matter" then you have a hobby not a startup.

I genuinely wish you all the best. Sorry if my words seem harsh.

I think there's a huge bias toward this "easy money" yea. I mean the Canadian government is in a bind with these tariff issues and what do they reflexively reach for? Pump more oil and gas. It's the easy fast, simple solution to problems and so every government returns to this well to the detriment of other industries that don't receive the same attention.

> Heck, China, Israel, and India all have larger tech industries than Canada and have much stricter internet speech requirements.

It's almost like all three of those involve absolutely enormous captive markets, including for their defence/espionage purposes.

The premise seems wrong here. As someone who worked my whole career in Canadian tech I assure you it exists.

The two big Canadian names in tech are Shopify and MindGeek (AKA Pornhub's parent company).

> Heck, China, Israel, India, South Korea, and Taiwan all have larger tech industries than Canada and have much stricter internet speech requirements (and in Israel and Taiwan's case are much smaller than Canada population wise).

That's actually not true for most of those countries. None of those countries other than maybe China have laws requiring encryption backdoors.

Suspicionless bulk metadata retention is also illegal in the EU, and no such law existing in many of those other democracies you listed.

China and Israel have pretty strict requirements. Korea was recently on the news for something some might say is an "internet speech requirement" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48406198)

And why, pray tell, is that the case? Because the Liberal government has created a terrible environment for Canadian businesses over the last 11 years, ballooning the size of the public service and the amount of regulations and bureaucratic oversight, as well as trying to pick winners by handing out subsidies to all the wrong companies in service of their ideological agenda. They would rather companies fail than succeed without their "help". That, and they've done everything in their power to keep the housing bubble juiced instead of allowing an RE correction. But hey, running the country into the ground while trying to blame everything on the orange man gets you elected, so I don't expect any course correction.

Dude, these problems predate the Liberal government(s) we've had by decades. It's a problem endemic to Canada's colonial background and existence as a resource extraction zone, and both mainstream political parties have made it happen, and both have sets of friends which benefit from their different flavours of patronage. Frankly the conservatives were worse when in power on doubling down on turning Canada into a pure petro-state above all.

I've never seen a healthy tech sector in Canada and I've been working in it for 30 years through the regimes of both flavours of asshole politician.

This. It's the exact same problem Australia faces as well, except Australia is basically a bizarro version of Canada where Harper won.

Because US has far better opportunities and more money.

My personal experience in doing business in Canada: each industry is monopolized by two or three companies, you need to get their “blessing” before you can do anything in that sector. Government contracts aren’t much, but even with that, it’s nepotism based, you will get a contract knowing someone who will indirectly get benefits from you, for example you will hire people they know, so kinda laundering the money. Lengthy regulations, you might wait months to get an SFOC for example (in drones, where you might need a special flight operation certificate) to do a simple operation, only to repeat that for another test. Securing clients, a combination of low on money and usually clients prefer US based companies, your best bet is securing a big client that will be your backbone, so back to point one where you need a blessing from a big company. And Im talking here about a business where there’s an opportunity to scale up, so food truck business and the local plumbing work aren’t part of that.

Yep, ever the same since the Hudsons Bay Company and the Northwest Company ran the whole place.

Now it's just the Westons and Rogers and Bell instead.

Some years ago when I first moved to my farm out here in the Hamilton area there was a meeting about zoning bylaws, as the city was finally -- after 20 years -- harmonizing the rural zoning laws after the municipal amalgamation that Mike Harris had forced on them back in the late 90s.

We're on an A1 zoned farm lot, and I have a small hobby vineyard here, and although I don't have enough acreage myself to run a winery business, I was curious to see what the zoning around that was. But then I noticed that they had language in the zoning laws that explicitly restricted all winery / commercial vineyard operations to be only in the east of the city (Winona, east of Stoney Creek). I was baffled why they would restrict like that, actually have laws preventing you from running a business up here.

So I went to the zoning presentations / meetings and tried to talk to the city staff there about it. She looked at me completely incredulously like I was from Mars.

"That's because that's where the wineries are. Maybe we'd allow cider operations up there, but not wine."

Why on earth would you go out of your way to do that? If someone wants to try it, why stop them? She just took it for granted that their job was to enshrine the existing state of things in a formal law.

It's for some reason just the default Canadian mindset to create an environment to often favour the already entrenched, and to explicitly put gates in front of any upstarts.

It's not a partisan thing. It's not liberal vs conservative vs whatever. It's just some weird mindset that wants to see credentials for everything, and the best credential you can have is your proximity to already existing power privilege or wealth.

Best explanation I have is this is an outcropping of the colonial mindset.

> It's not a partisan thing. It's not liberal vs conservative vs whatever. It's just some weird mindset that wants to see credentials for everything, and the best credential you can have is your proximity to already existing power privilege or wealth.

Bingo, you nailed it! I like how you described it in few words as I have been trying to articulate that for a while, as some people I know they blame it in liberal or whatever, but the reality it has nothing to do with that, it’s just the overall mindset in here. A lot of people here like to hate on Americans or at least have an anti-American identity somehow, but the reality is, Americans are miles better when it comes to practicality of work, diversity of thoughts, and openness to new opportunities. My friend who owns a big drone company in the US told me before how he started the company years ago, it sounds like a movie where all you needed is some determination only, he had zero money and zero connections zero VC investors, and started it after being rejected on something related. Meanwhile it’s almost impossible to achieve that in Canada the same way how he started it. Add to that, Canadian economy is mostly services and real-estate, so anything outside of these two must be directly or indirectly sponsored by one of the companies you mentioned. It’s funny because while doing my business I ended up either that I have to be “blessed” by rogers or bell to actually get going :)

To be fair, Americans have their own equally strong dysfunctions, and there's a lot of variance from state to state, industry to industry.

And the education system in the US is way less egalitarian and if you're talking about access to investment, etc. or jobs, proximity to an "Ivy League" school is super important blah blah blah.

I mean, it's a dangerous game to be playing stereotypes generally. But there's structurally economic factors at work.

The wild thing is that Canada is absolutely not alone in having this sort of insanely restrictive land use regulatory environment, as you hear similar stories from the UK (see: Clarkson's Farm) and even the USA (see: restrictive SF zoning). So the question for me is how the USA and other countries with similar regulatory regimes do well in spite of these things.

With the USA a possible answer is that the scale and diversity of the market adds more competition (ie. low regulatory areas) that Canada doesn't have.

Or it's possible that all these countries have awful zoning but while this is awful the factors that make tech a success in the USA are unrelated and dominate this (eg. unmatched wealth and financing)

It's true having 10x the population just makes so many things 10x better.

Some things also get 10x worse though :-)

> It's for some reason just the default Canadian mindset to create an environment to often favour the already entrenched, and to explicitly put gates in front of any upstarts.

"Peace, order, and good government" is easiest to achieve when things basically don't change.

> Why on earth would you go out of your way to do that? If someone wants to try it, why stop them? She just took it for granted that their job was to enshrine the existing state of things in a formal law.

This is exactly the Canadian experience: restrictions without thought.

Oh cool, we should set up stricter free speech restrictions in order to encourage our nascent tech sector. Sure thing champ.

Canadian tech is nonexistent because we continue to see ourselves as a colony instead of a country, a resource-extraction post-national economic state instead of a people.

the biggest reason is that canadians speak English

we could much more easily get a Quebecois tech industry than canadian

Smh what's with these dumb takes. Literally the only thing blocking a self-sustaining Canadian tech scene is the lack of capital.

Has anyone who comments these hot takes ever talked with Canadian founders or tried to raise capital in Canada?!? Do y'all even know what a term sheet is?

It doesn't matter if you live in Quebec, Alberta, or Nunavut - why the hell would I as a fund manager at Ontario Teachers, ScotiaBank, or a family office allocate $100M in Canadian equities over American or Asian equities? You could potentially make a case for commodities like ONG and metals, but much of the trading for that is cleared in Chicago and London and the past decade of major capital projects in the space were all blocked - be it pipeline projects by BC and Quebec or renewables projects by Alberta and Saskatchewan. But even with commodities that basically leaves Canada turning into a North American version of Australia or Russia.

This can only be solved with significant government support and intervention, which is how Israel, China, India, South Korea, and the UAE developed sustained domestic VC markets. The Carney admin has started to make the right moves.

> The Carney admin has started to make the right moves.

What moves in particular?

The creation of the Strong Fund, the Tech Fund, and sector specific SWFs like the Food Security Fund which can all participate in the VC Action Plan, along with increased coordination between provincial funds and the federal government and increasingly serious conversations about providing a tax shelter for venture and early stage capital in Canada.

Canadian tech was thriving 10-20 years ago, there is a reason it was called Silicon Valley North. RIM, Nortel, Celestica, QNX... I can't explain what exactly happened. A simple explanation would be Liberals prioritized real estate growth, unlimited immigration to artificially boost GDP but I suspect the problem is more complex.

> Canadian tech was thriving 10-20 years ago...

Moreso 20 years ago, but more to that in a bit.

> I suspect the problem is more complex

Yes. The answer is the absolute growth of the US economy over the last 20 years compared to Canada.

In 2006, the market cap of the TSX and NYSE+NASDAQ was roughly US$1T versus US$26T respectively.

In 2025, the market cap of the TSX and NYSE+NASDAQ was around US$4.8T versus US$87T.

Additionally, from 2006 to 2026 the Canada's GDP grew from around $1.3T to $2.42T whereas America's GDP grew from around $13T to $31T.

Basically, there was always a US-Canada gap, but the gap turned into a chasm over the last 20 years, especially as Canada's GDP growth wasn't able to keep up to the US [0] and was tied to energy markets.

The brutal reality is Canada's economy is significantly less complex that the ambitions on Canadian HNers. Canada's export bundle is roughly as economically complex [0] as Bulgaria [1] and Serbia [2].

Real estate and immigration is the easy boogeyman, but it's never been a serious consideration for institutional investors in Canada.

Institutional investors with a Canada thesis primarily wish to invest in ONG, Energy, and Construction associated to those industries, yet bipartisan bickering such as BC+Quebec blocking pipelines and Alberta blocking renewables projects wiped out tens of billions of dollars worth of projects and dealflow, and played a role in US$1T in capital leaving Canada [3] over the past decade. Additionally, Canada's major differentiator against the US in the 2000s was it's ONG sector, but by the 2010s the US was able to take advantage of shale fracking and NatGas in order to completely upend Canada's leverage on the American energy market. Heck, fracking was subsidized by a Democrat (Obama) and green energy was subsidized by Republicans (eg. TX wind/solar and Perry or Solar Panel manufacturing in Georgia and Arizona). Meanwhile, in Canada liberal leaning parties would undermine fossil fuel dealflow and conservative parties would undermine renewable dealflow.

With such a diverge, Canadian capital basically left for the US and even Canadian companies like RIM and OpenText shifted much of their leadership and core IP to their US divisions.

[0] - https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locat...

[1] - https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/124/export-complexit...

[2] - https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/100/export-complexit...

[3] - https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/688/export-complexit...

[4] - https://www.rbc.com/en/thought-leadership/the-growth-project...

Balsilie sold out to America what China didn't steal and undercut is what happened

One thing I have been thinking about is digital tariffs.

The US is perfectly willing to slam billions into ventures that lose money for years. EU for example doesn’t work that way. Consequence: US can develop faster, unconstrained by profitability, and capture the entire market before EU. This seems as US being more “innovative”, but realistically they are just running a perhaps similar engine way hotter at the cost of American QoL being way worse for the less fortunate. Similar thing can be said with Chinas subsidies on electric vehicles potentially flooding the EU with cheaper alternatives.

America is our ally, so we let this happen. For the most part this has served in this case EU and perhaps Canada well, albeit at the mercy of the US tech sector. Perhaps we shouldn’t anymore though, and consider tariffing American services to protect and incentivize local, sustainable alternatives. Meta, microsoft, etc. are clearly starting to rent seek now that they have us by the balls, I say fuck em?

I’m no expert in economics so I bet there are great arguments against this, lets see.

First issue is you are conflating investment and subsidies.

Quote the part where I state they are the same

>at the cost of American QoL being way worse for the less fortunate

That's a common claim, not sure it's true

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/poverty-share-on-less-tha...

https://xcancel.com/CPopeHC/status/2065144840002670921

> Canadian tech is nonexistent because every Canadian pension fund, family office, and bank prefers to invest in American equities over Canadian equities.

I was told that we should never invest pension fund on local, because you salary is basically based on local industry. One need diversified investment.

Not sure how true this is, but that's what I have been listening for years.

(disclaimer: not canandian, not american

There will be a SECU Committee meeting on C-22 later today, where the committee will be performing a clause by clause review of Bill C-22, and voting on amendments. It may be the final meeting. You can watch it live by clicking the "Watch on ParlVu" button on the meeting notice page: https://www.ourcommons.ca/DocumentViewer/en/45-1/SECU/meetin...

Direct link to the upcoming live ParlVu video: https://parlvu.parl.gc.ca/Harmony/en/PowerBrowser/PowerBrows...

After bill C-22 leaves the SECU Committee, it will be sent to the House of Commons for the third reading and a final vote before being sent to the Senate.

If you are a Canadian citizen, you can also use the following tools to message your MP:

* 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/

You can also email Gary Anandasangaree (gary.anand@parl.gc.ca), Marc Carney (mark.carney@parl.gc.ca), and Sean Fraser (sean.fraser@parl.gc.ca), and tell them that any weakening of encryption or suspicionless retention of metadata is unacceptable.

The Liberal party members of the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security (SECU) are:

* Jean-Yves Duclos: jean-yves.duclos@parl.gc.ca

* Sima Acan: sima.acan@parl.gc.ca

* Marianne Dandurand: marianne.dandurand@parl.gc.ca

* Anthony Housefather: anthony.housefather@parl.gc.ca

* Marcus Powlowski: marcus.powlowski@parl.gc.ca

* Jacques Ramsay: jacques.ramsay@parl.gc.ca

* Amandeep Sodhi: amandeep.sodhi@parl.gc.ca

3 from Ontario and 4 from Quebec. As a western Canada resident it has been real old that we have been steamrolled by the east for the past decade.

It's the tyranny of the majority.

Ontario and Quebec together are like 65% of Canadians. I'm in BC and have made my peace with that. I would imagine people in PEI feel a similar way.

Probably people living in Hope or Quesnel also feel similar about being steamrolled by Metro Vancouver and Victoria.

PEI gets 4 seats in the House of Commons.

Right, and even with those extra two seats from the Senatorial clause, they only get 4. Ontario the juggernaut gets 122.

As required by law.

The eastern provinces and Quebec are actually over represented. That means there's even less of a chance for the west.

Saskatchewan and Manitoba are also over-represented.

BC, Alberta, and Ontario are under-represented. Ontario, for example, is about 39% of the population of the provinces, but only 36% or so of the seats.

The allocation is an imperfect formula, to be sure. I doubt it makes much of a difference in practice, except as propaganda fuel for foreign influence operations driving Alberta separatism. The degree to which most provinces are under- or over-represented is less than 1%.

I get that Quebec and Ontario have 65% of the population, but why do they have 100% of the seats on a committee that shoves surveillance and gun bans down everyone else’s throats?

Not a clue, but if there are only 7 seats then all 10 provinces can't be represented anyway. I highly doubt political opinions about surveillance are aligned with provincial borders.

Because the laurentian elite rule Canada and the liberal party is the political arm of the power corporation

The last time I remember feeling that I had representation, as a Western Canadian was 3 Prim Ministers ago. I didn't even vote for Harper, but the others simply ignored the gulf between Regina and the Okanagan. It doesn't get better once you move to Ontario. You then realize that your MPs also don't represent you, but at least they're in government now.

Gotta have security clearance to be on the committee I suppose

The SECU Committee meeting is now live, and is set to go until 11:59 p.m. ET.

The livestream of the meeting is available here: https://parlvu.parl.gc.ca/Harmony/en/PowerBrowser/PowerBrows...

Well, the meeting ended early today after a member who supports the bill basically rage quit. Everyone else was trying not to laugh.

It seems possible that C-22 could be delayed in committee long enough to stop it from being passed before the summer recess deadline of June 18.

I made my petition in April 2025. I was genuinely surprised that my riding was fooled by Liberal lies, but I'm not surprised about the result.

Liberal, Tory, same old story.

There is not enough noise about this bill. It's horrific.

If you're Canadian, call your MP and raise a stink. The Liberals need to be shown quite explicitly by people in our profession how this will harm our industry, in addition to harming the privacy rights of our citizens; and it seems like conservatives are not planning on opposing this bill (just want it split in half) and the NDP is the only party raising real opposition?!

Sadly spying on citizens is pretty bipartisan for most governments around the world. It seems hard to actually stop this kind of stuff. I've signed this petition which I'm sure will do absolutely nothing, but it feels like there isn't much else I can do. I didn't even get a confirmation email with the link I need to click after signing this petition, so I guess my signature is null and void. I've lost faith in our government doing anything to benefit the people.

The confirmation email takes a few minutes.

Yeah it's already been 10 minutes, but they likely got their email server on some hamster somewhere, so I probably just gotta wait longer for it.

I had it take that long before for petitions I've signed. It will come.

Good to know, as past ones I've signed only have taken a couple minutes. Worst case I'm keeping the petition opened and will sign up again tonight. I'll probably also throw a little message together as well to send to my MP tonight. I feel like that's about all I can do to make my voice heard about these matters.

I got it in seconds, now.

I mean Canada is a part of the 'Five eyes' surveillance alliance since the 1950's. This is nothing new but it does keep escalating.

It was Terrance McKenna who said that the worst government is usually the one that is in charge, that is because they rarely tend to go back on what was put down before them. One could argue that in the US Trump is tearing down previous government work but also isn't doing it in a constructive fashion at all.

I pushed back on all these kinds of Bills and laws here in Australia and every time it was usually just met with the same boiler plate response of "We are enacting this at the advice of insert agency/person here."

I still do it but it sort of just feels like leaving a note to future generations that we at least tried to stop it.

The Liberals have been elected 4 times in a row. They don't even hide the fact they're hostile to the needs and cares of Canadian citizens since we're the idiots who keep electing them. CBC pushes some propaganda about how this'll protect the kids, some brain-dead liberals will keep repeating it, Canada will just continue its path to irrelevancy...

You know the conservatives are supporting this bill as well... right?

And when Harper was in power they were trying to push something similar?

And that the petition linked here is an NDP petition?

Partisan grandstanding won't fix the issue. A mobilized public will.

> You know the conservatives are supporting this bill as well... right?

That is not true at all.

https://www.conservative.ca/cpc/stop-online-government-surve...

Fair enough, this was not the case when I looked last week. They were "concerned" but had not posted anything in opposition.

And when I looked this morning all I found was they'd asked it to be split into two bills. Implying they want to support some but not all. Which is worrisome.

EDIT: wait, the thing linked here by you only says they want to amend it. That's a far cry from killing the bill. So, no, they're not opposed. The want to split and amend it.

Conservatives are against the whole surveillance on citizens aspect, that is the "Supporting Authorized Access to Information Act" part of this bill about electronic devices and service providers, the core controversial issue of this discussion, which they want removed.

Conservatives have been very critical about it since the beginning. You can find plenty of sources where they discuss this.

Both the conservatives and the NDP have been fighting against Bill C-22.

Conservatives want it amended. NDP wants it killed.

And how much of the conservatives issue with it are because the Liberal party put it forward. They have absolutely been bringing similar bills when they have control of the government.

That's how it's always gone. The people in power push it and the opposition fights it "for the people".

This has nothing to do with partisan politics. If you elect a party 4 times in a row, they rightfully won't care about your opinions. Holding parties responsible for their decisions and NOT making it partisan ensures both parties better align with what voters want.

Electing the Liberals forever because "the Cons are evil" or whatever just means we'll turn into a Liberal dictatorship.

The system is pretty fucked. You have the liberals (who are conservatives), the conservatives (who are increasingly taking inspiration from America but have always been even further right than the liberals), and the NDP who are unfortunately now rather irrelevant and also have a tendency to focus too much on identity politics.

If Trudeau had actually pushed for election reform like he'd promised to, maybe we'd be in a better place. But people forgave him for that because he made weed legal...

Is ourcommons.ca an official House of Commons website? It says so but how do I verify before I submit the petition with my information?

It is yes - in situations like that, your best bet is to view the SSL cert details. Of course, only if you trust the issuer. ;)

it really should be .gc.ca for us to be sure.

Here's a chain of trust you can follow:

https://parl.gc.ca -> https://parl.ca

https://www.parl.ca/Committees/en/LANG/Contact?parl=37&sessi... -> ourcommons.ca

Yeah, this is so bad - I struggled with this as well, why did they make it hard?

Signed, thanks for sharing.

Stop this heinous legislative attempt to rob Canadians of their right to privacy ,under the guise of public protection from criminality. This Bill is merely a potential vehicle for international bad actors to seize more personal data from unsuspecting law-abiding Canadians!

what is bill c 22 in a nutshell for non canadians like me ? is this like the patriot act in usa ?

https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/45-1/bill/C-22/first-r...

Basically the same idiocy that the British gov't has also tried to enact around making actually encrypted communication impossible, and giving them the rights to access metadata on the public's communications without warrant, etc.

How is it possible to make encrypted communication impossible? It’s (for us) trivial to encrypt and sign a message with GPG for instance. Does this allow the government to come to my house if I trade these messages with friends?

Regulation wise, is what I mean. They want backdoors, as in the ability to demand decrypted content, which as you and I both know is not possible if you've built the system with zero-knowledge on the server side ala Signal etc. As far as I understand the proposed bill, a service like that would not be legal to operate in Canada. Which is why Signal and Proton and others have said they would just leave the Canadian market.

The Liberals have noted they may be open to amendments to the language around encryption but not to other modifications.

> How is it possible to make encrypted communication impossible?

Illegal, not impossible

Its far worse than the Patriot Act.

Its legislation that attempts to weaken and break encryption so that law enforcement and others can access encrypted communications. It also seeks to require mandatory suspicionless metadata for all online services.

The legislation was explicitly written to target both telecom companies and every online service.

Citizen Lab has a good writeup on the legislation here: https://citizenlab.ca/research/analysis-of-proposed-surveill...

The collection of metadata is almost certainly bad for people even if they do nothing wrong. It can (and will) be sold if regulations and enforcement are not airtight. It will almost certainly be leaked as a result of incompetence, negligence, or outright criminality. The only way to prevent your metadata from getting out into the great unknown is to ensure it isn't collected in the first place.

If you don't see what the big deal is, I suggest you consider the recent leak of voter data in Alberta. For those unfamiliar, a list of eligible voters is routinely shared with political parties for the purposes of running their election campaigns. One of those parties, the "Republican Party of Alberta", shared their copy of the list with separatists, who made it freely available to any of their pals. What's the big deal you ask? Who cares if their address is public knowledge? Isn't this the sort of thing that used to be in phonebooks? Just for one example, anyone who has moved away from an abusive ex now has to worry about their address, phone number, etc. being made available to that abusive ex. Privacy isn't just important for people who like wearing pants.

C-22 is supposed to protect Canadians but, instead, it endangers them. This is a bad bill.

It's online and easy to read, and is a modernizing of laws around online systems. It is a deeply imperfect bill -- personally I think it is basically DOA and will not receive assent -- but a lot of the reaction to it are classic partisan hysterics (you can already see a bunch of those people throughout this discussion).

https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/45-1/bill/C-22/first-r...

The parts that are garnering a lot of negative feedback is

1) requiring core providers (a list as yet undefined), and any others if specifically directed to, to maintain a rolling year of metadata that the government can request on a targeted individual with a warrant. This is obviously at odds with "no log" VPNs in particular. And let's be real: 99% of the industry already logs everything.

2) "the development, implementation, assessment, testing and maintenance of operational and technical capabilities, including capabilities related to extracting and organizing information that is authorized to be accessed and to providing access to such information to authorized persons;"

The #2 could potentially imply secondary decryption keys and the like, though the bill explicitly says the requirement cannot impose a systematic vulnerability, and the government has pointed to that and said they want no such thing.

So VPN providers are saying "we don't want to log", and encryption providers are saying "be much clearer in what you mean by systematic vulnerability. Define this explicitly".

how would they force vpns like mullvad to turn over the log when there isn't any?

are they just going to ban specific vpn providers then ? this is absurd!

Well that's the crux of it and why some VPN providers have pushed back. If the law passed, and if those VPNs got added as core providers, they would either need to log the metadata or stop operating in Canada, and several have said they would stop operating in Canada.

There are arguments for all sides, and I do think the narrative gets monopolized by the hysterical. On the one side I like torrenting without concern, but on the other it would be nice if services didn't provide cover for people to send death threats, bomb threats to schools because they fly a pride flag, VoIP swatting, and so on. Though ultimately limiting just VPNs directly operating in Canada just offshores the problem so the solution doesn't really achieve anything.

The Canadian government can't compel companies, who have no hardware in Canada, to comply with Canadian law. Proton Mail has already made a statement that they will not comply with any foreign anti-privacy laws.

At most, Canada could force Canadian ISPs to block connections to known 'offenders' like Proton or other non-compliant VPNs. Then it's a cat and mouse game of using different and new VPNs to access to safe, non-compliant, services.

You could also rent a VPS in Europe to act as your own private tunnel but there's no telling if or when that would be blocked.

> this is absurd!

Why? Сountries pass laws, companies that don't comply are fined, shut down, blocked, and their owners are prosecuted and imprisoned. That is how it works already, nothing new or absurd here.

> It's online and easy to read

That's not true. Most people are not legal experts with extensive expertise in technology, knowledge of how Canadian courts will interpret the legislation, and knowledge of how governments around the world are trying to attack encryption (ex: they do their best to hide and not to explicitly say it in the legislation).

> And let's be real: 99% of the industry already logs everything.

That's your opinion. That's not a real scientific claim, and yet you are using it to justify an unprecedented attack on privacy rights.

Suspicionless metadata retention has been illegal in the European Union since 2014, and it violates the Charter. There is no world in which it is acceptable.

An RCMP witness speaking about the bill during a recent committee meeting literally said the legislation will help them "solve the problem of encryption": https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2026/05/rcmp-confirms-bill-c-22-...

the odd thing about it to me is that other than passports, all regular identity documents in Canada are issued by the provinces under specific mandates and regulations, which means that the provinces could choose not to endorse the usage of their IDs for age verification to foreign providers.

Other than passports, the government of canada does not have an identity card to base any kind of sweeping electronic age verification regime on. Sure there are some tech players looking to bring products to market that leverage banks and payment networks, but I suspect even they haven't figured out who owns the assertion of the persons attributes.

Maybe they've done the regs legwork and some scumbag backdoor account policy changes in the banks, but the PHIPA legislation that governs PII collection, use, and disclosure in the provinces would need to align with it.

I wouldn't be surprised if there were challenges to the law based on a lack of federal mandate for provincial identity repositories, no accountability or ownership for the accuracy of the age assertion, WTO and trade agreement challenges against subsidized providers, to speculate about a few.

The spirit of the law is contemptible, and is being pushed through by a farcically illegitimate, corrupt, and demonstrably foreign influenced majority that has made a mockery of our processes, and is expressly against the interests of Canadians.

The good news is that if you are a 13yr old who can jailbreak a foundation model, we are in a new golden age of hacking. The cryptography behind any of these systems of oppression won't last a month.

Bill C-22 is the Canadian government's attempt to require encryption backdoors and mandatory data retention, for all online services.

The invasive mandatory age verification requires are part of bill C-34, which was just tabled yesterday. Its obviously an unacceptable violate of privacy, but the Liberals are far closer to passing C-22 at the moment.

my error, i actually thought it was an omnibus. it doesn't change my view, but toward the specific encryption concern, indeed, less relevant. thank you.

I guess canadians get what they voted for... :)

in a three-party system, there's provably no optimal voting system. Most people who would normally vote NDP voted strategically in the last election to prevent a conservative majority. While it's true in the literal sense that we got what we voted for -- I mean, that's tautological; whoever wins an election is "voted" for -- it's not really the whole picture.

There is always the Australian system. Mandatory voting, preferential votes, majority rule.

The Preferential part is the most important, it means you can vote for who you want but also have the second preference get a vote if the first fails to get a wide enough margin. That first vote however will get additional resources based on vote tally with the next election cycle. If either of the last two majority parties fail to get the necessary votes to hold control and you have a hung parliament, they then have to negotiate with other parties to gain their preference.

Its not perfect but it looks like the best case system I have seen.

Under first-last-the-post, we actually don't :P

Oh wait.. canadians there’s more on the way lol, Mark Carney just posted on X for ID identification for social platforms:

Today, our government introduced new legislation to protect our kids online. Canada's Safe Social Media Act will hold social media and AI platforms accountable, make them safer, and restrict access to social media for children under 16.

https://x.com/markjcarney/status/2064846939691139082?s=46

The country has just slipped into a recession (only one in g20 btw), food bank usage is at record highs, it's young adults are ranked 71st in the world in happiness (boomers in the top 10 tho), housing is out of reach for many, youth unemployment is at ~15%, outside investments are non-existent, government debt is at record levels, haven't won the Stanley cup in decades, in a trade war with the USA, nobody is starting businesses here, educated people are leaving, etc.

Liberal party: We need to spy on people on the internet!

Foreign investments just hit an 18 year high. Employment numbers just went positive (at about 5x the per capita rate of the US). The country is recovering nicely from being addicted to mass immigration/housing. Export markets are rapidly diversifying, and Canada has made a number of new strategic partnerships. Two straight months of growing trade surpluses.

All while our largest trading partner explicitly and openly tries to harm us.

And who gives a flying fuck about the Stanley cup. What a weird thing to cite.

You understand governments are large things with many departments and focuses, right? This "whataboutism" angle is always spectacularly boring horseshit, and usually is plied by partisans that just want to piss and moan about everything Not Their Team does.

This bill is deeply imperfect, and I hope it dies. Your comment is just noisy partisan bluster.

It's partisan to deny your country is falling to shit just because you voted for the parties that made it fall to shit.

Their comment was directly, overtly partisan. Further, it plies the rhetoric of a partisan -- literally, every talking point directly from conservative Canada-land -- and then does the cliche "whataboutism" that is a signature.

This whataboutism is a go-to because it's universally usable, and is the biggest tell that you're dealing with a partisan spouting worthless noise. Anything the government of the day does, whatabout this other things. It is spectacularly stupid, and is an immediate example that the speaker has nothing of value to add to anything, ever. It is one of the greatest cancers in Western democracies, and is exactly how malignancies take hold.

And the "Bounces off me" tactic is so boorish. I don't like this bill. I don't like a lot of the things this government has done. But the "OMG EVERYTHING HAS FALLEN TO SHIT" is so laughable.

I dunno, man, despite the problems I think Canada's a pretty great country. I'm glad that the government is capable of actually doing many things at once.

No offence but you’re the one coming off as having a partisan agenda

The comment you've replied to is clearly not "partisan bluster". While it may be a tad hyperbolic, with the Stanley Cup line, it's driving a valid point that while Canada is facing a number of very real challenges, the government in power is spending its time on internet censorship bills.

These bills are of almost no benefit to the average Canadian, and the point is that the government should focus more on things that matter to citizens. Instead of playing into people's fear and exposing them to potential government overreach, privacy violations, data breaches, etc., Canada's leadership should focus back on the economy.

Your comment actually seems to be the bluster, considering the ranting and swearing.

> while Canada is facing a number of very real challenges, the government in power is spending its time on internet censorship bills.

You could have said this at any point in the last ~15-20 years and it would apply. It's a problem certainly but not a new problem and has little to do with the current government nor current issues. They will try and try again until they succeed.

Instead of arguing over these semantics we should be focusing on a more permanent measure of preventing this garbage from getting inevitable shoved down our throats.

I agree, we need more permanent measures. I'm tired of seeing these bills pop up over and over and having to play whack-a-mole. Any suggestions?

> And who gives a flying fuck about the Stanley cup. What a weird thing to cite.

If I was PM I would prioritise tax cuts to athletes playing for Canadian teams, repurpose the new Major Projects Office to be the Athletic Performance Office to provide funding and support to Canadian teams, and install a tax on Canadian players on American teams. I'm also joking, lighten up :P

I did misspeak about the foreign investments, what I was referring to is that we are seeing much more investments leaving the country than what are coming in, and of the investments in Canada, it's not just the sheer volume and direction that matters - foreign firms buying out Canadian businesses to later move them out of the country isn't a good thing long-term.

I have no doubt that Carney will be better for the economy than the last 10 years under Trudeau, and I hope they spend more time focusing on that then spending billions on useless gun buybacks, surveillance bills, banning social media, etc. We saw a sharp drop in entrepreneurship in Q1, hopefully they can do something to reverse that. I doubt it though.

This is basically just shilling. Average Canadians cannot point to many things that have improved or gotten cheaper in how many years? You are acting like we are a day away from being a debt free hyper economy that everyone is knocking on the door to get involved with.

According to the central bank, the country is "not clearly in a recession"[0].

[0] https://globalnews.ca/news/11897931/bank-of-canada-rate-anno...

I'm skeptical of central bankers trying to sugarcoat the fact that we are in a "technical" recession. If you look at per-capita GDP it's lower than it was four years ago and if you talk to regular Canadians you'll come away feeling like we've been in a recession for years. I would say per-capita is a better metric because it better reflects what individuals are experiencing, whereas Canada's overall GDP has been bolstered by high immigration targets for years. Regardless, it meets the definition of a recession and matches with the experiences of many Canadians. I'm sure the beureocrats and central bankers aren't feeling that pain though.

Why did you casually jump to per capita GDP? Per capita GDP is finally going up after a long regression, and one of the reasons Canada slipped to a very small recession is that hundreds of thousands of migrants are leaving the country, their visas expired. When you remove a lot of people that were consuming housing and food and cell plans and delivery doordash, GDP drops.

You have two conflicting complaints simultaneously, and you should make up your mind. Were you happy when Canada's GDP was increasing courtesy of mass migration?

So are you happy with the changes? I'm super happy with it. I'm also quite pleased with how well Canada has weathered a criminal felon pedo that has tried his hardest to hurt us, many Americans blissfully oblivious.

And yup, the many tentacles are government are going to keep making laws and planning trains and doing pipeline projects and countless other programs -- they aren't restricted to whatever the imaginary pet is of a particular complainer -- and amazingly they can competently do all of this simultaneously! Not always in a way that everyone agrees with, though.

Per-capita GDP rose mainly because of what you said, declining immigration growth.

The issue is that our economy has been in decline for years, increasing the population dramatically masked that at, least in nominal GDP, and as population growth declines it reveals the weaknesses that were previously obscured. Simply reducing population growth is not enough to fix the last 10 years. Immigration was and is never the problem with our economy, a lack of real growth is.

So no, I wasn't happy when our GDP rose because of population growth, and I'm not happy today either because pulling a few levers on the immigration machine to change the numbers slightly doesn't fix anything. And it doesn't appear like the government is doing anything to fix it, instead focusing on the stuff we're talking about in this thread.

>The issue is that our economy has been in decline for years

Yup. We had a housing and immigration based economy.

>Simply reducing population growth is not enough to fix the last 10 years.

Ah, so damned if they do, damned if they don't. Yes, getting unchecked immigration under control was absolutely a problem that needed to be fixed (they still aren't there, and the TFW and "student" pipelines are a major remaining problem), and it was a contributor to our economy getting untethered.

>And it doesn't appear like the government is doing anything to fix it, instead focusing on the stuff we're talking about in this thread.

C-22 is a tiny, minor, law and justice bill that normal wouldn't get an iota of attention (it legitimately is a tiny, extremely simple bill). You think the government is "focusing" on this? Then you have zero idea how anything works. Pretending like the massive arms of government focused on this is necessary for your rhetoric though.

Further, saying they aren't doing anything else...yes, you are 100% a partisan. Nothing will please you. Everything is wrong. Everything is dire. But I'm sure only Saviour Party will fix things.

And it's funny that there are dipshits in here pretending like I'm the partisan. I hate this sort of dipshit politics on either side. When Harper was PM and the far left was apocalyptic about everything he did (doing the same incredibly stupid "everything is going to hell!" routine), it was just as profoundly stupid. I hate when both sides do this nonsense.

I’m not sure why you’re so eager to blame immigration for the economy doing poorly. Cutting immigration only makes the economy worse unless you offset that by creating growth elsewhere, which hasn’t seemed to happen in the last 10 years, nor the last ~350 days.

C-22 is not a tiny, minor thing. It has massive repercussions for people’s privacy and security, as well as for the economy. If it was some minor thing, why so much effort to push it through despite immense backlash? It’s clearly a top priority for the government for some reason.

The liberals were literally reelected on the basis that Mark Carney is a master economist and he is our only saviour against Trump.

>I’m not sure why you’re so eager to blame immigration for the economy doing poorly.

YOU complained about immigration. Immigration and housing allowed the government to basically ignore economic policies, productivity, and so on, for a lost decade. It allowed partisans (just like you) to declare that GDP went up so everything is great and nothing can be criticized, as Canadians got poorer and worse off. And yes, fixing a problem -- unsustainable, outrageously destructive mass immigration -- has consequences, but they're well worth it. YOU are the one who brought up per capita GDP.

>The liberals were literally reelected on the basis that Mark Carney is a master economist and he is our only saviour against Trump.

Eh, considering everything we're doing fantastic, and we're in a much better position for the next century. I hope that USMCA falls apart, personally, however much some small but extremely loud minority of my bootlicking, wanna-be-MAGA countrymen want to be a poor work colony of the US for eternity. Bowing to rapist bullying by a corrupt failing idiocracy is never a winning move.

Am I the only one who sees this as the only viable solution to shutting down foreign interference through social media ? We certainly can't rely on the companies themselves doing it. Fifth column warfare is a thing and we are a ripe target.

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